Having made a late start in the business, Norman Paterson has been making up for lost time; Loved is his third album in two years (and from his Facebook videos, I suspect he already has enough material for a fourth). Like its predecessor, Stornoway, it’s rooted in the people and places of his formative years growing up in the Outer Hebrides, speaking in places to a vanished or vanishing way of Scottish life. A case in point is is the moody, slow jogging opening track, The Crofter, featuring Anna Massie on guitar and sparse banjo and accordion from Angus Lyon. Crofting has existed for centuries in the Northwest Highlands and Islands, and, back in the 80s, Paterson would visit many crofters while working on the Royal Bank mobile van. The Crofter is a tribute to them and the lives they lived (“He worked the land/He fished the sea/In the night he wove the tweed…He did not live a life of comfort/Ruled by calendars and clocks/He understood the seasons/Respected all the reasons”) before the times moved on (“He saw how things began to change/Understood they always would/He’d think about the old day/Remembering the old ways/When he lived the honest life of the crofter”).
Continuing the theme, with Massie on trilling mandolin, Alan Train on pedal steel and Ruby Shah duetting, the steady strummed loping countrified Abandoned Homes, Abandoned Hearts is based on ‘Nobody’s Home’, a photograph from John Maher’s exhibition of old Hebridean houses (whose work also featured on Alasdair Robert’s Pangs album), (“An abandoned old cottage stands by an overgrown track/A broken-down van sits propped up on blocks round the back /A red iron roof dissolving and turning to rust /Where brick built walls crumble and return to dust”). However, the lines “When you close that door/They fall apart/Little by little/Day by day/They lose hope and fade away” and “If I leave a light on/Maybe they’ll come back to stay” have equal resonance beyond buildings.
Accompanied by just mandolin and scratchy strummed guitar riff, When A Memory Awakes takes him back to an early 70s Indian summer when he and his brother walked four miles from Stornoway to Braighe Beach, arriving in time to see the haar rolling in from the sea heralding the end of the summer, a moment of both happiness and regret (“Despite our talk of next year/We never walked that road again”), the point being how “When a memory awakes from slumber/It can reach right up and pull you under/Or it can make you softly smile/Stop and linger for a while”.
On New Year’s Day 1919, HMS Iolaire, an iron-hulled steam yacht, was wrecked in a storm at the mouth of Stornoway harbour, sinking in just 90 minutes with the loss of 201 lives, including many young naval reservists returning home to the isles of Lewis and Harris after the war (marking the 100th anniversary of the disaster, it was also the subject of Lewis-born Ian Morrison’s 2019 album SÀL). Based on Malcolm MacDonald’s The Darkest Dawn, the six-and-a-half minute The Night Of The Iolaire, sparsely arranged for puttering guitar and banjo with Ian Sandilands on muted percussion, chronologically tells of a tragedy waiting to happen (“The ship was overcrowded./Her crew unprepared/The captain did not know/The safest course to steer”), opening with the plaintive plea “Don’t come home without Murdo/Mor MacLean was heard to cry/As her daughter left the village/To meet her brother off the Iolaire”. It especially recounts how one was washed overboard, his body found at the graveyard not far from his parents’ home and how another died as he returned to the waves trying to save his brother. As maritime tragedy ballads go, this stands shoulder to shoulder with The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald.
On a lighter note, liltingly played in ¾ time, The Tumbling Waltz, Lyon on accordion solo and Suzy Wall on backing, conjures images of old fashioned country house balls in its reminiscence of love at first sight (“Just a look and a glance/A chance of romance/Left me mumbling…I fell tumbling”).
Again with Shah and Train, The Saturday Cowboys is a country jog that harks back to the days of BBC Saturday matinees when he and his mates would watch black and white cowboy films and then go out and re-enact what they’d seen (“There were no cowboys in Coll/Tolsta never saw a train/Stornoway had no sidewalks/No Indians rode our plains/But come the Saturday matinee/In flickering black and white/We’d ride our pale palomino’s/Firing caps from our Colt 45s”), a misty-eyed song of lost innocence now “the Saturday Cowboys have ridden away” as he sings “take me back Gary Cooper/Take me back John Wayne/Back to the days before colour/When cowboys rode the range”.
Several reminiscences of colourful local characters pop up on the album, one such being The Map Maker, Wall again on backing and Massie and Paterson both on guitar, a song about a dapper old gentleman from Kippen who dressed each day in shirt, tie, waistcoat and tweed jacket who had spent his working life in Canada, Paterson recalling how he would “read maps like they were books/With watery eyes and preacher’s hands… Then with a slow and half bent finger/He traced for me his life/As he took me on his journey/Mapping Canada with his wife”.
Another, but with a more personal connection, is the subject of the choppy mandolin bubbly Daisy In December, a celebration of being different in an affectionate sketch of his wife Angela (“She’s the one splashed out in red/When everyone’s in grey/Who never takes the easy road when she sees a better way…my daisy in December/My snowdrop in July”.
Featuring ragtime guitar and brisk banjo with Lyon on piano, written for a Creative Scotland brief songwriting course about what Scotland means to you, Ain’t Like Scotland is another love song, one that finds other places lacking when compared to his native country (“Drinking Hurricanes on Bourbon Street/French Quarter Downtown New Orleans/Listening to lazy Louisiana blues/In the hotel Ragtime Rendezvous/Part of me thought I will confess/This ain’t whisky this ain’t Inverness/These ain’t fiddles accordions or guitars/This ain’t jumping like the Gellions’ Bar”). Or, more succinctly, “this world would be Scottish /If this world could”.
There are more childhood innocence memories with the stately piano ballad Remembering St Kilda, not his own this time but a song about a parent-child bond of trust and of risking all for community survival, based on a story in Tom Steels’ 1965 book The Life and Death of St Kilda telling the story of a young boy’s first venture to collect sea bird eggs with his father (“I was ten summers old/When he first lowered me down/1000 feet below …And though I was but a kid/I knew the work we did/Would see the village through/Maybe one last winter”).
Returning to the theme of a vanishing breed and another local legend, Big Red, another countrified jog with bluegrassy banjo, recalls a painter who, “the last of the Stornoway Coves”, also worked as a bouncer who worked the village dance halls but whose bark was far worse than his bite (“Big Red was a Teddy Bear/In our town”), offering up the underlying message “Does anyone know anyone anymore/Than from a distance”.
It ends with one last personal note with the metronomic melody of the banjo-caressed Lullaby, a gentle memory of being a young parent and trying to get the baby to sleep and a touching pledge of forever love (“I don’t know what lies before you/As you sleep safe in your bed/But know I’ll be there for you/And whatever lies ahead”). With its songs of people and places rooted in the earth of his home, the title may be in the past tense, but the emotions, like this album, are enduring.
Loved (29th November 2024) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://normanpaterson.bandcamp.com/album/loved