Day Thirty-One - Tentsmuir Sky

“Let me feel it, the weight of all the years gone by”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Tentsmuir Sky written by Roseanne Reid. I first heard this song (perhaps the newest one I’m looking at this month) when Scottish musician and songwriter Roseanne released it in February 2021. I loved it from the first listen and, particularly as Tentsmuir is very local to us (just over the river in Fife), I sent the Bandcamp link for the song to lots of friends and family (with a ‘Buy this now – it’s ace!’ kind of a message). Tentsmuir is a beautiful place and the song matches it perfectly. It is also on an EP that came a little later (Horticulture). And on that all I have to say is: Buy it now, it’s ace.

I first came across Roseanne sort of by accident (and not at Montrose Folk Club, that was the starting point for this project but I’ve moved a few miles south for this post). It was September 2017 and we were still living in Montrose but our daughter Heather and I came into Dundee for a poetry event at Abertay University and that’s where we heard Roseanne. There are few poetry events in Angus (one reason I organised some when we lived there) so generally you have to go a little further afield to the likes of Aberdeen, St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh to get wordy events. I went through a phase of going to a lot of poetry events (particularly to the St Andrews annual festival StAnza in the noughties, mainly because it wasn’t too far away by train) but by 2017 I had slowed down on that front. To be honest there are very few poetry events that I enjoy as I’m not one for the silent adoration of published poets (reminds me too much of quaker meetings in my youth perhaps) and I’m not 100% into slam culture either. I think that mostly I like poems and poets that fall between the two*. All of this meant I hadn’t been to many poetry events around this time and had well and truly got out of the habit. We had had some family stuff going on too, more life than poetry, but I suppose I thought it was time I made an effort so I persuaded the daughter to come with me into Dundee for this event in 2017. She was applying to study English so I said it would be good for her (like vegetables). She finishes her degree this summer.

The evening in question was a bit of weird night all round for me (I won’t go into all the details here – they are back on a rambly old blog post here if you’re interested) but the best part of it was hearing Roseanne’s voice and her music. I didn’t even know there was going to be music as part of the evening so that was a lovely surprise (I almost always prefer a poetry/music mix, certainly that’s what I always booked when I organised events). The second surprise of the night was that Roseanne was so good! I hadn’t heard of her at that point, knew nothing of her background or her place in the world of music, but her songs were just enchanting and her voice was an engaging mix of confidently smooth but also somehow really on edge (just where I like it). She played maybe six songs, talked about her wife a little and looked just awkward enough to be reassuring (this was much appreciated as I was sitting in the lighting box because the venue made me claustrophobic, pity the poor daughter!). I could see the skill in the poetry that came after (two marvellous and very successful women poets Rachel McCrum and Caroline Bird) but no matter how hard I try I am first and foremost a song and music fan so it was Roseanne’s set that connected with me that night. Someone who can rock a room to another place with just a guitar, a heart full of precious tunes and a voice that soothes and stirs – that, dear readers, is what does it for me. 

Somehow I missed Roseanne’s debut album (2019’s Trails) but I bought a copy recently and it’s gorgeous (there’s a pretty thorough review here). Steve Earle (who she met at his writing workshop in 2014) shows up singing on one track on the album and he is a big supporter of Roseanne’s work (his quote about her, “an outstanding songwriter”, is the first thing you see when you go to her website). We are Steve Earle fans in this house too (and saw him live in Aberdeen in 2009). Teddy Thompson produced Trails and Roseanne has toured with him already and is doing that again in 2022 (right now in fact, dates here). If you want her bio information the best place to get it is probably her own website (here) but I would suggest you listen to her music first. Let the songs tell you who she is. 

When I first heard today’s song Tentsmuir Sky I hadn’t listened to Roseanne’s music for a while. Like many people I sometimes get overloaded with music (so many albums, so many radio shows, another hot new artist on 6 Music every week, another totally classic album that we haven’t listened to for years, another song on a TV show that sends us off down another rabbit hole of another artist we don’t know). We love music but we can’t possibly keep up with it all and sometimes that almost turns it into a chore because we feel we should stay up to date with all our favourites (and others who could be favourites) but we just can’t. At the start of the first lockdown in 2020 I found that, unusually for me, I didn’t want to listen to a lot of music. I was working from home but when not doing that I tried to take myself to somewhere totally different in my head, I think, by listening to audiobooks (the longer, the better) and reading quite a lot (books about train journeys, books about elsewhere and other times).

