I can’t say I’ve ever paid too much attention to The Grammy Awards and probably not really noticed the nominations at all. Last week however, that all changed. No one likes a smart ass but I felt a small pinch of self-belief that my musical instincts had not completely disappeared. I should qualify this wholly but telling you I’d be the worst A & R person ever….I would let platinum selling artists drift in and out of my office without even reaching for my pen…..but when it comes to real songwriters I hope I can still say I’d recognise a real one from an imposter.

So when Sturgill Simpson and Brandy Clark were so notably nominated in last week’s announcement there was a certain amount of punching the air over here in AC Towers. We’ve talked about Sturgill and we’ll talk again but this week we’ve moved all the other records out of the way, in fact we’ve put every other artist on hold while we pay due respect to singer and songwriter, Brandy Clark.

If you don’t know Brandy’s work then prepare to laugh, be outraged and have your heart broken. If you think country music should be about depression, guilt, drugs, prison, single-parenthood, pills, marijuana then stay with us…if you think female singer songwriters should look and sound like the girl next door, well go next door. (That’s one of Brandy’s in case you wrongly credit me)

One of the other things I love about Brandy – and there are many – is her determination to succeed against, what many perceived to be, considerable odds. She was the Nashville go-to songwriter…i.e. she shouldn’t be seen as an artist, she wasn’t young and cool and she wasn’t likely to make it as she was no Miranda/ Carrie/ Martina (supply your own name here). Why wasn’t she just content to be a successful songwriter and know her place? One almost hears, ‘Dam it girl what makes you think you can be a country star?’

Most of that was to underestimate the considerable attributes of Brandy Clark. She grew up in a logging town called Morton in Washington State and experienced losing her father in a mill accident shortly before 9/11. Leaving her basketball scholarship behind she moved to Nashville – she’d fallen in love with country music – where she became a successful writer on other people’s records. Miranda Lambert, The Band Perry and most crucially Kacey Musgraves have all recorded major Brandy songs.There were however some songs that wouldn’t be touched by anyone in town. Those songs became the album 12 Stories in 2014 which was followed up by this year’s Big Day In A Small Town.

To hear the artist behind these songs and find out what gives me hope for country music you need to listen to Another Country this week. We’ll spend two hours with Brandy talking about her songs, her career and the songs and artists that made her.

It all starts this Tuesday evening from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

On Sunday I will be talking to the man at the centre of the Blair years and The New Labour project, Alastair Campbell.

Forgive me for inserting that quote from Born To Run, the Springsteen autobiography. But it occurred to me how true it was as I was preparing to go out on tour and it still rings true as my head clears from the chaos of the Barrowlands.

Something happens between the time you go on stage and the end of the show which changes the relationship between everyone in that room. It changes how people feel about themselves, how they feel about those sitting or standing around them and finally it breaks down the barrier between the artists and the audience to such an extent that everyone there feels like they are part of an homogenous collective altered by music.

I noticed a few years back when I remembered standing on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall and feeling as if I was part of the audience…and I felt the audience noticed it too. The pretence had gone. There were was no fourth wall..in the course of the show, it had disappeared completely. I realised that night, that this is the test of whether any gig has worked for me as a performer. All the usual stuff has to be correct and the test is that we all feel we are part of the one thing.

I’m probably saying this to explain the gap in the blog for the last few weeks. If you were not aware of it, I have been out on the road with my band mates from Deacon Blue touring the British Isles, north, south east and west and now I am home. It’s always slightly odd getting back. People assume touring is enormous fun – and bits of it can be – but for me it’s also a mountain to climb, and you have to climb it again very night, so there is a deep sense of relief to be on the other side of it all and look forward to a warm AC studio and a pile of fine records.

