I’m on the road….except this week the road brings me home before it sweeps me away south again. So, I have a night off from being a troubadour to return to the warmth of the AC studios in Glasgow and reunite myself with a pile of brilliant records to play this Tuesday night.

You’d imagine a tour would offer plenty of opportunity for listening, reading and writing but it’s a strange old thing. I’ve never – in 30 years of this caper – written a decent song on tour. Occasionally I’ve started one – but it’s taken another time at home to get it fixed. I also have found that reading is too easily distracted by what I might have to be doing later on and as far listening to new music –  I virtually listen to no music. I haven’t fully understood any of this but there it is…the life of the troubadour. It’s hugely rewarding, slightly scary and you meet some lovely people but your life seems to go on hold a bit. I’m not a real troubadour – Crazy Heart style – I only do this kind of thing now and again I’m grateful I get to spend more time at home than on the road.

I often talk to artists from Music City who regularly spend 200 days of the year on the road and I really can’t imagine what that feels like. This week on Another Country we welcome one of life’s great travelling singer-songwriters who may well claim the road as his middle name. Listen in this week for a very special conversation and session from Langhorne Slim. Langhorn is someone we’ve been trying to get on to the show for ages and we’re delighted to bring you this session recorded when he visited Scotland a few months ago. His new album ‘Lost at Last’ came out this month and he is essential listening.

Listen out too for some great new artists including J. Roddy Walston and The Business, Peter Oren, Sam Lewis and Caroline Spence as well as some new music from old friends like Cam, The Barr Brothers and Danny and The Champions of the World.

We shall be catching up with our very own Nashville correspondent, Bill DeMain during the course of the show as we hear all the gossip from last week’s CMA awards. Did anyone notice Sturgill Simpson busking and what did it all mean? We’ll also talk to Bill about the life and legacy of Mel Tillis who we lost in this last week.

All this and some great new music, old favourites and country music…our way. From five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

Join me live if you can.

We’re very  a fortunate group of people here at the AC. Regularly we witness country troubadours passing through and sharing intimate versions of their songs then we sit down and get a chance to ask all the things we’ve wanted to know since first spinning their records.

Now seems to be as good a time as any to reflect a little on that privilege. It’s been quite a year; we’ve spoken with kings and queens of country and witnessed some remarkable performances in concert rooms and in our studios. We’ve also heard some great stories. So it doesn’t seem likely that this late in the year I’d be flagging up a session and interview which takes everything up a gear.

A couple of weeks ago we welcomed an afternoon visit by Jason Isbell just before he had to return to the 02 Academy for his soundcheck with the 400 Unit. To be honest we’d fully expected that this was a commitment Jason would be unable to keep. He’s been on the road for most of the year and such is his success there’s no big reason he should consent to anything which takes up more time in his day. The promoter had already moved his ABC show to the bigger Academy to satisfy demand and the tickets for the bigger show were all gone months ago. I hope you’re getting the picture.

As I sat in the control room and listened in to Jason going through his possible songs I was taken by the ease in which tracks from ‘The Nashville Sound,’ his current album, poured out. This is a man as at home with an electric or an acoustic guitar in his hand, happy to be the band leader or, in this case, the folk singer – retelling the stories for one more audience.

There are really great versions of Jason songs which you can hear this coming Tuesday and you will also hear a longer than expected extended conversation on subjects as diverse as divided-America, record labels, fatherhood and his relationship with his friend and producer, Dave Cobb.

Jason Isbell is an artist at the top of his game. Comfortable in his own skin, recent massive commercial success has only confirmed what most people have known for some while; he’s a singer-songwriter accurately and eloquently telling the story of his own time in his own way. I’m not really sure Jason’s career path is one we’re going to see too often in this next generation. An artist who has had no real ‘hits’, comes from outside music-row but is lauded and respected by the country community, is not signed to a major label, and yet is successful commercially and critically. He is loved for his records and his live shows and he has developed a singular career over a number of years. Maybe he truly is the last of his kind? It’s a story we all need to hear and you can tune in this coming Tuesday with a special repeat this coming Friday.

