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.

Of all the benefits of presenting Another Country, by far the greatest is getting to ask questions to song writers about work they have produced. Often I’m gently probing around career paths and trying to persuade guests to explain how they arrived here. Sometimes the artist’s own life eclipses everything and the songs take a back seat; then sometimes it all comes together in an extraordinary way.

On this week’s Another Country we shall host a session and conversation with Sam Baker about what, for me, is undoubtedly my favourite record of the year. I love it because of the stories, I love it because of the melodies and I love it because it floored me when I played it from beginning until its final note was lost in the reverb. Part of my love for it was my surprise at the ingenious production and atmosphere created by Neilson Hubbard where songs explode into sonic delights deep into the track, disturbing and confounding me at every turn. But none of this would matter if the singer and the songs weren’t full of vitality.

Land of Doubt is an album bursting with life. Take the tale of the Vietnam vet in ‘Same Kind of Blue’ where the narrator recalls of the grim task of ‘Charlie fighting Charlie’ way down in tunnels ‘crawling into hell.’ It’s a story we think we’ve heard before until Sam hits with the confounding sucker punch: despite all of this his protagonist confesses, this ‘was the only time he ever felt alive.’ Then, over a military snare and a elegiac trumpet the song blows up into a gorgeous final coda.

Then there’s Sam’s monstrous ‘Feast of St Valentine’ where he sings above a track which Doves could have conjured up. Stirring, anthemic and ultimately life-affirming it’s tucked into the album so deep you are taken aback by its intensity. Early on we hear the simple beauty of the voices at the end of ‘Margaret’ and then there’s classic Sam Baker valedictory message of  ‘Peace Out.’

It really is this good. Sam’s own life means has the right to know the deep joy and gratitude in a simple phrase life Peace Out. In 1986 he escaped death in a train which was targeted by the Shining Path terrorists in Peru. He suffered life-changing injuries and his hearing is now so poor it’s miraculous he can make such beautiful music. But he does and he will make more. Join me for a very special Sam Baker session and conversation this coming Tuesday.

Elsewhere we’ll bring you some essential new Country Music from Carly Pearce, Luke Combs, Lee Ann Womack, Iron and Wine, Dean Owens (also produced by Nielson Hubbard) and John and Lily Hiatt.

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

One of the many reasons I never liked the video age (perhaps it has passed?) was less Mr Springsteen’s complaint that it was like ‘painting a moustache’ on your favourite painting and more that it took away the piece of magic any music allowed you – your imagination.

I don’t know how I would make a video for the Louvin Brothers singing ‘In the Pines’ but I’m pretty sure my ‘longest train’ would look a lot different to the next person’s. By the time the video age kicked in properly in the mid 80’s I had to start receiving ‘treatments’ for video plots for some of my own songs. I always liked the scripts which started, ‘I hope to shoot each member of the band individually’  – often the band ended up feeling the same thing. Moving images with music are hard to get out of our heads and the radio allows us some room for manoeuvre.

I love imagining where someone is listening when they send a message in. What are they looking at and where are they hearing? So, I suppose, the listener imagines too in their own way. Many people will chat to me and ask when we record the show, little realising that much of the joy of any given Another Country evening is being able to broadcast live. At this point the collective imagination goes into a top spin as listeners from across Scotland let the music take them some place familiar or to places they can only dream about.

This Tuesday I will bring you a vinyl selection from the new album by Randy Newman called Dark Matter. On so many songs from his back catalogue I’ve allowed myself to dream a little…that back yard with the dog in Rednecks, that bum on the street in I Love L.A. and the reflection of the golden girl in the spectacles of the child killer in ‘In Germany Before The War.’

You and me will both imagine the Music Row hangout of our Nashville correspondent, Bill DeMain as he brings us all the latest from Nashvegas and you will perhaps imagine the young Albert Hammond writing and selling songs in Denmark Street which would become the soundtrack to a million lives. There’s a lot of imagining goes on.

Your mind’s eye may like to think what it was like for Orphan Brigade in the caves below Osimo in Italy on their latest adventure – we’ll supply the soundtrack. We will hear some great new things from Courtney Marie Andrews, David Rawlings, Willie Watson and John Hiatt‘s daughter, Lily.

You will be pleased to know there will still be time to hear some familiar voices including The Dixie Chicks, Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash with the Carter Family.

We are back and live from five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Scotland FM. Join me if you can.

