Canyons & Highlands – Canyons & Highlands

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Described as ‘astral folk’, Canyons & Highlands is a new transatlantic collaboration from Scottish musician Norrie McCulloch who is joined by Teenage Fanclub multi-instrumentalist Dave McGowan, guitarists Iain Thomson and Marco Rea, Lavinia Blackwall (Trembling Bells, Wyndow), fiddler Christian Sedelmyer and Stuart Kidd and Nicholas Falk on drums. The songs and lyrics, several of which are drawn from letters from McCulloch’s past, were written and initially recorded in McCulloch’s VW Campervan in Stirlingshire and remotely developed with the other musicians during various lockdowns while retaining that formative intimacy.

As such, sung in an unfiltered accent, most tracks are of a highly minimalist nature, McCulloch’s simple strumming augmented here and there by some guitars, drums, and Blackwell’s piano and harmonies. First up, McCulloch on 12 string backed by Blackwell with Rea on bouzouki, Pushing On/Wolves is the most immediate track with its folksy Americana and underlying hints of Richard Thompson on a song of support and encouragement to keep moving forward in troubled times (“like wolves through drifting snow”) as he sings “You’re a little further down this river than me/But the waters creeping in onboard/Take a look you’ll see I’m right behind you now/I’ll meet you down where the river ends/Whenever trouble calls you”.

Falk on drums, the Scots Americana Hurry Up Angel remains uptempo, again tapping into a sense of urgency to move forward (“Hurry up angel stop falling behind/There’s a devil on our trail/Looks like he’s got a taste for blood/And he spent the night in jail”), and salvation (“Hurry up angel need you here right now/Thieves are robbing me blind”), here perhaps in the context of lovers on the run from an abusive father/husband.

A similar musical setting, but pared back to bass,  guitar and harmonica,  informs Other Side Of The World,  capturing the album title in a long-distance relationship love letter from Canada (“Been working down at the health food store/A local band were playing in Calgary/Me and some friends took a drive into town/Along the way we listened to the Grateful Dead”) to Scotland (“When I come over can we go to the highlands/Be good to leave the city sometime”), along with an allusion to (the US/Canadian slang for) Marijuana (“Did I tell you my sister bought a van/And mary jane came into her life/Guess I’ve found a new best friend”).

Two slower, more restrained numbers follow with McGowan on pedal steel, first the broken relationship of Took It To Heart (“No goodbye scene at the end of the day/No sunset walk as the credits play/They parted by the first light of morning/After too many nights alone/For all the taking, no giving away/Three little words they forgot to say”) with the narrator too late acknowledging his part (“There been times I wasn’t a good man/Days I’ve blamed everything on my old man/I can stand here now and tell you I’ve changed/I’m no longer throwing out any blame/If I could take back every word I said/Still wouldn’t pull me out of the dark”). Then, with Sedelmyer on fiddle, comes the equally downbeat break-up of Down From The Mountain (“Don’t think you noticed/But I was crying/All through our conversation/Getting to you/Is the only thing in my life”) amid the domestic storms. It’s perhaps the same story continued over into the pedal steel tears and resigned strum of the desolate She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (“None of her letters come through the door/I told the postman, she’s gone now to stay/And you can tell everyone, tell everyone/You can tell everyone/She won’t be back again/When love left this house/Tore it down to its core/Every room feels empty now”).

A little light relief returns with the slow walking pace We Get By with its bluesy electric and wah-wah guitars backdrop (“No money in the bank/Vans near the end of the tank/The phone won’t ring/Wages are thin/Been looking for work/And feeling down in the dirt/But we get by/The skin of our teeth”), the message being that love will hold you up when the waters threaten to swamp you, extending to a broader call for community with “We’ll get by if we help each other out”.

Suggesting Loudon Wainwright III influences, the acoustic strummed Zodiac is another bittersweet love song about a fraught relationship (“Today is your birthday/I tried to call but you’d walked out the door/And by the time I got home from work/You were already out with your friends”), following the same line of thought with the slow waltzing old time country feel of Drifting Apart that could well have been sung by the likes of Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.

With McCulloch back on 12 string  and McGowan playing Fender Rhodes, it ends with, first, the dreamily melancholic simple but inspired I Am The Blues, a distillation of the nature and inevitability of the feeling and the genre  (“I’ve been around since time began/I will come to you/I’m forever passing through”) and then the more optimistic (“Love digs deep/Like roots through the ground/Fed with water and good soil”) folksy fingerpicked Gordon Lightfoot-shaded Deep Forest Green which, in the light of everything that’s gone before with all the broken hearts and busted relationships, offers some final words of wisdom  – “Never turn your back/On where you came/Keep your key and get gone/You can’t try to know it all/From the first time you fall/You can still share this world/When there’s no one to call/But you won’t see nothing at all/If you’re eyes are closed”. And if you do all that then, maybe, in an intriguing metaphor, you can be the cat that each morning “Walks beneath the trees/With feathers in its mouth”.

“Every song tells us something about love”, McCulloch says at one point. You might not learn something you didn’t already know, but this beguiling album will certainly help bring it into perspective.

Canyons & Highlands is out now.

Order via Bandcamp – https://www.norriemcculloch.com/ | Bandcamp