Join us if you can this from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland

Many years ago I worked with some fabulous brothers called The Robbs. They had a studio in LA where I recorded a solo record and they would tell me great stories of past adventures. One night along with Mick, my guitarist at the time, the youngest of the brothers, Joe, took us to his favourite Mexican restaurant along Sunset. We Scots were quite taken with the Mariachi Band working their way round the room and adding to the ambience. The novelty however was less appealing to Joe who remembered a similar excursion from their studio a few years back with their then client, Mr Jimmy Webb. It appeared Jimmy’s budget was slightly more elastic than my own and his response to hearing the Mariachi players was to invite them all back to the studio and add them to his record. It’s a lovely idea and would only really work if you had the right song, of course.

Cut to twenty years later in the same city and Sam Outlaw is making his debut album with Ry Cooder handling production duties. Now I can’t tell you the exact circumstances, but on that album, ‘Angeleno,’ a Mariachi band was added at the suggestion of Ry. How fine it all sounds too. If that’s not enough there’s a little latin horn flavour on the opening track of Sam’s current album too.

This Tuesday we’ll get a chance to ask about that Tijuana sound when Sam Outlaw brings in his touring band for a very special Another Country live from Studio One. We’ll talk about these Ry sessions and we’ll also talk about Sam’s brilliant sequel which he’s produced himself, ‘Tenderheart.’ A lot has happened since he was last with us…Sam’s ‘Angeleno’ won UK Americana’s Best International Album award and he was nominated twice in the US Americana awards. More importantly Sam’s records and gigs have been building up a growing fan base (he’s now visited Scotland a number of times) and there’s at least one more chance to see him at Oran Mor as part of Celtic Connections on February 3rd 2018.

If that’s not enough we’re going to take you on a little road trip to Oklahoma. It is not coincidental that the blog should start off with a story about the State’s most famous musical son. We’ll have a little of Jimmy Webb‘s own music later in the show as well as some great contemporary Okies. Do join us live from nine o’clock this coming Tuesday. Sam Outlaw, his touring band including the wonderful Molly Jensen and our usual choice cuts from the country catalogue. Does it get any better?

It’s all on BBC Radio Scotland FM this Tuesday evening.

It was last night and I was at my lowest point when it happened; the smell of timber. I was back at my yoga class for the first time in weeks and as my face got close to the floor and just beyond the mat I caught a whiff of pine in my teacher’s lovely garden room studio. She and her husband had built the room a few years back and we neighbours have become her pupils. I remember noticing the smell of new wood when I’d first gone in and last night it was there again…just at the point where I was trying to raise my untuned body off the floor.

Suddenly I was back in childhood and we were excited children witnessing the conversion of our loft from a junk store into a play room shared between my sister and myself. For a couple of weeks a joiner lifted, sawed and planed lengths of timber until the solid floor and loft ladder was properly installed. Once the shavings and the dust were swept and cleared we all went up and imagined what we could do with the space. However it was the magical smell of the new timber I remembered as I lay on the floor last night. One moment and summers of sleepovers with cousins, record players and subbuteo competitions all came back.

Memory works like that; a fragment of time echoes unexpectedly and suddenly we’re back in the bosom of childhood. On this Tuesday’s Another Country we welcome a young artist who’s not been afraid to mine his own past. As Drake White’s album ‘Spark’ begins we hear the voice of a southern preacher. It’s the man who inspired Drake from his own childhood growing up in northern Alabama, his grandfather. Small snippets of his voice appear throughout the record as if to set a reminder to us and to Drake of the voices and influences which have brought him to this point. ‘Spark’ is an assured debut too and Drake’s grandfather would, no doubt, have been proud to know how far the young Drake has come in such a short time.