There were three of us. It was after a family dinner. We’d drifted through to the other room to have some coffee and watch the news. My wife, my mother and myself all half watching the TV and we all found ourselves absorbed by the memorial service from Paschendale.

Grandsons, great nieces and nephews all paid tribute to young men who’d been killed or gone missing 100 years ago. As my wife noted at one point, ‘it seems to move me more as I get older.’ Why is that?

Quietly the same truths confronted us in a much more understated way as we took our rented camper van round the North Coast 500 in early July. Like a cut-out and keep illustration of the themes behind Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s, ‘Sunset Song,’ no sooner had we pootled along the High St of any one of the many small towns and villages than we’d happen upon the war memorial. Often we’d be walking past and stop to read. How was it possible so many had gone from such a tiny place? How much harder to believe thy’d never returned.

What, I’m sure you ask, has any of this to bear upon country music? It’s the same question I found myself asking as I watched the choirs sing and the children laying wreaths on television. How insubstantial most of our choices seem when faced with people whose had only one option: to go over the top and be killed or refuse and be executed. It was the second fate which awaited the boy from the Mearns, Ewan Tavendale, in Grassick Gibbon’s novel. No comfort for any who waited on news.

It was then I thought of what was left behind: the turning of soil, the milking of cattle, a shop to run, a boat to sail. Nothing much greater than the routine rhythm of daily life, which, from only 80 miles away must have seemed further than the furthest place. A vision of heaven from the seventh circle of hell.

So we celebrate what we have, that which we would miss most and the tiny events which constitute civilisation as we know it. Every part of that is sacred.

Another Country may form part of that for you. I’m honoured if that’s the case. It’s not a matter of life or death but it is part of that delicate fabric we would all recognise had disappeared were we to be displaced and exiled in the way our forebears were 100 years ago. The absence of war gives weight and meaning to the prosaic.

We will be off air for the next three weeks allowing time for the endeavours of the Festival and Fringe to capture your artistic imagination. This Tuesday we will celebrate our last show in the present series by bringing you the best from Southern Fried 2017. Nick Lowe, Sam Outlaw, Chuck Prophet and Beth Nielson Chapman in concert. Oh how much we would miss all of those should our world be taken from us.

Join me from five past nine this Tuesday (repeated Friday) on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

I can’t really concentrate on this blog today. This is the second time I’ve started it. My mind is being drawn elsewhere. I hope you’ll understand as I’m trying to do this while also listening to a test pressing of a vinyl cut of my forthcoming solo record. It’s not multi tasking, it’s really just stupidity.

However there is a certain perfect symmetry too. The only reason I do any of this stuff is because of what I’ve heard coming from records…and in my case…vinyl records. In the old days it was simply a case of records arriving in the house and listening to all of them. They came in from my grandparents, my parents, my sister and her boyfriends and my visiting cousins. They ranged from Electric Lady Land to The Rolf Harris Show to Benny Goodman’s Countdown, and I listened and learned to love them all. Abbey Road appeared for a few brief months then disappeared as my cousin Pat returned to England and Thunderclap Newman got left behind by my cousin Brian; I never called to tell him but secretly treasured it. If someone left behind a great record there was very little motivation to return it.

One of the greatest joys for me is saying to someone, ‘sit down and listen to this.’ It’s probably one of the reasons I detest pop music being played in supermarket. I’m sorry, but God Only Knows was never meant to be played over Market St in Morrisons. So on Tuesday nights I love nothing more than a pile of records and a playlist to share some music with whoever happens to be listening. It really is a joy. I often feel I’m getting in the way just announcing what I’m playing…some night, I’m going to edit myself out all together.

For the next few weeks there will be no Another Country and no music in the evenings on BBC Radio Scotland. You can choose instead to hear the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival…go figure…it’s not my idea. So, for our last show for a month or so we’ll leave you with a bumper edition. Live in the studio we will be joined by Angaleena Presley warming up for her appearance at Perth’s excellent Southern Fried Festival.It’s the second time Angaleena has come to see us and she’ll be playing session versions of her songs from ‘Wrangled.’ She’ll be talking about women and country music which she’s singing about too as well as that final song with Guy Clark which appears on the record. We’ll also ask her about her fellow Pistol Annies, Ashley Munroe and Miranda Lambert.