Then in February 2021 I somehow came across this song Tentsmuir Sky (on social media I suppose). I had just finished last year’s Fun A Day Dundee project (a lot of writing and thinking about home) and was feeling pretty drained (not NHS worker level of drained, I should point out, more Romantic poet on a chaise longue kind of drained). The title jumped out at me because I’ve been to Tentsmuir various times but I’ve never seen it in a song title before (it’s a forest, with amazing beaches, big enough to get lost in and just a few miles away). I also wrote about it on this blog recently (tales of a long walk with a friend and seeing cows on the beach). There are a lot of beautiful places in this local area (so many!) but it is certainly up there with the best (even if it is in Fife**).

Kinshaldy Beach at Tentsmuir, June 2021

Straightway I went to Bandcamp and listened – and the song is just perfect so I’m not going to say any more about it (but Roseanne will, see below). What I will say is that this is the last post of this series and I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip and the songs. I hope if you have liked the music that you will support as many of the artists as you can in any way you can. I am not the main earner in our household (thank god, we’d starve for sure) but the paid work I do currently involves supporting others in a few different ways (and then a lot of what I earn goes out the same way). I just think we have to support each other as much as we possibly can. 

And here’s Roseanne.

When did you write this song?

I wrote ‘Tentsmuir Sky’ in May 2020. The world was in the grips of Covid and lockdowns, and I was desperate to write new material while I couldn’t do anything else. 

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the writing of this song?

I wrote the song about Tentsmuir forest in Fife. It is somewhere my wife and I spent a lot of time while the world was changing, and it offered us a sort of sanctuary, an escape. When we went exploring there, we didn’t use our phones, didn’t expose ourselves to the relentless news and worrying updates from around the world. All we had was each other, the magic of the forest and a beautiful stillness around us.

I wrote the song at home. It actually started as a completely different idea in terms of the narrative, but the original first verse was scrapped and I wrote this version in full in a couple of days. 

Is it a song you particularly like?

I have nothing but fond memories of writing this song. It encapsulates one of the saving graces of our time during lockdown. During what was a tumultuous and isolating period of time, I feel hope when I listen back to this song now. On a personal level, the writing of any new songs last year felt defiant – a sort of expression of faith while we were all walking through the dark.

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of?

The song I’ve written that I’m most proud of is ‘I Love Her So’. Lyrically, it’s actually not the most adventurous I’ve been, but it’s honest and true and I value that just as much. The reasons I’m most proud of it have changed over the years actually – sometimes it catches me by surprise with how much courage it takes to get up on stage by myself and sing openly and obviously about my love for another woman. It was the first song I wrote for my wife and my feelings for her have only grown since I wrote this. So while it isn’t my most technically impressive song – it moves people. Other people can relate to this one and I’m immensely proud of that. 

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written?

There’s lots of songs I wish I’d written, but ‘Blues Run The Game’ by Jackson C. Frank is right up there. Obviously his performance is such a big part of its magic, but lyrically it’s just devastating. I can’t imagine a more perfect line than “Living is a gamble baby, loving’s much the same”. I think you understand and appreciate a line like that the older you get and the more of life you experience.

Thanks so much to Roseanne for answering questions about Tentsmuir Sky and songwriting. As was mentioned on Day 26, this another song that connects so well to the place being written about. What a fantastic set of songs this has been!

And that’s it from me for this year’s Fun A Day Dundee. These 31 posts will stay up for you to read whenever you like and if you like them please share them (and the links to the musicians and songs) and make sure to enjoy all this lovely music. Thanks again for reading.

*I was interested to hear the most recent winner of the T.S.Eliot prize, Joelle Taylor, say something in a similar vein in this radio interview  (about 9 minutes in). The presenter asked about “the tension between spoken and written” poetry and Joelle said: “I think it’s where art lies, I think it’s where beauty lies, where uprising lies, where possibility lies, and it’s our job to balance in this tension and to explore it and to excavate it as much as possible.”

