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.

Memory is prismatic. It often amazes me how much all of us will misremember or partially recall an event and the outsider might well have to take an average of the collective narrative to capture a true picture of what really happened. None of this is news to m’learned friends who will make considerable capital from such mists of time.

I love when people tell me they saw me play at a gig I know I didn’t set foot in, or say they saw me a few years before my band existed. It’s pointless correcting them; it’s their story and nothing I can say will change it. I recently read a blog which insisted something happened to me onstage which I know for certain never happened or would ever happen. My good friend Simon Mayo’s first ‘confessions’ book had a story in which someone insisted they’d thrown up (unintentionally) over my shows during a gig. I never had the heart to correct it but I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of thing you don’t forget.

Often too something happens in the early days of a band’s career which is spun into a living myth. If all the people in Dublin who said they’d been at our debut gig there had actually been there I’m pretty sure we’d have had a bit more of the box office to spend on the way home. Instead it was the variation on Michael Marra gag, ‘Do you want onions with your concert appearance fee?’

This Tuesday we all get the chance to create a new myth with the added complication that this week’s debutantes have been recorded and put on film for posterity. We’re proud to bring you a new band from Edinburgh as part of BBC introducing. We’ve already played you some of Monticule‘s records and on this week’s Another Country you can hear what happened when they are let loose in AC towers and we let the tapes roll. I have a strong feeling you will love the sound of a band who have taken all of their influences (and a few off their folks’) and cooked them into a great rock/soul/country blues stew. Once you’ve got them into that swampy bracket of White Stripes/Black Keys/Tony Joe White you’ll be pleasantly surprised to realise that their influences spread so much further. The cover they have chosen to perform comes from one of Americana and Folk’s finest albums of the last 10 years, ‘Anais Mitchell‘s Hadestown.’ Pay close attention as you may well want to be having the, ‘Do you remember Monticule when they did their first radio session?’ chat a few years down the line.

On this Tuesday’s show we’ll also bring you some new records by Jess Morgan, Kris Dane and Brandy Clark. We’ll hear what The Jayhawks are up to and remind ourselves how wonderful it all was when Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris first decided to make that Trio album together. If you remember that as brilliant album of harmony singing then your memory is working just fine.

Join me this Tuesday for all of this and more from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

A little memory came calling last week. A friend had tweeted some photographs of the building of the Tay Road Bridge on the 50th anniversary of the bridge opening and suddenly I was back there. Growing up in the sixties in Dundee it was impossible to ignore such a wonderful development. You only needed to look out almost any south facing window – and there were plenty of those – and you’d see the landscape changing and as well as something strange, new and wonderful being created right in the middle of one of the widest stretches between Angus and Fife. At night the workers would carry keep on building and you’d see their lights shining out across the estuary and hear the deep thud as the pillars were sunk into the bed of the river.

On the day it was to open we must have been given the day off school or the schools were still to return. Either way we went down to the new precincts built around the entrance of the bridge to see the Queen Mother reveal the plaque and see the first official cars cross through the tolls. My sister asked the local TV reporter for his autograph and we all generally agreed it was the most exciting thing to have happened to us.

Then last week my old pal, Breeks from Goucho’s Record Shop put up a photograph on Facebook of the original shop in Perth Road and again I was straight back there. By now I was a student, short of money but keener than ever to acquire a decent record collection. Groucho’s provided the sole means to achieve that mission. Going in on a Saturday afternoon was like nothing that ever happens to me these days. Second hand albums were there sure, but also there were magazines – I once got Zig Zag and there were many back issues of the Furry Freak Brothers  – badges were being made with cool slogans and the names of your favourite new punk bands…and punk rock singles adorned the walls. You could buy the newest ones and also catch up with the ones you’d missed, sometimes 12” versions. The there was the counter. It was here the 17 year old eyes of your author turned circles. All manner of weird and wonderful hippy paraphernalia: joss sticks, bongs, pipes and objets d’art for which this brethren boy’s imagination could find no possible reason to acquire. And yet that smell and the otherness of that small space was an intoxicating fun of rock, colour and mystery. And who were these bands? Sure there were some I’d heard of and desperately wanted but the others…Commander Cody…The New Riders of The Purple Sage? Whoever they were and whatever they were about they all seemed to belong in this magical west end world.