In side two of tonight’s show we’ll catch up with our old friend but new recruit, Bill DeMain, the AC’s very own newly appointed Nashville Correpondent. There is so much news coming out of Music City we felt the need to have our own man on the ground. Bill is a songwriter, journalist and curator of ‘Walkin’ Nashville,’ so we feel we have the best man for the job.

In between all of that we’ll still play some new records and choice cuts. Look out for new records by The Americans, William The Conqueror, Heather Lynn Horton and John Murry. There will be much to love from the past too including records by The Carter Family and Clint Black. Join us live this Tuesday (repeated this Friday) on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

In a recent (excellent) interview in American Songwriter, Andrew Combs opined how much he never wanted to rewrite the same song. Having released 3 albums it is always his intention to keep moving forward.

Since releasing his second album, ‘All These Dreams’ Andrew has been played regularly on Another Country and he’s making his 4th visit to see us in as many years. His first was an outrider with Caitlin Rose on a session a few years back.

One beautiful thing which happens with Andrew’s songs as often as it happens with the best….Randy Newman, Harland Howard, Richard Rogers, Joni Mitchell…is the beautiful melodic shifts and patterns which still occur over, what my pal, ‘The Swan’ calls the usual chords. Harlan himself declared the secret to be ‘three chords and the truth’ and for that we must be grateful. Why is it however that these three chords can seem valid and simplistic in the wrong hands and wholly beautiful, moving and of God-like perfection with the right custodian? I have no idea, but I do know Andrew Combs to be in the latter camp. He makes these old changes sing.

Live and surrounded by his good musical companions he’s great too. At last year’s C2C he was the surprise opener to the second night and he won over many friends despite his legitimate concerns that he ‘wasn’t really very country.’ Of course, that tag is one which we often like as it usually means they are country enough to get us interested but not locked into the brainmash that is bro’ country. Andrew could not be further from that bold tradition if he tried. I love how much how much he follows where the song wants to go.

You can all of that for yourself as Andrew and his tour combo perform a session they recorded for us on their travels back in May. You’ll also hear how Andrew reminds me of so many of my favourite songwriters not least Canada’s Gordon Lightfoot…and how it seems it’s me and Andrew’s Dad who keep on about this. There’s much more too but you’ll need to tune in to hear all of that.

We’ll also have an interesting sequence inspired and including the late Johnny Cash which includes a great instrumental by the great Martin Belmont. Look out too for new music from Beth Nielson Chapman, Joan Osborne, Slaid Cleave and David Ramirez too.

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

There was no blog last week. I took off at the last minute on a sojourn around the north coast of Scotland accompanied only by my wife and our dog, Alf. It was one of the most wonderful weeks of my life and I kinda forgot to pack music so we often travelled in silence in the cathedral of the highlands. I have no regrets and it felt brilliant to put everything on hold for 5 days and step out of the everyday into a a slower and certainly more scenic pace.

I can’t say no one has told me, as they most certainly have, but perhaps I’d never listened carefully enough to how beautiful Scotland really is. I’ve often questioned how much travel broadens the mind – especially when you encounter certain individuals who test the theory to the limits – but now I’m certain the only journeys (spiritual, mental and physical) we need to make are much closer than we imagine.

Within a few hundred miles of where I live in Glasgow is all the beauty of the world in such breathtaking variety it would be impossible to experience it all in one lifetime. Sometimes, it seems, heaven is a little closer than you think.

On this week’s AC we welcome the lovely Holly MacVe who found she didn’t have to travel far at all to find her muse or fulfil her true destiny. You can hear how singing in her local cafe in Brighton brought Holly to the attention of her dream label and the best home she could ever hope for her music.

Holly’s music has the empty purity of Kentucky bluegrass and contains the heartbreak and longing of all the country music you can remember with the added salt of something unique. Produced  close to home by Paul Gregory of her fellow label mates, Lanterns On the Lake, her debut album, ‘Golden Eagle’ is truly high and lonesome. I defy you not to fall in love.

This Tuesday you can judge for yourself as you can hear tracks from Holly and hear her in conversation with me. It’s a fascinating story of a young talent who may well become one of your new favourite artists.

Elsewhere we shall spin new records by Micah P Hinson, Danny and The Champions of The World and (finally) a new album from John Murry. Stay tuned for significant reminders of the greatness of The Cowboy Junkies, Slim Whitman and Hank Williams and some new names including Suzanne Santo, Angelo De Augustine and someone coming to Scotland very soon, Hannah Aldridge.

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