It was red dirt track and our four by four was bouncing along nicely. From the rear-mirror swung the rosary beads and on the passenger side of the windscreen were the stickers of his favourite football team. The radio was playing some of his favourite songs. As the dust came up from the wheels and the truck made its way back to the main drive my friend, Stephen, pointed to our driver, Francis. ‘There are three things he loves, Ricky: The Catholic Church, his football team and……country music.’

Sounds like Tennessee or Texas? Wrong. It was Kazungula near Livingstone, Zambia just a few days ago. The driver was Francis the local organiser of the charity I was visiting. That whole story is for another time but, needless to say, Francis and I got locked into talking country for the next bumpy part of the journey. Later on in the week I’d come back after a long day visiting projects to see a fuzzy TV broadcasting the presidential inauguration from Washington DC. I wondered what my friend, Francis would make of the only name act that seemed to turn up for the event. Like may of the AC audience and production staff I can’t say I imagined Francis staying up beyond his bedtime to see a few songs by Toby Keith. It seems however Toby was one of the few to honour the new incumbent  on Pennsylvania Avenue. If The Donald wants to have an argument about numbers relating to this one then I think I can recap it fairly concisely:

Number of country acts you’d want to hear on any given night on the AC to play at inauguration: O.

Number of country acts not touching event with a barge pole: pick a number starting from 1000.

So this coming Tuesday you will hear a variety of artists, old and new, who were busy watching tv or shampooing their chickens last Thursday evening. You’ll hear some vintage Bob Wills on vinyl and something really great from Hank Williams. There will also be some new things from Brent Cobb, Holly Macve and Courtney Marie Andrews. Much of this is by way of celebrating the visit of many of the artists to Celtic Connections this month. Don’t forget that this week brings two AC’s as we will be bringing you our live show from the CCA in Glasgow as simulcast with BBC Radio 2 on Thursday evening. If you are not able to make the even you’ll be able to sit in the comfort of your own home or car and hear Margo Price, Lewis & Leigh and Tift Merritt perform songs live from the very heart of the festival.

I think Francis would have enjoyed all this much more than any inauguration ball, don’t you? When I asked him who his all time favourite artist was there was a simple answer: Don Williams. Sometimes you just have to opt for the right Don!

We’ll play a bit of that Gentle Giant this Tuesday on Another Country too.

Join me from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland FM on Tuesday. On Thursday we’ll be live on BBC Radio 2 and Radio Scotland from 7.

It’s ten years since I first set foot in Music City. My first time there was a beautiful baptism by immersion of (in no particular order) the south, the songwriting world and country music. I’m a fan of the USA. I enjoy being there immensely and I love experiencing new cities and new states …but Nashville…oh I could never live in LA or New York but I think I could get on fine in Nashville.

My publisher had set me up on writing dates for the best part of nearly two weeks and it often felt like house viewing; within five minutes you know you’ll never move in. Similarly with the writing sessions – you take a look at your fellow writer and your heart lifts – or on one or two occasions on that first visit – it hits the floor. I met some amazing people and I mostly enjoyed the ride with all songwriters having a great ability to tell a story or two. It was on this trip or the one a few months later where I first encountered Darrell Brown.

Darrell lived in a beautiful house out in West Nashville and we spent a great day together (including an introduction to the southern concept of macaroni cheese as a side dish.) It was Darrell, perhaps more than anyone, that confirmed what I had knew already: a good song is a good song and it doesn’t really matter what genre it’s in. We never finished the song – probably because we enjoyed each other’s company a little too much and by the end of my visit he’d called a friend and got me on the guest list for a sold out show at The Ryman by Patty Griffin. I have a lot to thank him for. On my next visit to Nashville and to Darrell I walked past his car in the garage and couldn’t help notice an oversized keyboard filling most of the back seat. ‘Were you doing a gig, Darrell?’

‘Oh yes,’ he smiled back. Turned out he’d been playing a round at The Bluebird the previous evening. I pushed him a little harder for details. How had it been, did he get nervous doing these things with these other ace writers? Turns out he did but…he looked at me knowingly…..’I had a ringer. LeAnn Rimes.’ It turned out LeAnn had turned up and sung with him on the songs he’d written for and with her. Now that is a Bluebird Night we’d all have loved to have seen.

Cut to 9 years later and Darrell Brown is sipping coffee with me at Pacific Quay as we wait on our guest to complete her preparations. Darrell is now on the promotional trail with the same LeAnn   – still as songwriter collaborator, but now also as producer and manager. The last 9 years has been an interesting journey for both of us and we spend a little bit of time catching up.

It turns out that songwriting had brought such a strong bond between Darrell and LeAnn that he’d become the person she relied on to guide her career. So on this week’s Another Country we bring you the day I met Darrell again and he brought along his ‘ringer’.. the amazing double Grammy, CMA, AMC award winning Miss LeAnn Rimes. In a frank conversation about family, performing, her remarkable 20 year career and her relationship with my pal Darrell. Oh yes…and she’s singing exclusively for us too. Join us if you can this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland.

