Lightning FayAlasdair Roberts August 15, 2011
Alasdair Roberts is a Scottish folk singer who started making waves in the late 1990s with his band Appendix Out. Since 2001, he's been releasing works under his own name. For every two or three albums of original material, Roberts puts out a record of traditional folk songs, interpreting music from the near and distant past.
Roberts' own songs concern themselves with timeless themes like love and death, lost histories of ancient peoples, and the complex psychology of modern life. Whether he's singing a simple lover's lament or embarking on a saga filled with sages, sailors, and seers, Roberts' warm, vulnerable voice entices the listener to enter the story and inhabit his richly rendered world for a few moments.
Photo by Seán Kelly.
This interview was conducted via email.
Lightning Fay: You fill your songs with references to some fairly esoteric mythologies, philosophies and histories. While this seems a highly intellectual process, your songs are also imbued with an emotional richness. When you write, is there any conflict between your emotional and intellectual impulses? Are they mutually exclusive, or does one lead to the other?
Alasdair Roberts: It's a combination of both -- there's a cerebral element involving a fair amount of reading, listening, research, note-taking and so on, but at the point of singing the song (normally with acoustic guitar these days) it's not cerebral at all -- if anything it's about getting away from intellect and into something that the Scottish Travellers, among whom are some of my favourite traditional singers living or dead, would call 'the conyach' -- the emotional core of the song.
Fay: The traditional songs you sing usually have very clear narratives, yet your original material is often cloaked in mythic references and rather dense imagery. You've said that you aren't interested in autobiographical songwriting, but that in the process of steeping your lyrics in mythology and symbolism, you may reveal non-literal truths about your own life. Can you speak a bit about this impulse to wrap your own stories in symbols and myth?
Roberts: Well, it just seems like a more interesting way of telling things -- with some mystery therein, in an attempt at some kind of heightened form. Also it's about removing myself from the song so that others can enter into it -- trying to universalise a personal experience. I am interested more in music where the 'I' in that sense is absent rather than to hear a singer-songwriter bleating his self-centred woes; a music that's more social and communal. It's much more interesting to me when writers can extrapolate from the personal to the universal -- I think a great example of this is the Leonard Cohen song 'Please Don't Pass Me By' on 'Live Songs.' I find that piece so beautiful and humane. I suppose I also believe that first-person style confessional-type music bespeaks aspects of our society which I find disagreeable on many levels -- individualism and solipsism and lonerism versus community, society, togetherness, sharing. The latter four are much more preferable to me, and that's reflected in what I like to listen to and what I'm increasingly trying to achieve -- artistically and in other ways -- myself.
Fay: Your song "I Had A Kiss Of The King's Hand" seems to have been inspired by a poem by Sarah Robenson Matheson about Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Can you tell us briefly what the story is behind the poem and what drew you to it?
Roberts: Well, I don't actually know this poem, but thanks for drawing my attention to it. I'm presuming that the poem takes its title from the piobiareachd (pibroch) tune of the same name (in Gaelic it is "Fhuair Mi PUg O Limh An RIgh"
Fay: Seeing as your songs are so referential, do you think the listener suffers who doesn't know the source material?
Roberts: Not at all. As I said, I've always liked some element of mystery and difficulty in music or in any other art, for example poetry. I wouldn't say that the lyrics of any of my songs are as obscure or difficult to grasp as some of the writing of, say, TS Eliot or Hugh MacDiarmid -- what I enjoy of those two writers' work is not necessarily the same as what I understand of it intellectually so it follows that I don't believe that 'understanding' in that sense is essential for the enjoyment of art. For me to simplify anything for the sake of the listener or reader would seem to me to be patronising. Nowadays the clues behind any 'obscure' references within the work are only a mouseclick away anyway. I use Wikipedia as a research tool all the time myself. In my student days it was hammered home to me in literature classes that ambiguity is an essential element of good poetry and, while I'm not arguing that the song lyrics are poetry (although I do share with many poets a concern with the materiality of language), that idea continues to lurk at the back of my mind when I am working on songs of my own.
Fay: Can you describe your songwriting process? Are the guitar parts written to accommodate the melody or meter of the lyric (or vice versa)? Is it a different process every time, or is there a pattern, or method, that you fall into when you write?
Roberts: I use a lot of different guitar tunings. Doing this makes the guitar feel like a different instrument every time -- it keeps it fresh for me. Every different tuning is like a riddle or conundrum to be unravelled. Normally guitar parts, melodies and lyrics all come separately. Sometimes the melodies are borne out of the guitar figures. Sometimes they're adapted from traditional melodies -- although I have in my repertoire a lot of traditional ballads, I consider the process with my own 'art songs' as akin to the way that makers of all kinds have always drawn on traditional material to make new work. For instance, I've recently set some poems by my friend Robin Robertson to music -- the poems are about the archipelago of St Kilda, an island group formerly inhabited by Gaelic speakers which lies far off the West Coast of Scotland. That involved a lot of listening to Gaelic traditional song, which I love to listen to, in order to glean melodies to use for Robin's pieces.