**A Michael Marra-inspired bit of gentle local rivalry there – see here (p.s. Methil is in Fife). My post on a Michael Marra song was back on Day 12.

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).

Day Thirty - Lay My Heart

 

“Build a fire, watch it burn”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Lay My Heart written by Rachel Sermanni. This song was released in 2017 (hear it and buy it here) but I first heard it last year (in January 2021) when it was used for the final part of the online Celtic Connections music festival. I’ve mentioned this festival a few times this month already – it’s annual, in Glasgow, and something like the Scottish mothership for players and fans of folk, acoustic and all associated music. Last year Lay My Heart was the soundtrack to a montage that looked back at the festival, all of which had been online. It was a very emotional segment as people all over the world remembered what we had shared, watched and listened to over the previous few weeks. You can still see that montage below (and spot a few of the songwriters from my choices this month in there too). Lay My Heart was a perfect choice for that final broadcast (full details of players on the song on the Bandcamp page too). I listened to the song on repeat for days after and it became another new favourite song. You can have a lot of favourite songs – I have hundreds, if not thousands, by this point. How on earth do we fit them all in our heads, I sometimes wonder?

In fact, permit me a folk club-related aside here. In 2006 I saw a singer-songwriter called Kieran Halpin* at Montrose Folk Club. I can’t say he was one of my favourites but something he said stuck in my mind. He talked about how loving children is like having a jacket that just keeps getting more pockets. You think you have no more love to give but then, lo!, when a child arrives another pocket (full of love) appears like magic. I think someone else, another songwriter, had said this to him but I can’t remember who. We have one child so I haven’t personally tested this theory but certainly it does work for songs. Sometimes I think I don’t have room in my mind/ears/heart for more music and then, lo!, another pocket of space appears! So it was with today’s song.

There isn’t a link to my Montrose Folk Club visits for Lay My Heart (it seems I am all out of those links). I don’t think Rachel Sermanni has played there, in fact I don’t know if she plays folk clubs at all particularly. She is a Scottish singer-songwriter, a musician, and somewhere online I read “The music of Folk-Noir Balladeer, Rachel Sermanni, has the flesh of Folk but, if you were to cut the skin, you’d find it pumped with contemporary, genre blended blood” (I thought I’d read it on her website but can’t see it there now). It is common to use the word ‘artist’ for musicians and for Rachel this word seems exactly right. She’s been putting out music for about a decade and it is textured, careful, interesting, dreamy. I’ve only seen her perform live once but I have friends who are big fans and who have pretty much followed her around the country applauding. One of those friends has always looked at me a bit confused when they’ve suggested I join them on one of these trips and I’ve said no for one reason or another (distance, family responsibilities, nervous dog that can’t be left alone, just general weariness). I think their confusion went along the lines of ‘but this is the most beautiful music, are you mad, why don’t you want to come?’ And now I’ve listened to her songs I can see their point (Breathe Easy on her first album Under Mountains is another lovely one, likewise Old Ladies Lament, Banks Are Broken and This Love on Tied to the Moon and that’s just my favourites so far). 

The time I did see her live was as part of the launch show for Celtic Connections 2017 (I mentioned this event already back here). The tickets were a 50^th birthday present (for me) and all we knew was that Laura Marling was headlining (and all 3 of us in the family love her albums). There were some amazing surprises though because other artists on the bill were Rachel Sermanni and Adam Holmes, Cara Dillon, Aziza Brahim, Declan O’Rourke and, one of my absolute faves, the Karine Polwart Trio (and this was the event where KP premiered I Burn But I Am Not Consumed – so, so good). It was a great night. Well worth getting old for.

I know the pandemic has been (and continues to be) super tough on people who rely on live events for their income and so I have done my best to support all my favourite artists by buying albums (as directly from them as possible), buying tickets to online shows, donating what I can when there’s a donate option for online festivals and so on. Once it was announced in late 2020 that 2021’s Celtic Connections would all be online we bought a pass and got ready for some great music (at home) last January. We’ve been to the in-person Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow a few times and we’ve always loved it but, what with cost and overnight stays, January weather and all that, when we do go there we get to, at most, a couple of shows. This time we would binge!

