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This is the second of the two Kasino songs we’ve rebooted. The original dates back to 2000, 2001, and it sounded awfully like Snow Patrol’s Run; Snow Patrol hadn’t actually written Run back then, and their singer saw us play this one live several times before they did. Ho hum. That’s not just me being… [more]
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The lyric seems pretty obvious to me but maybe it isn’t all that obvious to anybody else: the two fingers in the lyric mean two shots of alcohol. It’s about someone getting drunk quickly and looking for a fight, something you’ll see in pubs every weekend. Musically this one’s had a bit of a journey.… [more]
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In the last song I was trying to be Michael Stipe. In this one, I’m Rihanna. I’ll pause a moment to let you get over the horror of that mental image. David wrote this one, his riff really reminding me of the Rihanna/Calvin Harris collaboration We Found Love. It doesn’t sound anything like it, but… [more]
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Oh, this one’s fuuuuuuuuun. Let It Go started off as a spectacularly cheesy 70s keyboard thing that David concocted, and we’ve tried to keep its fundamental cheesiness throughout the song. That explains the brass section stabs in the chorus. Musically we’ve kept it really simple – one bass, one lazy guitar, some drum loops and… [more]
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The clouds here are metaphorical, of course. The lyric’s about the constant internal critic that we all have, and which really ought to shut the fuck up. I read an interview a long time ago that suggested songs just float through the air and you have to catch them “before some bastard like Mick Hucknall… [more]
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I was very pleased with this column I wrote for .net about boredom. I spent most of last night glued to a screen watching a Twitter stream, refreshing my RSS feeds, clicking on various interesting links and using recommendation engines to find writing worth reading. After a while, I’d read the entire internet, so I… [more]
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This one’s a good example of why musicians need to collaborate with one another: I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, and it’s a perfectly decent acoustic guitar song – but it’s a much, much better song if you put the guitars away and get the keyboards out. The lyric is about casual cruelties, the… [more]
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This is our Elbow song. Elbow have been a big influence on me: their Seldom Seen Kid is a tremendous record. It’s music for grown-ups that isn’t a pale imitation of former glories, that isn’t trying to be down with the kids, that isn’t ashamed to be about grown-up subjects. It’s music that’s lived a… [more]
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This is Fall From Grace, a song we did when we were in the band Kasino, although back then it was a U2-esque bit of stadium rock. Now it’s been retooled with some deliberate nods to some of my guilty pleasures: the bass nods to Happy Mondays’ Wrote For Luck, and the heavily compressed electric… [more]
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There’s a fascinating discussion on The New Yorker about the future for musicians in a world of widespread piracy and tiny payments from streaming music services. The working question is not about the life of a band like Wilco but of smaller outfits, where making a living is sometimes not even a question, when a… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