It was years later when the good Breeks was in hospital that we played a track by one of these acts for him on the AC to cheer him up. After that I made a little note to myself to explore the roots of cosmic country a little more some night. But somehow, like many noble plans, it never really happened.

So this week I have another excuse and it’s been spurred by a couple of newer artists who could well lay claim to that title too. Sturgill Simpson is leading the way with his own fusion of country, rock,blues, soul and  a new cosmic contender, Morgan Delt from L.A. They have both inherited a little of the space cowboy tag from the great tradition that goes back to Gram Parsons, Gene Clark and the man who comes along with a new album very soon, David Crosby. So allow us to take you on a little orbit or two this Tuesday.

We will also play you Willie Nelson paying tribute to Ray Price, more good things from Julia Jacklin, White Denim and hear why lots of people are loving Lori Mckenna’s new album. Did I mention we have a Merle Moment and Luke The Drifter on vinyl?

If I’ve missed anything out you can listen along and check for yourself. It all starts at five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM this Tuesday evening.

‘The play is memory. Being a memory play it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music (that explains the fiddle in the wings).’ So explains narrator, Tom Winfield, in his monologue at the beginning of Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ We went through, as a family, to see it at The Festival last night and I was caught up again in that great story of a writer trying to make sense of his past and realising that, despite his best efforts, he can neither return or completely leave the memory behind. Thirty Five years on from when I first encountered the play I was moved to tears last night of the depiction of the Laura, based on Williams own younger sister, too frightened of life to fully engage; lost in her own private world and the fragility of her glass animals.

A wise, good friend of mine told me that our deepest spiritual experiences happen within our childhood. Quite a discomfiting thought for some people on the life long soul search. It’s no surprise therefore that all writers return to childhood in some way to make sense of their own lives. This week’s very special Another Country celebrates all of that in a unique two hour celebration of a very real new talent.

Sturgill Simpson’s current album, ‘A Sailor’s Guide to Earth’ is a beautiful long love letter to his young son. In all that imagining of a young life however there is inevitably a sense in which the artist uses his own memories and instincts to project his hopes and fears for his young lad:

Oh, and everything is not what it seems
This life is but a dream
Shatter illusions that hold your spirit down
Open up your heart and you’ll find love all around
Breathing and moving are healing
And soothing away
All the pain in life holding you down

(Breakers Roar)

What makes Sturgill so interesting to us that his career is on one level a classic country story and on another a complete counterpoint to everything held true by Music Row. Despite now being on a major record label, all of Sturgill’s career has been based around his own musical instincts. Rejecting the advice of the moguls on Nashville’s 16th Avenue he brought out two of his own albums within a year and within a very short time was touring to such a successful level that the music business was struggling to keep up.

We were lucky to catch on to what Sturgill was doing very early on and he recorded his first ever UK radio session with the AC. We’ve kept faith with him over these few short years and he’s been good enough to keep coming back to see us. Recently we recorded a fascinating conversation with him in the dressing room of his Glasgow ABC show. Reflecting on the birth of his son, his recent chart topping success and his short lived but deep friendship with the late Merle Haggard he gave us a brilliant insight into his current thinking.

For me it was real joy seeing the development of such a great talent and knowing our instincts hadn’t been wrong. It was also life-affirming to know that people can become so successful and still be as natural, warm, engaging and funny as the day you first met them.

Later that evening as Sturgill was in the middle of one of the gigs of the year in that same venue my producer Richard Murdoch turned to me and said, ‘I think I have a brilliant idea.’ He did and it was.