And I’d have to say I found last January’s Celtic Connections festival really special. I know online events are generally talked about as less than ‘the real thing’ (and many people have been extremely glad that at least some of this year’s Celtic Connections have been in-person live events) but online events can have their own kind of joy (for some of the audience anyway). I’ve attended lots of events online in the past 2 years that I wouldn’t have managed to get to in-person (some music events but also book festivals, poetry festivals, talks, conferences). There can be all kinds of restrictions to getting to things elsewhere and everyone has their own versions of what’s difficult or just downright impossible. For me I’m still quite (specifically) claustrophobic (after pretty severe anxiety issues in my younger years) so certain venues just feel out of bounds or at least so uncomfortable that I won’t enjoy the event if I go (I can’t relax without a back door exit, make of that what you will). Also I think attending online can make some audiences a little more open to trying new things. Certainly we watched gigs last January that I wouldn’t have bought in-Glasgow tickets for (though I might in future). I am firmly in the #KeepFestivalsHybrid camp.

Last year we enjoyed lots of Celtic Connections events from our sitting room but one of my favourites was The Roaming Roots Revue. Rachel Sermanni was part of it and I saw in that show how she can build an atmosphere and dominate a mood (you can still hear her brilliant version of an Elbow track in that show here). Curated by Roddy Hart and the Lonesome Fire, the Revue is a regular feature of the festival but this was the first one I’d seen (sadly it was one of the cancelled shows this year). Last year’s Revue was brilliant – a great mix of songs and some lovely surprises**. It was only a month or so before that I had been introduced to Roddy Hart’s radio show (Tues nights, BBC Radio Scotland, 10-12 – apologies that it took me so long to find it). I first listened when Kim Edgar (see Day 28) was a guest on their ‘Me In 3’ segment and I fell for the show straightaway. It has interesting music choices and is a really sumptuous, mostly chilled listen. 

Anyway, back to today’s song. At the end of the weeks of amazing music last January we watched the closing event, a little sad that it was all over and that our sitting room would go back to being just a room, instead of a window and an ear to the rhythms of the rest of the world. The closing event was really moving and the montage of moments from the previous few weeks (with Rachel’s beautiful, hypnotic song accompanying them) was a lovely way to say goodbye. Straight after I went and bought Lay My Heart on Bandcamp and have listened to it over the year. I suggest you buy a copy too because (a) it’s amazing and (b) half of all proceeds will go to The BIG Project, a charity dedicated to empowering children and young people to build a BIG future, whatever their background or circumstances.

Just recently I also bought Rachel’s album, 2019’s So It Turns (and it is literally all good). Rachel has a really distinctive voice and it’s such thoughtful music. There is a great range to her songwriting (though I fear she might not often pass my father-out-law’s ’appy songs test – see Day 1). But Lay My Heart is a great place to start if you don’t know her work. In times of trouble (with pandemic fatigue of one sort or another) this song certainly opened a door for me last year, maybe even a floodgate. And since then we’ve taken on another year of all this weight and here we are now, not knowing what will come next, how much lighter or heavier it might get. We all have our ways of coping and for me it’s memories and photos, songs and sights, scribbling and stories. Pockets of peace.

It’s the last day (and the last song) here tomorrow and we’re going to be looking up high to the skies. See you then!

*I went to see what Kieran was up to these days and found that he died in October 2020. You can read about him here. The song about pockets is called The Bigger Picture and is on his 2005 album A Box of Words and Tunes.

**In case you’re interested I found this online piece which ends by summing up the 2021 Roaming Roots Revue: ‘The apt theme for the concert was hope and inspiration, and Roddy charged his guests to select a song which reflected this. Lau, joined by Rachel Sermanni, opted for Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World and the Brewis brothers of Field Music covered Money’s Too Tight to Mention. Ricky Ross contributed a great rendition of There’s Gold in Them Hills before the ensemble gave us a rocking version of The Traveling Wilburys’ End of the Line. Everybody Has Got To Live by Arthur Lee was the soulful contribution from Dumfries singer songwriter Beldina Odenyo Onassis, while Strathspey’s own Rachel Sermanni selected Elbow’s One Day Like This. Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil joined in with a superb rendition of Machines. The set proved to be a thoroughly entertaining and uplifting event.’

