‘Letter to Dead End, Indiana’ is my love letter to Americana. Download it here.
‘Leaving Time’ is what I call my Springsteen album. Download it here.
If God’s Not On The Angels’ Side (Who The Devil Is) is the fourth of my full albums, and is available for download only here on Bandcamp.
It’s a collection of my most country songs, or mostly country, depending how you want to think of it. It gives me great pleasure to say not all of them are performed by me!
Other performers include Isaac Brutal, Tribute to Venus Carmichael, and a soulful rendition of the title track by Martin McGroarty.
Friends and Other Heroes
My third album, and a double to boot.
It features a lot of my friends on various tracks. This means a lot to me. Without sounding too aw shucks about it, I still consider myself a newbie to the music scene, so it’s a buzz for me that bandmates and others – all of them my heroes in their own particular ways – want to contribute to an individual project like this. So, since there wasn’t room to put the full credits on the album cover, here’s the list of personnel and what they played in full:
Andrew C Ferguson: vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, harmonica, kantele
Mountain View – Norman Lamont, bass
The Stand – Mark Allan, bass
Prufrock’s Revenge – Norman Lamont, electric guitar
Last Call – Norman Lamont, keyboards, production
Roy Orbison – Jeff Sniper, electric guitar
Another Eden – Norman Lamont, production
Camouflage – Gerry Callaghan, production
Clara Said, Yesterday – Gerry Callaghan, production
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Mark Allan, bass, electric guitar
Winter That The Snow Fell – Emma Gow, vocals; Graham Crawford, production
Speed Trap Town – Emma Gow, vocals; Graham Crawford, production.
There were also a couple of Freesound samples, and thanks to the Freesound community for being there:
Police Radio Chatter on Speed Trap Town courtesy of https://freesound.org/people/Guardian2433/sounds/320351/
Thrush Nightingale on Another Eden courtesy of https://freesound.org/people/genghis%20attenborough/sounds/36152/
There are 18 songs in all: 16 of them my own, and one each from Bob Dylan and Jason Isbell. I’ve posted about most of them already (and if you want to check back and hear if the final track was any different, I’ve updated the previous posts with the album versions) so I’ll mention just a couple:
Camouflage was recorded live at the Bridge of Orchy songwriting weekend a year past May. Set up in the main room, some of us did a live session, engineered and overseen by Gerry Callaghan. It’s not perfect, because I muff a line, but Gerry’s production is so good I wanted to include it anyway. I’ve learned a lot about production from Gerry and Norman especially over the last year.
Despite the Dylan cover, I spend most of my time in my songwriting trying to avoid sounding Dylanesque. However, I read a review recently about a band called Wave Pictures, and how one track was the main songwriter’s ‘Desolation Row,’ and I thought, yeah. Everyone should write their own ‘Desolation Row,’ just once. So that’s Bus Stop.
If you like what you hear, and you still believe in physical manifestations of music like CDs, I’d be delighted to send you one for free. All I ask is that you consider making a donation to Glenrothes Foodbank.
Final Days
The second of my solo albums. To be honest, ten years ago, when I first started getting back into music, I had no concept of where it would take me: it was a way of mixing things up in my spoken word shows at the Free Fringe that year. A Tribute to Venus Carmichael album, production credits on one of Isaac Brutal’s, and now, two of my own later, I seem to have mutated from writer to songwriter!
This album, like the first, is absolutely free. You can download it from Soundcloud – see the tracks below – or, if you prefer the old-fashioned way, I can send you a CD. I’ll even pay the postage, but as there are only 55 of these, they won’t last forever! If you just can’t get enough of this stuff, you can sign up to my ‘inner circle’: this subset of my email group should be getting some exclusive bonus tracks and one or two digital goodies over the next few months. Email me at venus [dot] carmichael [at] gmail [dot] com if you want in.
In any event, all I ask in return is that you donate to a charity. This time round I’m making two suggestions. The first is Oxfam, which, despite the bad publicity about the actions of a few guys no longer in the organisation, still do crucial work in the world’s poorest regions. Or, if you want to be more local, the Glenrothes Foodbank does vital stuff in my home town. I wish they didn’t have to exist, but they do (you can, of course, if you prefer, donate to something similar in your own locale).
I have no way of checking how much you give, of course. But you seem like a good person.
If you want an independent (albeit friendly) perspective on the album, my pal Norman Lamont, a singer-songwriter of much wider renown than me, has done me the honour of a review.
Now, for the story behind the tracks:
I thought this would be my Bruce Springsteen album, but it’s more like Leonard Cohen. I’m a long-time Springsteen fan, of course, but I was also inspired by country rockers like Jason Isbell and Cory Branan last year. At the same time, I had a fire lit under me by the injustice and inequality I saw in my own home town, watching a documentary about Fife Council.
But, at least for me, it’s not just as simple as sitting down to write a song and knowing what’s going to come out. And what came out, a lot of the time, was quite Cohenesque. This first track is a prime example. It was done and (almost) dusted quite early on, but then (fellow Cohen fan) Norman Lamont (yeah, the same one that did the review, not the former Chancellor of the Exchequer) came over one night with his Strat and sprinkled just a bit of stardust on the track.
Some tracks took longer than others. ‘Cicero’s Blues’ was first written in a hotel room in Edinburgh in October, 2016, and started out as ‘Tin Can.’ I was never happy with the middle 8, until Cicero lent a hand. He may have been the first person to come out with that phrase ‘You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.’ But it wasn’t till I put a more dynamic drum track on it just before album release in March 2018 that it was done.