I’ve missed being able to play music the way I like to. I quite like being driven around but have no idea how to access all the home entertainment on the tour bus so I ended up just taking my trusty ipod to my bunk and losing myself in old favourites. This has meant that I’ve had to catch up with many lovely new things since my return. The good news? We have some new names for you. Be prepared to be wowed by Holly MacVe, Flo Morrisey and Matthew White (together) and Courtney Marie Andrews.

We’ll also have some lovely new things from Tift Merritt, Gillian Welch and our continuing love for Michael Nau.

However all of that will only serve as an opener for tonight’s main event: a session from Austin Lucas backed up by his own touring partners The Dreaming Spires. Austin came in to record this for us back in October when he was visiting Scotland. We’ve loved Austin’s recent album, Between The Moon and The Midwest and you can hear the painful story of that record’s difficult birth. The rejection that Austin faced has, no doubt, made him a stronger artist. You can hear how the story unfolded and the songs that came through the fire on this Tuesday’s Another Country.

We will be on air from five past nine on BBC Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

ps I’m back this Sunday morning too when I will be talking to comic God, Gregor Fisher and playing some fine songs too.

One of the loveliest things about working on Another Country is the sure and certain knowledge that every other week I will get to meet some brilliant musicians who have a lifetime of great stories to tell. Some of this is because so many country artists have to do so much of an apprenticeship before they get taken seriously by the business that they very often have ten good years of recording and live experience before they appear as the overnight successes we encounter.

People will tell me lovely things about the show and I will often reply that I would have to be doing my job particularly badly if I couldn’t present a radio programme where brilliant songs, singers and stories are guaranteed every week. Looking back now it’s been a great joy to talk to Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, KD Lang, Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, Shawn Colvin and Connie Smith. But in reality, how could I possibly go wrong? They’ve all made brilliant records, have changed the face of music and have worked with some remarkable people. It would be great to say, like my great radio hero Eddie Stubbs, that I remembered talking to them on their way up but sadly I’ve not had that experience. So this Tuesday it gives me great pleasure to introduce two singers who, although they’ve already enjoyed considerable success, are certainly still in the early days of a very promising career. Maddie and Tae are barely 21 years old but have already experienced huge country success as well as country controversy by daring to lampoon one of the staples of Music Row, ‘Bro Country.’ Their single ‘Girl In a Country Song’ was a huge hit last year and, although bought and shared by many, also caused one or two old-school country types to oppose what they were saying and singing? What was all the fuss about? You can hear the story of Maddie and Tae this Tuesday evening as they were kind enough to join me last week for a session and an extended conversation about their rise to fame. Overnight success? Well they moved to Nashville aged 17….so, again, they have a few tales to tell.

We will also celebrate 70 years since the birth of the man who brought so many us to country music. It is over 40 years since Gram Parsons died far too early but we are still celebrating the music he made with The International Submarine Band, The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and under his own name in a short but brilliant career. We will play some classic Gram from CD and original vinyl which may inspire those of you who have always wanted to discover him to go off and do that very thing. We’ll also have some Byrds music which we think inspired The Dreaming Spires.  Listen out for significant anniversaries for the aforementioned KD Lang and Connie Smith too.

There will be new records from Roseanne Reid, M Lockwood Porter, Michael Nau and Margaret Glaspy (apologies that we ran out of time for Margaret last week.

It’s all on BBC Radio Scotland FM and it starts at five past nine this Tuesday evening.

Flashes like a spray of blue jays
Hmmm — a golden crown upon each one
Like an eagle seen against the sun

Bruce Cockburn

It’s one of these mornings and I’m back at the desk looking out at the park where I’ve just enjoyed the morning walk with Alf the dog. If it weren’t for the radio I’d probably imagine the world right now was just about as perfect as the picture I recall; single leaves dropping languidly as Alf shuffled around in the leftovers of summer. At one point I looked and there was the unlikely sight of him wreathed in his own condensation, happy as the morning.