It was very sad to hear that Beldina, mentioned in the extract above and who used the name Heir of the Cursed, died a few months ago.

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).

Day Twenty-Nine - Golden Leaves

“Just like that bird on a wire 
          I watch the flock soar overhead”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Golden Leaves written by Rhona Macfarlane (hear it here). This song is on Rhona’s 2017 EP The Tide and this is definitely one I heard at Montrose Folk Club. In fact I’d heard Rhona sing a fair bit in Montrose even before that song. But how, you ask, and why?

The answer is that Rhona grew up in Montrose in Angus and went to the same local secondary school as our daughter Heather (Montrose Academy, the wee town only has one high school). Rhona is a few years older but for Heather’s first few years at the Academy whenever we went to any kind of school concert Rhona would be part of the show too. School concerts are always something of a box of chocolates (will anyone tune their violin? Will you have to sit next to the most annoying parent in the room? Are you the most annoying parent in the room? Why isn’t your child somewhere you can see them? And so on…) but Rhona’s appearances were always one of the highlights. She played violin, she sang, she played piano – once she even played a mighty solo Beethoven piece (I least that’s what I remember). The piano was behind the audience so there was just this mysterious presence, filling the school hall with huge, serious sound. 

It was a great school in some ways but from the experience of many I knew it didn’t have strong expressive arts departments (not in our era anyway, see me afterwards for more details). Despite this, there were a few young people who just got on with it and were fabulous anyway and Rhona was definitely one of those. She played at school, in youth orchestras (I think) and I heard her at the local Montrose Musical Festival too (we talked about MoFest back here). One year at MoFest she played and sang a Nina Simone song (was it Feeling Good? I think it might have been …) on the big stage on Montrose High Street – something of a daring choice when there’s a lot of AC/DC* in the air (and covering Nina at any time is a challenge, pretty special shoes to try to fill). She pulled it off brilliantly and I remember it as a really special moment in the midst of all the commotion of a busy day out. Rhona went on to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to study music (violin, so I’ve read) but as you’ll see in her answers below, she had a year between school and Glasgow and that’s when she wrote today’s song. I heard her perform at the folk club a few times whilst she was still in Montrose and possibly after she’d left the town too (she played her own songs and some lovely covers). I don’t know her in any real sense – I’ve spoken to her briefly a couple of times and met her Mum at a parent evening (her Mum was on the teacher’s side of the table). At some point I bought Rhona’s first EP (2013’s Remembrance, possibly a collector’s item by now). Then I got quite a few copies of The Tide EP when it came out in 2017 and gave them mostly to young people I knew around my daughter’s age. I thought they would like it all (other tracks on it are The Tide and My Brother) but in particular I thought Golden Leaves was such a perfect song for them at that point in their lives. Being at a very different point in mine it almost always makes me want to cry (not in a bad way, just emotions, you know, and they dinnae scare me, well, not anymore). 

Because today’s song is about Montrose, and that’s where we lived for all of our daughter’s school days (2004-18), I suppose it does have some special significance for me. Like many small towns Montrose can be both amazing (beautiful, special, the best beaches, a secret charm) and, at other times, really miserable (dead, empty, isolating) and I think Rhona really gets all that in the song. Also, although Rhona is singing about golden leaves** (autumn, seasons changing, the geese*** overheard …) the lyrics are definitely linked in my mind with the fact that the secondary school in question has gold leaf on the dome at the front of the school (after World War II its copper dome was covered in gold leaf as a war memorial). The gold makes for a very grand sight and always made me think of more dramatic landmarks (a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow, domes in Jerusalem or Istanbul…). It almost always made me smile as I approached it – something about that brightness shining above as the kids rushed out for lunch or waited for a bus to take them on some trip or other. I don’t know if Rhona was also thinking about the dome when she wrote Golden Leaves. I imagine it was in there somewhere, even if she didn’t realise it.