Sometimes, you do need that extra bit of stardust. The same evening that he put some doomy undercarriage on ‘Final Days,’ Norman Lamont added a lovely bit of slide to this next track. Like most of the album, the concentration is on acoustic guitar: but there’s a perhaps surprising amount of electric on it, given that I don’t actually own one!
A word about the artwork. Most of its imagery isn’t too hard to figure out, especially the Roman legionary, given there’s a song referencing Cicero; and this one, which tells the story of the famous ‘lost legion’ of the Ninth. The padlock symbolises the fight all of us have to break out of restrictions, self-imposed and otherwise; the vintage-style metronome, the passage of time, as well as the recording process; and as for the weathervane, well, everyone knows now you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows.
The lamp? It’s just a lamp.
It’s All Gravy came from a bit of inter-band banter with the Isaac Brutal boys (and girl) on Facebook chat. The lyrics are a strictly surreal Kafkaesque nonsense, but I was particularly pleased at the way I got the guitars to interact. The Epiphone EJC200, in particular, seemed to be made for the Johnny Cash-style rhythm, and it also contributed the fillers: I’m never going to be Eric Flaming Clapton, but this worked for me.
I like wine over whisky, isn’t it a sin? That bit of this next song is, to be honest, utterly autobiographical. I’m taking the fifth on the rest of the lyrics! They sat in a notebook for quite a long time, and I didn’t even know if I would get around to recording it. Then I did, and I suspect the fun I had doing it comes through.
Sonically, I wanted a warm bath of acoustic guitars for this next track. The key, of course, was having the beautiful violin line running through it, and Jennifer Kerr came in, did it in a single take, and nailed it. The lyrics reference the Sage of Montreal again, and play with the concept of altars and heart-stealing. Simple really.
I’m not the biggest fan of Father John Misty but there was something in ‘Divine Comedy’ that spoke to me. That tone, playful but sincere, was what I had in mind here. I wrote the first half of the lyrics around the same time I got the melody. Then I stopped for a bit: it kind of felt like if I finished it right away, I’d spoil it. The rest of the lyrics came more slowly. I even used bibliomancy, for the line about trumpeters and artisans. To be honest, it still feels like I could write another 96 verses of it.
I wanted to finish with something uplifting, and this was as good as it was going to get. Actually, I felt the spiritual hand of Tom Petty when recording this track: I came up with the basic chord change when I still had Mark’s 12 string, and that jangly sound that Petty inherited from the Byrds, was what I had in mind as the core of the thing. I recorded a basic track with the Danelectro to a click track, handed it back, and then began to build a sound around it.
Another key moment was when I ditched the sort-of-okay drum track I was using for a more complex system of breaks and fills, taking a leaf out of my mentor Mr Lamont’s book in that regard. There’s nothing that substitutes for a real drummer, of course. The vocal was quite hard to do in my own accent. I kept wanting to slip into sounding like Tom Petty.
The message, that there never was a golden age as such, but we can build one if we work together, isn’t perhaps fathoms deep, but maybe brings the lyrical content of the album back from the brink after all the death, destruction, imminent apocalypse and torture tales elsewhere.
And finally… just so that you can hear one of my songs with a proper singer, I negotiated with Mr Brutal that I could put on a song from his latest long player, The Falcon Has Landed. I had a couple of songs on it, but this is one I thought fitted the rest of my album. Graham Crawford, Isaac’s long term producer, did a fine job with it. It’s not free to download on Soundcloud, but instead, follow the link to the Brutal Bandcamp presence and listen to more great stuff. If you go the old-fashioned way, though, you do get it on the CD.
Songs in a Scottish Accent
My first solo album of music and spoken word which you can still have totally free, just by contacting me at venus [dot] carmichael [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll even pay the postage! (but there aren’t many copies left…)
There’s just one catch. I’m giving the album away, but in return, I’d like you to contribute to a refugee charity. Suggestions are below:
Aegean Solidarity Network Team UK, a small charity supporting Syrian and other refugees landing on the small Greek island of Leros, by providing a ‘supporting all people escaping life threatening conflict landing in Greece by supporting ‘safe places to stay, safe spaces to talk, provisions of food, dry clothes, and education amongst many other needs;’
Praksis, who provide a range of medical help and accommodation to refugees in Greece.
Alternatively, of the bigger charities I generally default to Oxfam. Bear in mind though that they cover a whole lot more than just the refugee crisis.
Alternatively, you can download the tracks via my Amazing Radio presence, and I’ll put any money I receive by that route towards these charities.
Why refugee charities? This post explains my thinking on it, if you need more explanation.
Why songs in a Scottish accent? Put simply, all my life I’ve been a fan of American music: traditionally, that broad church known as rock, but over the years the blood relations that generally introduce themselves as country, blues, gospel, etc, etc. There’s a good general categorisation for much of what I like now, which is Americana.
And for most of my life I’ve been trying to avoid singing them in an American accent! It was a friend’s comment on a Leonard Cohen cover I put up a while back that crystallised it for me: he said he preferred the spoken word parts, ‘in my own accent.’ Without consciously doing it, I’d slipped into an American (or perhaps even Canadian) one for the singing bits.
Well, this album is my attempt to find my own voice, if you want to be pretentious (or even portentous) about it. Several people who know me have expressed surprise that it’s me speaking, or singing, on the tracks when they first hear it. For some reason, when I recorded the vocals,(1) they came out different to my normal conversational voice, so if you meet me, don’t expect me to sound the same as the guy on ‘Prophets on Instagram,’ for example…
Anyhoo, thanks for listening, and I hope there’s something in there that you enjoy!
(1) Which reminds me. The vocal in an American accent on both versions of ‘Scotland as an Xbox Game,’ is the wonderful Halsted Bernard.
andrewcferguson 