2018

Popular Scottish group Ashton Lane had a quick chat with Maverick about some of the exciting things they’ve been up to before they headlined the Maverick Acoustic Stage on the Friday night What can you tell me about the new album? How has recording gone? Esther O’Connor: Really good – we write in an interesting way as a band. We write ourselves, but we also write in collaboration with our fans sometimes and write songs based around their experiences and we call them our bespoke songs. That’s become a very, very important thing to us as a band and we’ve done lots and lots of them. It’s done two things – it’s meant we’ve really connected really closely with our fans through our music, and it’s been a constant source of inspiration because it’s specifically people’s real life stories they are telling you. They are often very moving and really interesting. It’s been a fascinating journey, so quite a few of those songs will be on the next album too. That’s a very unique way of songwriting, when did that start happening? Tim O’Connor: We’ve done that for a couple of years now haven’t we? Esther: Probably about five years ago. It was an idea we had one day and literally the very first day we did it, we just never looked back. People love it, and it’s been really popular.  The other thing you’ve done recently is a greatest hits album – how was it arranging that? Esther: Yes it’s called ‘The Journey’, and it was a really nice thing to put together. We did it with Graeme Duffin, who has a home recording studio we sometimes work at, but we also sometimes record at the Foundry Music Lab, which Graeme runs with his partner, Sandy. Tim: The Foundry Music Lab is where we recorded ‘Nashville Heart’, so it’s really nice to look back over the albums we’ve done and pick our favourite tracks. It was really good, and it was lovely to release something like that, which showed years of our work.  

Scottish act Raintown were immensely popular at Millport Country Music Festival, and they spoke to Maverick after their set to discuss their future plans. What’s next for Raintown? Claire McArthur-Bain: We don’t have any more shows booked in for 2018 because back in the summer, we were working with a consultant from Nashville and our management and we were instructed to go for a break for writing. So now, we’re going to write and record the third album. Exciting times then? Claire: It’s very exciting. For us, it’s a challenge not to be thinking about playing because we love playing – we love being on stage, but at the end of the day, we have to think about getting the third album out so we can go out and play that again for more tours and shows next year. Paul Bain: We’re always writing down ideas, but now it’s very much a structured approach to specifically write at least every other day as we have a child now. We make time for writing, and we’ve set up a number of co-writes as well, which we are excited about, with very different writers. Everybody is a bit different and has their own spin on what is country to them, which I think could be interesting. And it will just be interesting to see what we can come up with for this third album. There are worse things to be told than to write new material…  Claire: That’s what the consultant from Nashville was saying, she was saying it is not a bad thing to come off the road. I know as an artist it feels like it is, but you will have new things to play, new material to get people excited about, and to go back out again. Paul: It also means you’re not thinking about trying to get people to come along and ways to advertise your music. Because we are effectively independent – I mean, we have management in London – but we are independent artists, and that means you can take care of your own stuff and take care of your own business. Claire: We organise everything really – from the touring, to the writing, to the band…we organise everything. A lot of other artists find it easier to write on tour, but we actually don’t. We don’t find it easier to write on tour, so we need to have the focussed hours of doing it. In terms of your material, what direction are you heading with your next album? Claire: There are parts of it that we are still deciding on, but we’ve been doing a mixture of different things. Paul: We said before we went out with this one, ‘let’s just write whatever’. In previous albums, we’ve probably had more of an idea because there’s been one song that has started the process. For example, we were in some studio Memphis and I said to the guys and Claire, ‘I wonder if they knew when they were doing this music that they were going to change the world with it’. Like, did they see the writing on the wall? And that started a whole process of conversation and songs. Claire: Inspiration for the songs came a lot from that one trip. A lot of the album was based on that trip, so that did have a specific sound to the record, but this time, we get different things to write about. Paul: And that radically changes your viewpoint on so many things. It’s the fact that your perception changes and that’s what you want to write about, because something happens. For us, it was having a child, how your emotions change and how you react to things differently. The one thing is that will remain the same, from now until the end of Raintown, is that we will write about what we know. And for Raintown at the moment, I think the songs all represent this time of change and growing. Claire: We are excited to see where it’s going to go as well. Usually we have everything all mapped out in our heads – for example, how we want to sound, what songs we’re picking, what the order is…but we are going in a bit blind this time, and deliberately so.

The latest interview taken at Millport Country Music Festival is with a band who are very much on the cusp of greatness in The Wandering Hearts, and the four-piece discuss their upcoming tour, lyrical content and new music. You’ve got quite an expansive UK tour coming up soon…  Tara Wilcox: We kick off in Brighton in November, and it’s so lovely. We are going back to some of the venues that we played on the last tour we did, and we’re also hitting some cities that we didn’t get to play, including Dublin! We’ve not been to Ireland before. We’ve met people that are buying tickets, and it’s really exciting. We’ve sold out a couple of venues already. Chess Whiffin: We’ve got the amazing Ruston Kelly supporting us and our wonderful friend Fiona Bevan, so it will be a really cool evening of varied music. Your lyrics very much seem to be an outpouring of emotion, do you find that draining at all? Or is it therapeutic in a way? Tim Prottey-Jones: When we got together we didn’t really know each other very well – we were more or less strangers. And so, writing together, which we did straight off, required us to be very open and sharing with each other. A lot of personal experience went into that, and a lot of imagination as well, but it was a really good way of us getting to know each other, and it was kind of therapeutic. Chess: It’s quite cathartic, I think, the whole song writing process – I never come away feeling drained by it. Tara: You feel closer and it’s how you make friendships. In my experience, you end up making good friends. Someone has a hard time and you go ‘I relate to that, because this happened’, and it broaches some kind of common ground, and you realise you’re not the only person feeling that way. We have that as a forum and what is so lovely is that seems to connect on a wider level, because someone hears a song that we wrote, that means something to us, and they go, ‘I’ve been there, and I’ve done that’. That’s the coolest thing for us, when someone goes, ‘this helped me out of this situation’, and we’re like, ‘that’s good!’ It does seem a very big leap to do that with four strangers. AJ Dean: That’s the only way you can really do it – if you’re going to start writing, you’re going to start writing stuff that matters to you. You’ve got to discover what means what to each other, and before too long you’re having those conversations that are deeply personal, and you’re learning a lot about one another in quite a short space of time, which has been really good for us. Generally speaking, do you think there’s enough time spent on lyrics these days? Tim: Hmm…I think that really depends. Yes and no. Chess: I think in country music more so than anything else, yeah. Tara: It’s difficult though with other genres, because I listen to some really successful minimalistic pop and there’s some great stuff, but sometimes lyrics can be super poignant. It might just be one phrase repeated, so that whole thing, I think, is quite subjective. AJ: Definitely, and also there’s a skill in how they succinctly use something simple that can be very powerful. This is more the case in pop I think, as a lot of the mainstream pop that you hear can sometimes not have that much going on lyrically, but then what they do have manages to be so catchy, hooky or powerful, that you go, ‘oh my god!’ All you need is that phrase there. Tim: We are utilising that too, and that’s maybe where the more commercial stuff comes into our lyrics.  You can have really descriptive verses, or whatever, and then you just get this hook that is something that says it all. When your UK tour comes to an end, what are you doing then, heading back into the studio to record new stuff, or on the road in Europe?  Tim: Hopefully all of the above! Chess: Yeah hopefully we will get to do it all, we will try and maybe get over to Europe soon, maybe even before the end of this year. If not, definitely next year is the plan, and we’re writing a lot so we will be in the studio hopefully recording it for the New Year. Do you think you will have anything out before C2C? AJ: Ooo…maybe!