There’s a little village near Oxford where I once spent a happy few months. On Monday there I found myself nearby and, with an open day in front of me in which my only goal was to get home to Glasgow, I found myself driving away from the motorway following old signs on B roads till I turned into the village again. Village is a slight overstatement. The hamlet in question was Shipton On Cherwell which, as far as I can make out boasts a Church and a post box. The nearest pub is a few miles away…more on that anon.

I had driven past this little village once in the last twenty five years but I had never returned to the house where I’d stayed. It’s a beautiful country manor overlooking rolling hills and fields adjacent to that churchyard boasting a well stocked pond and, most significantly, a bespoke 24 track recording facility.

In an attempt to get as far away from our record label as we could manage we all decamped to this house in the early summer of 1992 where we continued on the tricky task of completing (what may well have become) our final record together. The mood was set early; on the first evening one of our crew found a nest of Starling chicks abandoned in the garden and Lorraine (my wife) decided it was our duty to adopt them. When she returned to Glasgow for anti-natal check ups a few days later she left me in charge of feeding and early flying lessons! They lived in the games room and it was my job to go in and feed them every morning with cat food……you can probably tell that the rural idyll was beginning to make a stronger impression than the music.

Of course I was never really going to be in a bad mood. I’d decided to drive my 27 year old car down and the very fact of it making the journey made all seem well with the world. The Manor studio had been the home of Richard Branson. Above the stairwell was a giant mural of Mike Oldfield whose album, Tubular Bells, had been recorded there and had made the young Mr Branson the fortune he was set to spend on interesting projects like the studio where we now were based. It was the summer of a heatwave and none of us really noticed how dilapidated the house was until the inevitable thunderstorm sent rain running through the leaky roof during one of these short summer nights.

There were so many magical times I could fill all this space with stories but as my car nudged along those country lanes yesterday it was one car journey that I remembered. Our band had become friendly with the locals in the pub in the next village. Transport was always an issue as the producer and myself were the only two folks with cars. One night we were all alerted to the sound of a polite parp parp outside the door of the studio as a 1920s vintage car (think Toad of Toad Hall here) pulled up carrying two of our number home from their watering hole. Sitting outside in the January drizzle remembering these sunlit evenings of younger selves and so many changes was a sobering moment. You can’t go home again…but for a minute there outside The Manor, where nothing seemed to have changed, I was back.

Memory of course is set to music. In time the music we made there no longer links me to the place but being there or near there reminded me to acknowledge…on a dull January day….the happiness that came with a particular time.

It’s impossible to create nostalgia but I hope, at the start of a new year, we may be playing you something which might form part of a longer memory. What was I doing in January 2017…and what was I listening to? I hope we might help youth answer that question a few years hence. If you want to make a start we can help supply a possible soundtrack.

This week I hope we’ll create some magical places for you as we bring you new recordings from Holly Macve, Courtney Marie Andrews, Aaron Lee Tasman and Rhiannon Giddens.

We’ll have some lovely old memories from Johnny Horton, Conway Twitty and, of course, Merle Haggard. We’ll talk little about Mac Wiseman and share something new and something old from him and we’ll pay our respects to a much overlooked Irish Americana troubadour, the late Bap Kennedy. So much and only two hours to get it all in. We’re live this Tuesday from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland. Join me if you can.

Why is it people (men) love the list? Why are we drawn to keep looking? The listers like revealing their lists slowly day by excruciating day seemingly blissfully unaware that no one gives damned toot about any of it. I’ve already seen two music lists in the short time I’ve been awake today. Music right now, in my opinion, mainly needs celebrated and played……. loud.

I say this as over these next two festive Tuesdays we will attempt to play you lots of the songs we’ve been banging on about all year. The songs we return to again and again. The ones we play for weeks on end and the ones which we take home and play to our pals.

We’ve had an amazing year. We’ve met some wonderful guests who have come in to see us in our studios in Glasgow or who we’ve met on our travels. We feel honoured to have welcomed Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Carrie Underwood, Sam Outlaw and Brandy Clark to town. We’ve hooked up with Graham Nash in London, Connie Smith and The Bradley Family in Nashville and we’ve talked to Billy Bragg and Joe Henry about the best rail journey anyone could ever hope to make. We’ve been wowed by some killer performances in our studios and at our live events. We’ve been side of stage at Country to Country and The UK Americanas, we’ve been silent over fish and chips at The Bluebird, talkative with Buddy Miller in his own home studio and been dumb struck with awe at Sturgill Simpson on Sauchiehall Street. We’ve seen Cale Tyson play a Veteran’s club in Music City and we’ve chatted backstage at the Opry to WSM legend Eddie Stubbs. In the words of one of our favourite artists, Eric Church it’s been a record year.

So over the next two Tuesdays we will try to celebrate the music that comes with that. It won’t be the songs you’ll find on these end of year lists – it will be the songs we’ve loved enough to play and play again. This particular Tuesday we will also play you some Christmas Country Vinyl as a perfect backdrop to that wrapping and last minute card writing you’re bound to be doing. It all starts at five past nine.

I will be wishing you a very happy Christmas on Christmas Day when I will be hosting two hours of conversation and Christmas music with my good friend, Cathy MacDonald. Join us from 8 a.m. and you can find all of these radio shows on  BBC Radio Scotland.

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.