You can hear Drake White talking about that album, his current tour and his Alabama memories as well as some great session versions of songs from Spark on this week’s AC.

Talking of memories, I’m now dismayed that I missed Phoebe Bridgers when she opened for Conor Oberst a few weeks ago. You can hear some of Phoebe’s music tonight along with some new discoveries Ferris and Sylvester, Jeff Crosby and Susto. Look out for the familiar with Brandy Clark, Wanda Jackson and Margo Price and something special from Lee Ann Womack. We’ll let you hear Glasgow’s own new country band, Ashton Lane’s new single and remind you Jason Isbell comes to Scotland this week.

Join me live if you can on BBC Radio Scotland FM from five past nine this Tuesday.

Marty Stuart and the Fabulous Superlatives. Photo by Alyse Gafkjen

I first started presenting a programme on Country Music in 2008. A couple of years later someone told me that Marty Stuart was coming over to do a gig in Glasgow. At this point in my life I had no idea who Marty Stuart was or why this was, in any way, important.

So I had a lot of sympathy with a guy I met coming out of Oran Mor last Monday night. Looking as if he’d just been through a religious conversion which involved some form of total immersion. He was shaking his head in disbelief as he ascended the stairs back to the cool humdrum of a Glasgow October, ‘Last February I was complaining because C2C were putting this guy Marty Stuart on….now I’ve seen him twice and I know he was the best thing at the festival and look…..I’m wearing his T shirt.’

I wasn’t lucky enough to catch up with Marty’s live show when I first encountered him, but I was fortunate enough to meet him and interview him in, what will always be for me, one of the most memorable sessions we have ever recorded for the AC. Once encountered neither Marty or his music can be filed away in any convenient subfolder. He’s a brilliant guitarist, phenomenal mandolin player, singer, song writer, country archivist, photographer and all round keeper of the country flame.

If you think, like my friend from the stairs of Oran Mor, that Marty doesn’t figure in your understanding of contemporary country music that’s because they’ve managed to get it wrong and he’s got it right. However, Marty is not a grumpy Americana prophet railing against the passing of time, he is simply someone who understands the deep, simple beauty of the music. To that end he has assembled around him the finest band of musicians you are ever likely to find in one beat combo. Favouring the classic four-piece line-up of The Beatles, The Fabulous Superlatives feature the man himself on guitar,mandolin and vocals, alongside his cousin Kenny Vaughan on guitar and vocals, handsome Harry Stinson on drums and vocals and the great Chris Scruggs on bass and vocals. If you think I’m over egging the vocals then you need to wait until you hear the broadcast…these boys can all sing!

Last Monday we took the BBC mobile studio to Great Western Road and recorded all of Marty Stuart and The Fabulous Superlatives show for this week’s Another Country. You will be able to hear an hour of that amazing concert from 10 o’clock this coming Tuesday night. It’s the third time I’ve seen Marty this year and though the other two were tough acts to follow it was, simply, the best. You’ll hear honky tonk, you’ll hear western swing and you’ll hear bluegrass and classic country reinterpreted and beautifully performed by a band at the very top of their game.

Before all of that you can enjoy an hour of Marty Stuart picking his favourite country songs. Listen out for cuts from Johnny Cash, Connie Smith, Merle Haggard, Miranda Lambert and The Byrds. 

The great Eddie Stubbs prefaces Marty’s Late Night Jam at the Ryman thus: ‘ You may have been to a concert before; but tonight you are going to experience a show.’ No truer word was ever spoken about the Marty Stuart live experience.

Judge for yourself.It all starts from five past nine thisTuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.

A few weeks ago the good Miranda Lambert came to Glasgow to headline a show at the Clyde Auditorium. It was great to catch up  and talk about her amazing career backstage at the Armadillo where she told us some of the background to her successful album from last year, ‘The Weight of These Wings.’ We left her in good spirits as chatted to her significant ‘other’, Mr Anderson East and  made our apologies explaining that we couldn’t stay as we had a live radio show today.