My own lyric writing is a process of taking constant notes on paper, then putting them onto a word processor and letting them gestate and take shape. Some songs take a very long time to emerge. I am working on one today, in fact, which I began about two years ago and it only now feels like it's about 'done' -- though songs are never complete, I think. After writing on guitar and voice, I'll think about arranging for other instruments -- I've just started using Sibelius composition software for this purpose, for the new batch of songs I'm hoping to record soon. Then at the point of recording, the songs will develop and change in unexpected ways, and it's hoped that after recording, in the live arena, the songs will continue to grow.
Fay: Is songwriting a constant endeavor, or does it come and go? Do you continue to write original songs while you're working on your interpretive records, or do you need to focus on the material at hand?
Roberts: Since making the last record of traditional ballads [Too Long In This Condition, 2010], writing has been pretty much an ongoing pursuit. Normally there are at least two or three songs on the go in my brain at any one time. The latest batch of songs is preoccupying me -- I'm hoping to get them recorded soon so that I can move on to the next thing!
Read my review of Too Long In This Condition.
Fay: I read that you were 15 when you wrote your first song. How long was it before you wrote anything you were willing to share with others? And to this day, do you still feel any hesitation presenting new material?
Roberts: I shared recorded versions of the music from about the age of 17, including songs I'd written when I was 15 and 16, but only began playing them live when I was 18. Yes, I still do have some apprehensions whenever I first present new material live.
Fay: Do you suffer from stage fright?
Roberts: Not really any more.
Fay: What will your next record look like, and when can we expect it? Do you have plans to tour the U.S. any time soon?
Roberts: The next record was made in January and it's a collaboration with a Gaelic singer called Mairi Morrison. It consists mostly of traditional Gaelic songs as well as a few Scottish traditional songs and it'll be released by Drag City in February 2012. I don't speak or sing Gaelic, but (as I intimated above when writing about pipe music and the collaboration with Robin Robertson) I love the culture and the music -- I listen to a lot of it, a lot of old recordings of Gaelic traditional singers like Calum and Annie Johnston of Barra, Flora MacNeil as well as recent recordings by singers like the late Ishbel MacAskill and Kathleen MacInnes. I'm hoping to tour in the USA next year but I'm not sure exactly when -- there's been some talk of May, but we'll see.
Watch a video about the collaboration between Alasdair Roberts and Mairi Morrison.
Fay: I know you listen to lots of different kinds of music. What are you listening to these days that your fans might find surprising?
Roberts: I consider listening widely to be an important part of the process of actually making music, so at times I immerse myself in many different kinds of musics, with as open a mind as possible. At the moment I am interested in developing my own compositional skills more so am listening to more 'classical' and composed musics of all kinds in the vain hope that, by osmosis, some of the techniques will rub off on me. The music of Bach and Janacek, for example, recently; and a friend introduced me to the music of Silvius Leopold Weiss, a contemporary of Bach who composed for lute -- I have listened to his music a lot this year. It's possibly attractive to me as I play a stringed, fretted instrument myself. I've been interested in trying to write for trumpet and trombone so I've been listening to a lot of different musics involving those instruments for inspiration. I almost never listen to other contemporary songwriters, particularly when I'm working on my own songs -- I prefer instrumental music or music in other languages. But what lyrical music I do listen to, love and will always draw upon, is traditional Scottish balladry and song, such as the great old singers you can hear at (plug!) www.kistoriches.com -- a lot of material from the sound archives of the School of Scottish Studies online for all to hear. I see my work in the near future drawing on these two strands -- traditional song and composition. Some of the old singers, too many to name, are my favourites of all time.
Fay: Do you study guitar formally? Do you give guitar lessons?
Roberts: I'm thinking more and more about giving guitar lessons but I'm not sure that I'd be that good a teacher. I have a fairly limited style, really, and I think it's idiosyncratic to the point that it might actually be harmful for others' musical development to learn from me. But then, I could probably learn just as much from my guitar students as they might be able to learn from me.
Watch videos of Alasdair performing a few of his original tunes.
Fay: You're from the small village of Kilmahog, but you've lived in Glasgow for your entire adult life. What is your relationship to Glasgow like? Are you active in the local music scene?
Roberts: I'm fairly active at times on the music scene in Glasgow -- I collaborate a lot with different people there. For example, there's a young group called The Second Hand Marching Band who are working on a song cycle based on the poems of Robert Tannahill, who was from Paisley just outside Glasgow and a contemporary of Robert Burns. I've sung a couple of Tannahill songs with them. That's just one of a few local collaborations with Glasgow musicians I've done recently.
