After fifty years (really!) of playing and writing, as an occasionally paid amateur musician/songwriter, I felt it was time to harvest some of my best songs, but also to stretch myself and write new things. What started out as a solo, retrospective recording project gradually gathered a few collaborators and new songs that just couldn’t wait for the “next album”, all fitting together – in my mind, at least – under the emerging theme of “An Old Man’s Folly”. Wisdom and folly keep up a running dialogue through songs about politics, love, religion, place and history. As it’s ended up, just about everything included was written in the last five years. The older songs are going to have to wait their turn (again).

Part of the project was building, insulating (brrrr!) and equipping a studio, in a garden on Iona, and developing methods and broadband capacity, to enable collaboration with friends and relatives in Glasgow, Norwich, Cheltenham and Tokyo. There is no proprietary software dedicated to the removal of the sound of ewes recently separated from their lambs from audio recordings, so much improvisation was required before I felt I had something ready to present to the world at large. I first played in a recording studio in about 1975 and these are definitely the best recordings I’ve made and some of the best songs I’ve written, over a wide range of styles, so the next thing seems to be to try and find people who will enjoy them.

Where did these songs come from? Nobody made me do it. I write songs because I have a personal impulse to write them. Sometimes the impulse seems to be primarily about “making something” – something perhaps of a particular style or feel that I’m attracted to, or interested in. Sometimes the impulse seems to be more about “saying something”, but, even then, it matters to me to make something strong and original, with a life and energy of its own, and a bit of style. Guitars and guitar playing – with influences from Bert Jansch, Richard Thompson, Ry Cooder, John Martyn, Chris Wood and JJ Cale, among others – form a major part of the soundworld of the album.

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