Montrose Academy (photo by R C Codona)

Still in Glasgow (Scotland’s capital city for music, I think I said back here), Rhona has had other releases since The Tide. Her very recent new EP is Closing the Window and I have been getting to know its four songs better in the past couple of months (spoiler - they are really, really good – a lot of depth to them, gorgeous recordings and her voice just getting better and better). They are total growers and I find myself singing along to them more and more with each listen (buy it here or find it elsewhere via her website). I hadn’t heard her very first EP for a while but listening to it this week I noticed for the first time that the track Black Wall has been resurrected from that very early release and rerecorded for the new EP (and it sounds amazing). Here’s the tracklisting for that very early CD:

And here she is more recently doing a live version of that same track:

I think Rhona was largely bemused by my choosing an older song (Golden Leaves) for this project and not one of tracks from her lovely new EP (say the big uplifter Better When You’re Around, give that one a listen if you haven’t already). She probably wasn’t the only one in this month’s list who felt that way – I know artists largely want to talk about their most recent work – but for this project it had to be songs that I’d heard a little while back and that had stayed with me (and Golden Leaves certainly fits that bill). For me this song represents a lot about history and memory but most of all I just think it’s an excellent piece of work, especially for someone so early in their career. I share a lot of Rhona’s taste in music (we ended up a couple of seats along at a Laura Marling concert at Celtic Connections a few years ago) and I always love the covers she shares (Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones…). I think she has a huge talent, both in writing and performing, and I look forward to following her brilliant career. Here she is humouring an old woman by answering questions about Golden Leaves. 

When did you write this song? 

I wrote this song after leaving secondary school and realising that a lot of things were about to change. Most of my close friends from school were moving and going on to uni in different cities and I knew things were never going to be the same again. I also took a year out after school (which was unusual at the time) so I was in Montrose while all my friends had moved on. The town felt so different without my friends around and without the routine of school that I had been used to for most my life. I wrote it around Autumn time, hence the metaphor of leaves falling and seasons changing.

I actually was working in Boots at the time and I finished writing the song when I was sitting at the till with some receipt paper… don’t tell the boss!

Who performed and/or recorded it first? 

I can’t remember the specific year but around 2015/2016. I recorded it at Seagate Studios with Graeme Watt. I played piano, guitar and vocals. I arranged the string parts and played layered violins. I had Joanna Stark on cello.

Is it a song you particularly like?

Yes, I still connect with the song but it was written so long ago now. I feel not so close to the topic now since school was such a long time ago. I feel my writing style has changed a little bit also since that time since this was my earlier writing days. However, the song takes on new meanings for me now and the theme of ‘change’ is always relatable.

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of?

Perhaps the song ‘Closing the Window’ from my new EP since it is the most recent song I have written and is about a topic that I feel isn’t widely sung about. I am also proud of ‘No Rain’ since the song is very personal to me.

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written? 

Hmm.. difficult question! Any Joni Mitchell song  ... maybe ‘Blue’ or perhaps ‘I think it is going to rain today’ by Randy Newman. The lyrics and melodies are amazing.

Thanks to Rhona for answering questions about her song. This is the last one in this list of 31 songs that has any link to Montrose (folk club or otherwise). Tomorrow it’s another Celtic Connection.

*I loved AC/DC in my teens, had the embroidered denim jacket, headbanged and everything so I’m not dissing them. It’s just an observation.

**Obviously leaves are a popular subject for songwriters (and poets) but I had one of those ‘how did I not know that’ moments this week with a famous leaf song. I was reading this article about Billy Bragg’s song New England (a song I know really well, it was big in my student days) and it mentioned how the first lines (‘I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song/I’m twenty-two now, but I won’t be for long’) come from Simon and Garfunkel’s Leaves That Are Green. Somehow I had not made that connection and you could have knocked me down with a, well, leaf. More Billy Bragg references back on Day 13.

***Pink-footed geese, and other migrating birds, are really important in Montrose. The town’s tidal basin has a Scottish Wildlife Trust centre where you can observe and learn about many different species. The geese have also inspired a lot of art – sculptures, poems, songs. The Wild Geese is a poem by local poet Violet Jacob (1863-1946) which was later made into a very popular song (The Wild Geese/The Norland Wind by Dundee songwriter Jim Reid, 1934-2009). I saw Jim play in Montrose too (but as part of some other arts/music event I think, not folk club).