Life’s not that simple, I know, but if I’ve learned anything (and the jury’s still out there) I’ve learned that you’ll regret it if you fail to celebrate the moments that matter. Other things will come along soon enough and the good memories help balance everything out. Right now I’m completing the moment and have put on the new vinyl album by Conor Oberst where he sings of Paul Gauguin in The Pacific and John Muir in Yosemite. It’s one of the joyous things I’ll share with you on this Tuesday’s Another Country.

We will also repeat a moment from last year when we hosted Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats. These chaps have taken Nathaniel’s music to a whole new audience since they released their current, eponymously titled album. It’s been great for us to watch the progress of Nathaniel and his troubadours over the last 15 months or so. Since we first new him as an introspective folk singer it’s been great to see his music embraced by a wider audience who now include the 4,000 souls who have bought tickets for his 2 sold out Barrowlands shows early next month. Last October they came in to AC Towers to perform an exclusive acoustic session and I sat down to chat to the man himself about singing, drinking, getting famous and being on one of the most the most iconic record labels of all time. On this week’s show you get a chance to hear all of that again.

Also, and if you like The Night Sweats, we think you’ll just love Tami Nielson, Dietrich Strausse and Margaret Glaspy, you’ll swoon at the new track from Hiss Golden Messenger noting that Tift Merrit guests on his latest album and what do you know, we have something new and wonderful from Tift herself. We’ll bring you your regular Merle Moment and, not a moment too soon we’ll have a song from one of the biggest country stars of all time, Garth Brooks. If I told you we also had a track from Sarah Jarosz I think you’d feel we have a very special show lined up.

It all starts at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM on Tuesday evening.

I love PM on Radio 4. I trust Eddie Mair more, perhaps, than anyone really should. Eddie, like me, loves country music but that’s only a side issue. The editorial approach and decision making behind the programme makes it, for me, the best weekday news programme on the network and Eddie is the king of all he surveys. So why could they have got their Bob Dylan Nobel feature so horribly wrong?

In ‘celebration’ of Bob’s honour they decided to ask actors to read sections of Dylan’s lyrics aloud on air. This in itself may have worked with a little contextualisation, like why the lyric means so much – in fact the final choice by Pam Ayres almost triumphed – but in the main it was a recreation of Peter Sellers comic masterly recital of ‘Hard Day’s Night.’ I can understand why they felt they had to do it. Dylan, they are trying to say, is now a Nobel Laureate – it must be his lyrics, they must be of such literary merit they will stand alone as poetry. How wrong is that though?

What people fail to understand about pop music – because it is that folks – is there are many things going on. Firstly there is a context – Where does a song encounter its audience? Certainly in a  wholly different way any other piece of literature does. We don’t sit down and read this stuff. We hear it our of our dad’s car radio, across a noisy open air swimming pool through a bad tannoy, above the generator hum and the screams of the dodgems and sometimes in the silence of a bedroom at night. We hear the song not as collection of rhymes, allusions and metaphors but as words sneaking between guitar licks and horns riffs. We hear the singer but sometimes only just. Where the music makes us feel good it is often against the entire thrust of the narrative of the lyric and vice versa. People – it’s a song! It is made to be with music, it doesn’t exist without music and if the singer sings one line ten times that’s because it works in a song. Sometimes – and get this clearly – it makes no sense at all! One of the greatest ever rock’n’roll revival groups were called, Sha Na Na, because they, probably like you, knew that’s what makes sense in rock’n’roll. Maybe, just maybe, the good people in Sweden who sat in that room understood some of this too. They understood that Bob Dylan’s songs are great literature because of how they have been received by the audience and how they are not simply words to be removed from the upward thrust of some of the most heartbreaking, uplifting, joyous, anthemic and exciting music you are ever likely to hear.

This Tuesday night we will play a couple of good reasons why Bob Dylan has been honoured and we will ask you, out of deep respect, to turn your radios up very loud.

We also want to mark the 90th birthday of the 20th Century’s other great singer songwriter. The man, without whom I suggest, none of us would be here: Chuck Berry.

