Let’s be honest, it’s quite a good week to be a Harris. Apart from the incumbent Democrat Presidential nominee this week’s AC hosts a session and conversation with the very talented Jaimee Harris.
We’ve been playing Jaimee’s music since we discovered the infectious Missing Someone in 2022 from an excellent album which finally surfaced last year called Boomerang Town. It’s one of those records you didn’t want to take off the turntable once you’d put it on and I felt I knew something about Jaimee even before we sat down to have a conversation a few weeks back when she was in Glasgow on tour. The night before our conversation Jaimee had won my nomination for the hardest working person in the music business for performing an excellent solo set at St Luke’s. Without so much as a drink or a pause she went straight into introducing her life partner, Mary Gauthier for whom she played guitar and sang harmony for the rest of a long evening. They both appeared at our studio at nine the next morning and recorded a brilliant session. I was exhausted just thinking about it.
Jaimee is a great foil for Mary, but happily for us this week, she really is a great singer songwriter in her own right. The title track of Boomerang Town centres around the characters often passed over in popular culture but whose dreams are often based around escape. Jaime says, “This is what it’s like to be a part of the post- “‘Born To Run’ Generation. Springsteen’s generation had somewhere to run to. I’m not so sure mine does.” For the characters in these songs, escape isn’t always a matter of geographical distance.
Jaimee’s own experience of addiction and rejection is also at the forefront of the songs on the album and you’ll hear more about the background to these songs in the second part of this week’s show. There’s also the promise of hope in Love Is Gonna Come Again which Jaimee performs in session too. It’s a beautiful thing.
Elsewhere we have new music from Kacey Musgraves (who has just released an expanded edition of her excellent Deeper Well) Miranda Lambert (whose album arrives in September) Nick Lowe (who’s reunited with the mad masked Los Strait Jackets) and Alice Randall via Rhiannon Giddens. In early September you’ll hear a fascinating conversation with Alice Randall whose book and album, My Black Country, is the source of The Rhiannon song.
Finally, in a week celebrating the Harris clan, we couldn’t go on air without including the legend that is Emmylou. It’s two hours of country music our way and we’d love you to join us live on BBC Radio Scotland or BBC Sounds from five past eight this Tuesday evening.