On this Tuesday’s Another Country you can hear that idea in full. Three years worth of conversations with Sturgill Simpson and all the songs he’s recorded in session for us (solo and with his band) in that short time. In between we celebrate the music that inspired this Kentucky troubadour and the music he’s still listening to. It will be a remarkable two hours all based around the talent of a remarkable artist. Join me if you can this Tuesday from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

It’s the perfect image. A train in the night. It will remind you of a loved one gone far away – maybe off to war – and tease with you the possibility of taking off. The duality is perfect…the train that took your baby away is the train that might bring him/her back another day.

When it’s dark and quiet I often hear the click clack of the train from my garden or through the park when I’m on a late night stroll with the dog. It never really sounds romantic to me cause I know it’s only going round a greater Glasgow circle and the reality is that no one is really getting very far. In the old days I used to live quite near the main line to london and there was something (still is) fairly wistful about watching that long sleek sleeper slipping through the Glasgow suburbs knowing it took people to the big smoke. In the early days…and I’m not sure this will ever pass either….I could never sleep on the ‘sleeper’ as I was always too excited at the very idea of speeding through the night on a train.

I’d heard stories of American trains and the romance that went with the railroad but have had very little experience of it. It wasn’t really until I went to Nashville some years ago that I got a real sense of the hypnotic draw of the sound of a train. The first time I stayed there the triple glazing and air con meant I got no sense of ever being near the track. Then one day, one a writing appointment in a house not far from my hotel, I heard it. Nashvilleans are so used to the freight trains going through the city and the soundtrack of their long, mournful horns that they don’t even flinch when they hear it echoing through the traffic. On a later visit I stayed very near the main freight junction downtown and I found myself drawn to going over to the side of the tracks and just watching and waiting as the trains went past. What I couldn’t fathom was my inability to wait around long enough to let one train pass. I’d been there a good 40 minutes and there was still no sign of the caboose.

Billy Bragg and Joe Henry have a new album coming out soon which celebrates the railroad. They have taken my fascination one step farther by getting on the trains, recording as they travelled. It’s a beautiful thing and we’ll be talking to them about the whole project. Meanwhile we thought we’d celebrate the Great American Railroad a little on this coming Tuesday with songs from Billy and Joe, George Jones, Roseanne Cash, Anna and Elizabeth and the man who once worked on the railroad himself, Sturgill Simpson.

We’ll also bring you some great new things from Steve Gunn, Mutual Benefit, The Stray Birds and Michael Nau. We’ll play you some lovely older things from Hank Williams, Emmylou Harris and by the man who came through Glasgow last week, Van Morrison.

We start at five past nine and you can find us on BBC Radio Scotland FM.

I’ve never really got over the idea that the summer holidays are endless. 7 weeks as a child made it quite possible to be a different person coming back to school than the one who’d run out of the gates at the end of June. I remember wanting to come back into the next year and be looking and sounding different. It rarely worked.

This morning I had a strong sense of those long July weeks when I spent a bit of time sorting out the path at the back of my house. Turning over some unwanted weeds I spied a couple of beautiful beetles and remembered again being the boy who, with his chums next door, collected all manner of insects, bees and assorted wildlife. Mornings would drift into afternoon as bees, wasps and all manner of myriapoda were buckled into makeshift dens, boxes and jars. It seemed to me that we rarely ventured home, though in truth, we never really went that far away either. I distinctly recall managing to return to the house fairly quickly when an insecure bee jar broke free and the newly liberated buzzers took revenge on their captor. It was all of this which went through my mind this morning pulling out the weeds and generally getting lost in my garden. I found myself thinking, ‘It’s summer, so this is where I’m really meant to be.’

It’s probably me stretching my holiday as long as possible. Returning from a warm place to a sunny Scotland is always the bonus we yearn for. But I am back and, as you may have seen on my Life in Ten Pics on the telly last week I’m delighted to be back in the studio to play you some music I’m loving at the moment.