We will have plenty new music for your to enjoy too. Listen out for new records by Tim Easton, Anthony D’Amato, The Black Feathers and The Way Down Wanderers. Did I mention Merle yet? Oh there’s so much. Please join me from five past nine this Tuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.

A few years ago we started a little AC side project. Calling it the Another Country Movie Club we started to collect lists of the many films which had great country music soundtracks. This was propelled by two or three movies which could well lay claim to converting people to the genre in the first place.

Around 16 years ago or so Oh, Brother Where Art Thou brought country, gospel and bluegrass to a worldwide audience who, until then, had no idea they might actually like the sound of a banjo or a church choir. A few years earlier I had been to Dundee’s first designated ‘film theatre’ to see ‘Coal Miners Daughter.’ Such was my limited knowledge of the genre that I had no idea who the film was about and was grateful that someone explained it was about ‘Crystal Gale’s sister.’

The tradition of country music in movies now has a proud and noble history and there is rarely a year goes by which doesn’t add into the canon of work. This year, ‘Hell or High Water’ made by Scottish filmmaker, David McKenzie and to some extent ‘War on Everyone’ with its sublot paen to Glen Campbell have added into the catalogue. Then, of course, there are the biopics – I still haven’t seen ‘I Saw The Light’ as it’s not had many recommendations but we all fell in love with ‘Walk The Line’ – the list goes on and on.

On the Tuesday’s Another Country I will be joined by a man who knows all these films and more. By day he is Edinburgh University’s Doctor of Celluloid and in any spare time he has he loves country music. Pasquale Iannone will take us through some films you’ll want to see or see again if it’s been a while and from them we’ll pull out some great singers and songs you will certainly want to hear again and again.

You’ll hear music from Ryan Bingham, Tom Russell, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss and we will not forget one or two current releases as well as our regular Merle Moment. Join us from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.

25 years ago in New York City my wife and I went to see an Off-Broadway production of a one-man show. It had been recommended to us by a colleague who said – ‘You must go see this.’ It was called, ‘Only The Truth is Funny’ and now I can’t remember the actor/stand up performer whose story it was. I always imagined it was one of these shows which would run and run and eventually appear in Edinburgh at the Fringe or as a touring production. It never did. But that night the man who made that story took us on a journey of such emotional extremes it was only possible to conclude he had indeed been telling his own story. At the beginning of the evening he was at pains to point out to us that the show only works if we knew each detail to be completely true. There was no willing suspension here; this was simply belief.

As you may have gathered, this is a theme of mine which has been running through my head for a while now. Later this week you can here some of that put to song – but that’s for another day. I thought of all of this when listening to Danny and The Champions of The World in lieu of their recent visit to AC Towers. For Danny Wilson, lead singer of the London combo, all of life is up for inclusion. On (Never Stop Building) That Old Space Rocket, a wonderful song on their last but one record, Danny tells the story of a holiday road trip with his father to witness the magnificence of Fabulous Thunderbirds and each and every detail of that journey is all you need to know to love what Danny and the Champs do so well.

At this year’s inaugural UK Americana awards I presented Danny and The Champs with one award and they went on to pick up a couple more on a wonderful night which affirmed all they have been doing for these last few years. The Band were in Scotland earlier in the month and they came in to record some songs in session for us and I caught up on the whole Champs happy history in a long conversation with Danny Wilson himself. You can hear all of that on this week’s show.

To us, female country artists seem to have been around forever. But there was a time when they were as rare as royalties from Spotify. In the late 50’s Jean Shepard came along to add her name on to a growing list of women singers that included Kitty Wells and Patsy Montana. Last Sunday aged 82 she passed away after suffering from Parkinsons Disease in later life. Never a shrinking violet she continued to blossom in recent years when she challenged the blandness of Bro Country in a way only a legend could do. We’ll tell you more about her run in with Blake Shelton later on Tuesday’s show. Safe to say you’re always more likely to hear Jean than Blake on the AC.

