“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).
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