Sculpture in Montrose by David A Annand, dedicated to the poet Violet Jacob

photo by Hazel Buchan Cameron

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).

Day Twenty-Eight - Tightrope

 

“words, once uttered, change the way we feel”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Tightrope written by Kim Edgar. Kim is a Scottish musician, songwriter and choir director (and a few more things besides – see her site for more details). She plays solo and with Cara, an Irish folk band from Germany, Scotland and Ireland. This track is on her 2016 solo album Stories Untold and as she specifically talks about the video here it is:

Again this song does not strictly speaking have a Montrose Folk Club connection. The only link would be that club-going led to radio-listening, which led me to Karine Polwart (see Day 21), which led me to an event in Dundee where Karine and Kim were both playing. So the first time I heard Kim was when she appeared at Dundee’s Out of the Woods in June 2008 (that event and its beloved organiser, Pauline Meikleham/Hynd have been mentioned a few times this month – mostly here). Kim, who plays piano, guitar and sings, was opening for the Polwart, Grace, Hewat trio and I think maybe Karine Polwart joined Kim for some of her set too*. It was a great night (pretty much guaranteed when one of Dundee’s finest, the fabulous Pauline, was involved). Kim and Karine were also then both part of The Burns Unit** (a group that had formed in 2006 after meeting at a Burnsong songwriting retreat). Later I remember seeing them all on the Jools Holland TV show (and according to YouTube that appearance must have been in 2011).

Some time after the Out of the Woods gig in 2008 I made contact with Kim (probably on MySpace, all the rage then, you know) and asked her to play at a poetry/music event that I organised at the Forest Café in Edinburgh in November 2008 (the event was called Postcards from the Song). That year Kim had put out her first solo album Butterflies and Broken Glass and that release has some great songs (my favourite is Just Outside Your Door). I think it was also around that time that she told me she had put a poem of mine called Significant Other Deceased to music, I think she maybe even played it at Forest Café (but that might be a false memory). It was a lovely surprise as we hardly knew each other, still don’t really (though we’ve met briefly a couple of times, emailed a few more). She says herself she’s pretty shy (I’m not saying that about her - it’s on her website!) and she has said she has to be encouraged to be more present online and all that kind of thing. I think she’d rather be playing the piano, writing, singing, teaching. Like many who come to music via less obvious routes she loves it very deeply. She studied English literature, not music, and, as far as I know, she didn’t come from a family with a big tradition of playing or anything like that. I think some people go into music because it just is what they do (they’ve grown up around it or they’ve been doing it from very young) whilst other people make a much more conscious choice (and that choice can be quite a daring leap in many ways).

Some years went by, she had another album, 2012’s The Ornate Lie, and then Kim got in touch to tell me that the piece using my poem was going to be on her new (third) album – 2016’s Stories Untold. This was an even lovelier surprise and Mark and I went down to the album launch at Stockbridge Parish Church in August 2016. In amongst festival Edinburgh this event was an island of peace and a magical night out with a friendly, caring audience. It had a definite folk club feel (raffle, veg from an allotment as the prize) but the venue was a little flashier. Here is the piano waiting for Kim that day:

There are lots of lovely songs on Stories Untold – Anchor in the Sky, The Whole Rainbow (which is a cousin of Bella Hardy’s You Don’t Owe the World Pretty that we looked at back here perhaps), also Significant Other Deceased (of course!), Well Worn and today’s song Tightrope. Stories Untold is my favourite of Kim’s four solo albums so far but it might just be that it’s the one I know best. We heard her play in Dundee again in June 2017 so I’ve heard its songs live a couple of times – they are really effective, honest, and moving.

Tightrope is a gorgeous song and Kim’s voice is just perfect for it. So many of her songs feature her piano playing and I’ve only just realised as I listened through the albums again that I picked a purely guitar number (she plays that too). I should say for balance that another of my favourite pieces is the piano instrumental that finishes her most recent album (2020’s Held). That track is also called Held and is a beautiful, atmospheric number just calling out for a BBC (or Scandi) drama series that is looking for a theme tune…

I attended the online launch for Held in December 2020 (well, I sat in relaxed clothing in our back room with a glass of something). Even online it managed, like her launch in 2016, to be friendly and fun. There were singalongs, smiles, tears. Held has some lovely tracks – Give It Time, Shelf, Some Things Happen. All her albums are in her shop here.