So it’s sad to remember that…judging from my twitter feed later that evening…Miranda’s gig ended a little unhappily for audience and performer. It seems, and I’m piecing this together, Miranda introduced her band and pointed out that one of her players was from England. What followed was ‘good natured banter’ according to some reports, but certainly some people started to boo as, presumably, they wished the musician in question had been from the US or, presumably, Scotland.

The result of all of this (misunderstanding) was an early exit from Miranda and a few people in the audience feeling a little deprived of the ending they were hoping for. It’s probably worth taking a step back and thinking that booing anyone isn’t really very clever and probably not really very funny. Scotland and Glasgow is a great place to play for most people and the main reason for that is the warmth and enthusiasm of the crowd as well as the generous welcome we usually extend to visiting acts.

• Miranda, Me and a Kenny Rogers photo bomb!

So on Tuesday night those people who may have been disappointed by Miranda’s early exit will hear how much she has been enjoying coming here and how generous she was with her time for Another Country. We’re interested in Miranda’s story for a lot of different reasons: She has paid her dues by playing live extensively in her home state of Texas, having been ‘discovered’ and groomed to be in a pop band she rebelled and headed home to Texas and asked her father to teach her to play guitar as she wanted to be a real singer songwriter. She won an early TV talent show called Nashville Star but always set her own agenda by writing her own – and usually her best songs then…and…. we loved this…at the peak of her fame she brought in Ashley Munro and Anagaleena Presley to form The Pistol Annies. Miranda is, of course, Lone Star Annie and she talks about that in the conversation. It’s a wide ranging discussion with the current queen of Country and we’ll play some great cuts from her current album and some significant older ones too.

We’ll also have new music from Old Sea Brigade, Caity Krone, Margo Price and The Barr Brothers and we’ll be live from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.

Whatever we do this Tuesday all of us involved with the programme are dismayed and heart broken at the events in Las Vegas on Sunday night. Country Music at its best is life affirming, joyful and unifying. It defies belief that something so evil could visit men, women and children out enjoying a concert. To the bereaved, the injured and to all those caught up in this tragedy we send our love and prayers.

With love from all at BBC Radio Scotland’s Another Country.

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I remember hearing Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love for the first time. It would have been on cassette and it would have been on the road. What that album meant to be then would take a longer essay – maybe a book – but that is for another time. What I remember about the album is pretty well everything. To say I became obsessed is an understatement of gargantuan proportions and by the time I met the man who mixed the record, Mr Bob Clearmountain, a few months later the only questions I wanted to ask him were about that album.

Bob’s memorable quote was one that stuck with me for a long time after. Referring to Springsteen’s then wife, Julianne Phillips, Bob apparently asked The Boss, ‘Has Julie heard these songs?’

It’s not difficult to see why the question got asked. As the tracks went past and Bob balanced the self produced multi tracks one thing was certain about the theme of the record. The character or characters in these songs were unhappily out of love. Whether it’s the man questioning his own identity in ‘Brilliant Disguise’ or the couple entering that dark fairground ride itself or the lover who tells his partner that they take ‘One step up and two steps back’ these are relationships getting into deep water without any sight of shore.

Well, I can feel the soft silk of your blouse
And them soft thrills in our little fun house
Then the lights go out and it’s just the three of us, yeah
You, me and all that stuff we’re so scared of

Nevertheless for reasons that could fill that book, the record remains my favourite record. In the spring after the record came out I saw Bruce for the first time. I’d not been a huge fan of Born In The USA and his previous visit to the UK demanded a herculean effort to get a ticket at The Edinburgh Playhouse. I had neither the time nor the money to make that. On this occasion however I had engineered events differently. I was being sent to New York City on recording business and I managed to go the week Bruce was to play a run of shows at Madison Square Gardens. I went twice.