Tonight we’ll pay tribute to this family:

For the full story of The Browns is better told by my radio hero, Eddie Stubbs who shares his memories of Bonnie Brown when her death in July was the subject of one of his great blog.https://www.facebook.com/eddiestubbsofficial/. We’ll play you some Browns from vinyl tonight.

We’ll also play you some great selections from one of our favourite record labels, Third Man Records. Not only do they record, master, manufacture and distribute the records from their Pie Town HQ in Nashville they’ve recently decided to play one of their records in space…….I know…more tonight featuring The Raconteurs, Margo Price and new signing Dwight Yoakam.

We’ll have some wonderful new records from Band of Horses, Miranda Lambert, Haley Bonar and Brent Cobb. Look out for some vintage Alan Jackson from his excellent boxed set compilation and, of course, this week’s Merle Moment.

We’ll be on from Five past Nine on Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland FM. Join me and send me a picture if you’re listening out of doors too.

On Saturday night I went to see Martin McDonagh’s The Lonesome West at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. Darkly funny it concerns the lives of two brothers who live in a state of permanent conflict in a remote village in the west of Ireland. The strange logic of their feuds only illustrates how isolated their lives have become. Violent,comic, bathetic and strangely life affirming I recommend the play to you as good a night out as you will find while Richmond Fontaine are not in town.

In some ways it provided the link between the two parts of my radio week. On Tuesday night I will welcome the aforementioned Fontaines in session and, inevitably, in conversation with the great Willie Vlautin. On Richmond Fontaine’s latest and final album an assortment of characters leave, get lost and try to pick up the pieces in and around Oregon and, no matter how tragic, we find ourselves drawn into the disappointment of each fragile life story.

He sold off the horses to some guy in Arizona
Whitey and me couldn’t get them back
Cause we were flat broke
I hated him for what he’d done to us
But I knew he was in a bad way
I heard he ended up in Douglas
Holed up in the Gadsden Hotel
And shot all that money away
He fell apart in his underwear in the lobby
Crying for his sister
Who hadn’t been alive in years

From Whitey and Me by Richmond Fontaine

Since Willie Vlautin’s characters entered my life a few years back I feel I approach each new song or novel partly with an expectation that all will not be well but also with a realisation that the full range of human expectations can be realised. Sure, they’re going to fail, but this is not Hollywood, it’s Winnemuca or Reno; it’s the Elko Lounge and we’re all just looking to survive.

By sheer coincidence my guest on my final Sunday Morning With of this season is Jean Vanier. One of the most remarkable people living in the world today and described by many as a ‘living saint.’ I’ve no doubt he would reject both of these charges because his entire life has been given over to making his own life more obscure and enabling the excluded to be seen as vital members of society. 50 years ago he founded a community near Paris in a little village called Trolly-Breuil where he decided he would live with two other men,  Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux who would leave the institution where they lived to share their lives with him. Together they began L’Arche.

However, despite his attempts at obscurity, the world has noticed. L’Ache now has 147 different communities based on that 1964 model working in 50 countries. His awards include the French Legion of Honour, Companion of the Order of Canada, the Rabbi Gunther Plaut Humanitarian Award 2001, and the International Paul VI Award. In November 2004, a CBC poll placed him number 12 in a list of Greatest Canadians. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Templeton Prize.

Last week I went over to meet Jean Vanier in that original L’Arche house to which he moved in 1964 and has never left. Now aged 87 he is as vibrant and engaged as ever. Sitting in his small study surrounded by work and whatever he’s been reading we talked about the Christianity that frames all that he does, his belief that we are all enriched the more we engage with and celebrate people of disability and the continued journey towards becoming human. It was one of the more remarkable conversations I’ve had the privilege of sharing and I hope you will listen in this Sunday Morning from 10 on BBC Radio Scotland.

Another Country goes out this Tuesday when Richmond Fontaine will be in session and I will be talking to Willie Vlautin about the current album, ‘You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To’ and re-listening to some great songs from his back catalogue.Join me from 9 p.m. on Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.