Songwriting is hugely important to Kim and she is currently working on a giant collaborative writing project called Consequences that involves her working with a different songwriter every month (details here). So far the collaborators have been Ron Sexsmith, Horse McDonald and Boo Hewerdine*** with another track released next week. On any of her social media (or her website) you can keep track of all the songs as she releases them and you can pre-order the album here.

And now here’s Kim to answer questions about Tightrope.

When did you write this song?

I'm really rubbish with time, I'm afraid ... I think I wrote it in 2015 - it's on my 2016 album, ‘Stories Untold’, in any case.

 

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the writing of this song?

I wrote it in my (then) flat in Leith, in Edinburgh. The starting point for me was my literal fear of falling, and what that might represent. I wanted to admit to myself, and publicly, that I find it hard to ask for help when I need it, and I don't like to show that I'm scared or vulnerable. It's strange, because I really do try make myself vulnerable and open in my songwriting, but I find it hard in real life ...

 

Who performed and/or recorded it first? What year was that?

Me, I think! I performed it live in advance of recording it for my album ‘Stories Untold’, which was released in 2016.

 

Any other versions of it you know of? Any you particularly like?

There aren't any other versions of it that I know of - though I'd love it if there were! It's always a great compliment when someone covers one of your songs . But I did make a music video for the song in 2017 with members of Freedom Of Mind, a choir which grew out of a project at FDAMH - Falkirk's Mental Health Association (and subsequently became an independent community choir with a mental health focus in 2019). I really love the video, which was beautifully filmed by Louise Mather, and shows the choir members holding up a word to represent how they are feeling. They were so honest and I feel the video is very powerful as a result. 

 

Is it a song you particularly like?

I do have good feelings about the song, yes. I hope that there might be other people who are also struggling with showing vulnerability or asking for help, and that the song might be helpful to them.

 

Have your feelings about the song changed since you wrote it?

They have. Sadly, my dad became ill in late 2016 (when I released ‘Stories Untold’) with a cancer of an unknown primary source, and so that album, and its release tour, is tied up with memories of his illness. Despite his hugely positive approach, I'm sorry to say that my dad had died before I made the music video. The song for me now is strongly associated with my work with the choir through that difficult time; though I was really struggling personally, being able to co-lead Freedom Of Mind on a weekly basis gave me a real sense of purpose and solidarity, and that's why I chose to write "vulnerable" and "supported" for my words in the video. The choir is such a supportive space to be for all of us who are involved in it, I think - we sing because it makes us feel good.

 

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of?

Ooh, I've never thought about that before! Good question. ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone’ from my first album, ‘Butterflies And Broken Glass’, I think ... I wrote it to try and encourage someone I didn't know too well to get out of a very unhealthy relationship. And although I don't think she ever heard the song, I'm glad to say she did get out of the relationship! I feel proud of it because of the number of people who have told me after live performances how affected they have been by the song or how meaningful it is to them.

 

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written? 

I absolutely love ‘A Case Of You’ by Joni Mitchell. I think Joni's ability to capture emotions is exquisite, and this particular song had a profound effect on me when I first heard it in 1994 as an encore at a Tori Amos concert in Edinburgh's Queens Hall. Tori didn't introduce it, and (pre-internet access!) it took me a few more years (and a mix tape from my art teacher at high school!) to discover the song's name and its songwriter. I then listened exclusively to Joni's ‘Court And Spark’ and ‘Blue’ albums for around seven years ... The song is beautiful, with powerful imagery and it's emotionally open, and honest. If I had to listen to one song for the rest of my life, this would be the one. I hope to keep learning, and to work towards this in my own songwriting.

Thanks so much to Kim for answering questions about her song. And tomorrow it’s back up to Angus for a songwriter who grew up in Montrose.

*Karine (and many of her band and collaborators) crop up on most of Kim’s albums somewhere. 

**Full list of the Burns Unit members in their first album review here.

***Yes, that’s another square on this month’s Boo Hewerdine bingo card (read about songs of his here and here). 

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).