All this and so much more: Thomas Earl Conley on vinyl, new records from Mandolin Orange and Brooke Sharkey and a dip into Pre E Street Bruce. If this is not enough we will, of course, enjoy another Merle moment. Join me from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.

I found myself at a couple of artistic endeavours recently where the above aphorism came to mind. Show, don’t tell is said to be the mantra of creative writing classes the world over. Let the audience see the story and they will probably get your point of view but will have come to that position, at least, imagining they came independently.

In the early 80’s I bade farewell to agit-prop having spent many years being brow-beaten by Socialists, Christians, Pacifists or a combination of all three. Often they wanted to bring their own propaganda for fear you’d be seduced by someone else’s. In all of it there was the recurring theme of the main stream media – especially our beloved state broadcaster – traducing our higher instincts of reason, fairness and justice and supplanting it with orthodoxy, conservatism and conformity. The only real conformity was the regularity in which all manner of ginger groups used the same arguments for their own particular diffidence to the real world.

The trouble is I’ve only been put off the political because the medium became the message. When it works well it really is great. Woody Guthrie, Bertolt Brecht, John Steinbeck and Pete Seeger take a bow. There is something true and honest about taking an idea into the public space and using that to provoke, encourage or surprise us. Sometimes the very act of opening up our thinking process to the world will bring a clarity to an idea and usually, in song, brings a rounded humanity to any polemic.

So, and with that in mind, I come to this week’s guest artistes. Joe Henry is no stranger to the AC although his own contribution to our content has been as a producer rather than an artist. We’ve played records he has made with Rodney Crowell with and without Emmylou Harris, Allen Toussaint, Carolina Chocolate Drops and this year the remarkable new album from Hayes Carll. He’s also a writer and artist in his own right. Billy Bragg, his travelling companion on the current project, is a man who we may have less connection with on the programme but who exemplifies artist as activist.

Given my opening salvo, you would imagine that my enthusiasm for Billy and his music may not be as high as it could have been. The opposite is, in fact, the truth. Art as politics works brilliantly simply because it follows the same rules as every other piece of art: it works because it’s good. So my earlier antipathy, I quickly gleaned, was not an indifference to the propagandists per se but a dislike of being ignored as participator and being taken for granted as a mindless devotee.

Billy Bragg and Joe Henry of course sidestep all of this neatly by telling some stories on a train. What could be simpler or more innocent than that? Except that Billy and Joe’s stories have a pre roll, a context and and  an aftershock because of the place and the time they choose to sing. Travelling  2728 miles on the Great American Railroad from Chicago to Los Angeles is always going to be interesting in a Presidential election year. Given the fact that they are travelling in tracks made famous by Leadbelly amongst others when the USA is in a fierce debate about the worth of black lives only adds to the intrigue.

On Tuesday Billy and Joe tell their own story of the journey, the people they met and the songs they sang. We will start the two hours with some fine country and americana songs of choice before moving into the main event. Do join us if you can from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

You can’t go home again. The phrase and the title was first coined by the great American novelist Thomas Wolf and, if your experience resembles mine in any way, you will know it to be true. We make attempts of course, and who can blame us. The past is a misty memory on the best of days and we have forgotten much and (gladly) remembered so much of what we loved.

My school pals gathered on Saturday for a reunion. Though I couldn’t make it on the night I was drawn to the Facebook photographs and loved hearing the tales of people being reunited after such a long time. It was the class of 76 and it’s fairly inevitable that, at that distance, we all remembered our school days being beautifully sunlit and happening to a brilliant soundtrack. Memory, nostalgia and a halo on the past; it’s the stuff of country music is it not? I often hear the phrase, ‘keep it country’ and I like it but puzzle over it too.