Fay: Aside from travel, have you ever lived outside Scotland? If you were to live somewhere else, where would it be?
Roberts: Perhaps northern England! But I've thought about moving to the USA to live. I could make a living playing at Highland Games in the Appalachians -- but I've observed other Scots who move to the USA and become almost like caricature, exaggerated Scots -- that's a concern.
Fay: You talk of the syncretic nature of your work, which is to say the effort to combine seemingly disparate concepts. This seems a particularly modern endeavor, and I wonder if it was easier to be a folk singer in years past. It used to be that a person was born in a particular time and place, and his or her folk tradition was passed down intact. Do you find it difficult to be of a time when every book, every religious/philosophic movement and every musical mode is available to you? Is it burdensome to have so much source material to choose from? Or is it liberating to be able to pull from so many different places?
Roberts: Phew, that's a big question. As Bill Drummond argued, there is too much music in the world already -- and not just music, of course, but all the other things you mention. But on better days that's more liberating than disheartening. It's a relief to eventually realise that you can only do what you can do -- I think it's best to just be as open as possible to things and seek the things that you feel are important, and let those things which feel it's important to find you, find you.
Fay: In 2009, you released both the LP Spoils and the EP The Wyrd Meme. Were these two works recorded at the same time? If so, why did you decided to release them separately?
Roberts: Neither I nor Drag City wanted to release a double album!
Fay: Can you explain the title The Wyrd Meme?
Roberts: It seemed to me at the time that everybody was getting interested in 'wyrdness', in a few different ways, and that it was kind of like a meme, and that EP was the result of my own entrapment in that very meme.
Fay: The number three figures quite prominently on Spoils (the three cities and forests in "The Flyting Of Grief And Joy (Eternal Return)," the three stages of life in "So Bored Was I (Dark Triad)" and the three paths in "Hazel Forks"). Is this one concept that you wrote about repeatedly, or are these threes unrelated?
Roberts: There were personal reasons for it -- a feeling of being at a three-legged crossroads, having three possible ways to move forward ... but then that also relates to, say, the symbolism of three in the Celtic world -- for example, the triskelion, the three-legged symbol of the Isle of Man (and I think that that record is replete with what I'd maybe call, or have called then, 'interrogations of Celticity' -- the title in fact is a reference to an old British poem 'The Spoils of Annwn'). And then there's Georges Dumezil's theory of the tripartite organisation of Indo-European society -- its division into three castes, king/priest, warrior and farmer/commoner -- which is something that's preoccupied me on and off for a few years ... also, the question of whether that kind of Dumezilian tripartism is reflected in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It might be something to do with being a son of the manse, but I am occasionally given to such ruminations. So Bored was I is the conflation of the idea of the three ages of man with the conjectured 'dark triad' of personality types which make a person a sociopath. The 'flyting' song is more Jungian -- it came out of, on some levels, a reading of his 'Seven Sermons to the Dead', and so did on some level the preoccupation with eternal recurrence, the ourobouros, which marks that record -- a preoccupation which I am very happy to be rid of.
Fay: Earlier this year, you completed a residency at the School of Scottish Studies Archive, where you were "researching and reworking the mummers' play Galoshins to create a new, extended drama and song cycle." What is the original play about? What shape is your interpretation taking?
Roberts: It's a hero-combat play, distinct from but related to the English mummers' plays. For more information, see the recently published 'A Penny Was A Lot In Those Days: Galoshins Remembered' by Dr Emily Lyle. Dr Lyle is a cosmologist who has done detailed studies of Galoshins. I'm currently working with my friend, the puppeteer Shane Connolly, on a production of the piece which will tour in Scotland in October this year. It's my first venture into this kind of work, so a little daunting from that perspective. Drew Wright and Aileen Campbell are also creating work.
Fay: You've said that if you weren't a musician, you'd probably be an academic. At this point, it seems as though your knowledge of Scottish folk music in particular and British folk music in general is quite extensive. Do you ever consider teaching or lecturing? Besides the residency, are you involved in any other academic pursuits?
Roberts: No. I do think that perhaps one day I'd like to have some kind of academic association with the School of Scottish Studies, if they'd have me, or perhaps teach on some kind of 'traditional music' course elsewhere, with a focus on balladry. I know that the SSS has an artist-in-residence programme, a position which the great Glasgow musician and songwriter Adam McNaughtan holds just now ...
Fay: Are you a drinker of Scottish whisky? If so, what are your favorites?
Roberts: I like Talisker from the Isle of Skye. I'm considering naming my son Talisker Roberts.
Fay: I'll drink to that. Thanks so much, Alasdair!