Darker than you might have expected and lightened only by the chemistry between Bruce and his new wife to be, Patty Scialfa, the shows were compulsive viewing to this young man. Jet lagged and slightly weary I took in every beat of the 3 hour show. The Fat man on the ticket booth, the rap with Clarence, the cover of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ and the thrill of hearing 10th Avenue Freeze Out in exactly the right place at the right time.

This Tuesday we’ll celebrate 30 years since Tunnel of Love ‘dropped’  and talk to our own man in Nashville, Bill Demain, about why, for many country artists, Bruce is the man keeping the country flame burning.

It’s all on this week’s Another Country. Join me from five past nine this Tuesday evening from five past nine.

Nanci Griffith has a song which sprung out of part of a tour itinerary. While the rest of the Blue Moon Orchestra were whiling away their down time Nanci wrote an unaccompanied folk ballad about her trip to Aberdeen. I can’t think of a trip to the Granite City as significant as Nanci’s ‘Road to Aberdeen’ but I do remember a beautiful ride home one sunny morning.

The year is a little sketchy but it was late seventies and the Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes and Graham Parker and The Rumour tour had not been booked to play Dundee but had, rather, elected to visit The Music Hall in Furryboots City.  My pal, Pete was a student up in the town and we had tickets.  I was to stay over with him after the gig on the Sunday evening with the assurance I’d return my mother’s car back in time for her work on the Monday morning. I remember the drive back as if it was yesterday. A sparkling North Sea to the left of me as a fishing boat gently carved the water out beyond Stonehaven and, as my mother’s mini had no radio or cassette player,  the only sound was the music of my imagination. It wasn’t hard to make that happen as I’d been at one of those gigs you alway hear about but – until that point  – seemed to elude me. The Jukes were up first and their horn section was front and off-centre – but in your face. After this came The Rumour with their classic line up augmented by a wonderful brass section, this time offset a little behind the main band. It was on this night I might have first discovered the glory of The Tramps’ ‘Hold Back The Night.’ and the joy of Southside’s great version of Miami Steve’s I Don’t Wanna Go Home…two songs which followed me through my life.

I thought of this night recently as we ticked off yet one more band who are not afraid to mix in the R n B with the country to create these beautiful roots southern stews we love so much. We call it Americana but heck..we know it’s just great music.

So look out for a soul/country/blues crossover sequence featuring Sam Outlaw, Margo Price, Valerie June and Anderson East…oh and something rather wonderful from Don Bryant.

We shall also welcome John Murry. In our most celtically connected moment yet John will tell us how his first AC visit has reaped rewards by the way of his long awaited second album. He’ll play session versions from ‘ A Short History of Decay’ and we’ll hear the story of that five year lay over which took him from San Francisco to Kilkenny via an encounter with the Cowboy Junkies. John is a compulsive listen and, accompanied by his excellent tour band, you will hear him on fine form.

There’s probably more but this should whet your appetite for what will be a remarkable two hours of country music …our way.

Join us from five past nine this Tuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

Can we listen to the demo again?

It’s often the most asked question in the studio as artists play the long standing recording game of ‘chasing the demo.’ A song has been written and recorded in a fairly rudimentary but effective way and no one in the room is convinced they are getting it to sound any better, despite spending four times more time and multiplying the budget by ten.

The stories are legion. Bruce Springsteen‘s Nebraska – demos for an album meant to be called ‘Murder Incorporated’ and recorded on such basic equipment (the Tascam 4 track Cassette recorder) Bob Ludwig refused to master it. On Last week’s AC we played a lovely song from Neil Young’s lost Hitchhiker record which has been on the shelves since 1976. In this case Neil took songs one by one and found homes for them on other records, but it was interesting to know where they all fitted in to the bigger picture.