I thought of it this week when certain records left me cold and another has wormed its way into my affections so tenderly that I can’t stop thinking about it. In a couple of weeks time we’ll catch up in detail with Brandy Clark but right now I realise her new album, ‘Big Day In a Small Town‘ captures so much of what seems essential to me. A great voice, memorable melodies and great stories you enjoy hearing again and again. You’ll hear a bit of this album on Tuesday.

Another great singer songwriter is about to bring out a new record too. It strikes me that John Prine has been so many songwriters favourite songwriter for such a long time that it is impossible to imagine him not being around. I’ve been aware of him for so much of my musical life and I still marvel at his songwriting and his ability to tell a story that takes you right to the heart of the action. From the sixties and the Vietnam years he gave us ‘Sam Stone.’ Later we heard Nanci Griffith singing his brilliant, ‘The Speed of The Sound of Loneliness’ then the great ‘Angel From Montgomery’ made famous by Bonnie Raitt. A good writer knows a good song though, and John’s new collection of covers, ‘For Better or Worse‘ and duets is a brilliant collection of other people’s classics.

On the song “In The Name Of You” Basia Bulat opens with the line, “I know I can’t home again…..”So it seems hugely appropriate that she is our very special guest on this week’s show. Canada’s own,  Basia has made a great break-up record and the best way she found to record her songs was to take the long journey from her home in Montreal to Louisville Kentucky. It was there she spent some significant time with our old friend Jim James (of My Morning Jacket fame) who produced her excellent new record, ‘Good Advice.’   You can hear more about that advice and some acoustic versions of the song on the album by Basia on this Tuesday’s AC.

It’s a very special night and we’ll be on BBC Radio Scotland FM from five past nine. Join me if you can.

On Sunday I was overcome by nostalgia. A song was going through my head I had to hear. It was only a simple melody in truth played on a clarinet on a record that is probably around 80 years old.

Benny Goodman’s Countdown album was one of these records that came to our house in an odd way. My father had been visiting his brother and in a true gesture of Ross generosity (we had many flaws but parsimony wasn’t one) my Uncle had given my father a few of his old records. The one I remember best was Countdown. Starting with the big band it worked its way down from through an octet, sextet,quartet, trio until a brilliant climax of vibraphone and piano duet was played at breakneck speed by Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. At the end of each track an audience burst into applause and my young teenage self imagined the spontaneous hysteria visited on Americans  hearing hot swing music played with such skill, rhythm and speed. How they cheered.

As I made the lunch on Sunday and listened to Countdown again for the first time in years I recalled how I knew almost everything and nothing by reading record sleeves. The names of the writers, the players and the songs. That song which had been going through my mind? ‘Bach Goes To Town,’ Benny’s own re arrangement of a Bach piece which lent itself perfectly to jazz.

Perhaps it was the fact we didn’t know everything. We couldn’t really research very much and we had no video to see how performers played or where. In reality what we didn’t know we chose to imagine – for my part I tried to visualise these magical live performances, how they played and where they were all taking place. Do I wish I knew more? Perhaps? Am I glad I got hours and hours with just a record, a record player and me..oh yes.

Imagination is often all we have and I’m pretty sure it’s what we all do when we hear music. It’s for that reason I take all responsibility for my own music but leave it to others to sort out the videos.

It’s always been the way I love to listen to music for the first time. In the perfect world it will sit on the passenger seat and I manage to put the CD into the player without knowing which album I’m listening to until – bingo – I’m in love. This week I bring you some beautiful new things and a Mr Murdoch discovery that will melt your heart. Listen out for Joseph, three sisters from Oregon produced by Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis. We’ll have a gorgeous new song from Heidi Talbot and we’ll play you some of these country rebels who’ve been having their own say on the CMA and its awards.

We’ll also reflect on the fact that the great Buddy Holly would only have been 80 years old this week by reminding you – should you need it – how vital his music was. It’s country music our way and you can join us this coming Tuesday evening from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.