On this week’s AC we catch up with former Bright Eyes singer and song writer, Conor Oberst. His own demo story adds a new dimension to the sagas. Last year he put together some work tapes on piano and acoustic guitar of a bunch of songs for his forthcoming album. He sent them round to the musicians he was hoping to ask onto the final recordings including esteemed rock legend, drummer, Jim Keltner. What happened next was what makes Conor’s story well worth following.

His record label boss opined that these recordings were worthy of a release in their own right and advised Conor he wanted to do just this, but encouraged him also to go and make the record he was planning to make in the first place. At this point Mr Keltner’s enthusiasm for the demos went overboard and he signed up to co-produce the forthcoming fully realised album with Conor. The result is that the demo album, ‘Ruminations’ came out a few month before ‘Salutations.’ It’s an interesting listen to play them both back to back.

On a warm evening last month we caught up with Conor Oberst in Glasgow’s ABC before his show there that evening. He was on great form and we talked extensively about his life, those records, Bright Eyes, his road band – The Felice Brothers and his special relationship with Jim Keltner.

You can hear all of that conversation plus an in depth look at these two remarkable records on this week’s Another Country.

Listen out too for records for brand new things from Elliot Brood, Gill Landry, Lady Antebellum and JD McPherson. As our good friend Eddie Stubbs might well say, ‘You may have been to a concert before…but tonight…you will hear a show.’

We’re live from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can

Just adjacent to Kensington Palace in the splendour of west London is one of the world’s finer hotels. The Royal Garden in Kensington was one of the new hotels of the sixties. In the summer of ’66 it was the chosen venue for the victorious England team when they returned with the World Cup.

I’d passed The Garden many times on my walks along Ken High St but can’t remember ever staying there until the end of the nineties. I’d signed a new publishing contract with Warner Chappell Music and they were kind enough to accommodate me there on the night we sealed the deal. Music publishing is the dowdy bird in the aviary of the music business and I was more surprised than most at this display of uncanny opulence. I remember my well-appointed room offering a wonderful prospect of the High St as the lights started to come on in the early London dusk.

In the months that followed the publishers affirmed their good relationship with the hotel by moving their own offices round the corner to Kensington Church St, one of the old capital’s beautiful thoroughfares linking bohemian Notting Hill to the grandeur and glitz of WestKen.

I would stay there again on one of my first co-writing sessions of this new life I had. The publisher thought I should write with one of their best and most successful writers, Charlie Dore. So it was on headed note paper from this hotel I wrote out the lyrics to the first song Charlie and I had drafted together. I proudly showed her my effort the following morning back at her house in Highgate. ‘Good,’ she said warily, ‘let me just photocopy that and we can start work.’ For the next few hours I got a text book lesson on the art of co writing from of the finest songwriters I have come to know as a colleague and friend. Scribbling over with pens and pencils, the lyric was chiselled and shaped till it became, finally, a song.

In the intervening seventeen years or so we’ve become close friends and songwriting partners and Charlie has found a renewed love for performing and recording her own songs. Along with her own regular song writing partner, Julian Littman, Charlie has produced a series of brilliantly realised folk/americana records. On her latest, Dark Matter, she meshes stories as disparate as teenage science-class apathy to…. well… matters of life and death. And it is on this last subject where you realise Charlie’s songs matter more than most. Never afraid to poke and prod and ask the tricky questions, her own visceral response to growing older and facing the end of times becomes a compulsive listen.

This Tuesday I get to ask her the questions I’ve always wanted to ask and Charlie talks honestly, openly, hilariously and movingly about her own life and her brilliant songs. It’s one of those nights where you need to drop everything and listen.

Elsewhere we will pay tribute to Don Williams who died over the weekend aged 78. Don was a giant in country music and he had a special career in the UK touching millions of people with his music. Listen out for tributes from The Pistol Annies, music from Don himself and some great new music from Margo Price, The Orphan Brigade, Joanna Serrat, Willie Watson and Whitney Rose.

We’re on from five past nine on BBC Scotland FM this Tuesday evening. Join me if you can.