C Macleod's Inverness date and album
LEWIS singer songwriter C Macleod has a new album and Inverness date next month – tickets are on sale now.
Bloodlines is the new album from Colin and – according to his producer Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Kings Of Leon) – it's folk music but not as you've heard it before.
Colin has always been inspired by American artists, as by all the Scottish rock bands who've embarked on that long-established musical trade route across the Atlantic. But it was producer Ethan Johns, whom he befriended on a short solo tour, who told him he was actually writing Scottish folk songs.
"Ethan said, these are really traditional Gaelic songs," he recalls. "You're rewiring old stories of ghosts, seafarers. It wasn't until he pointed it out that I realised that's what it was!"
Colin said: "When you're from a place that is really beautiful, you struggle to be anywhere else.
"There is a Gaelic phrase, a Lewis man would be homesick in heaven, and it's true. When I was younger, I used to get stressed thinking the island would disappear. If I stayed away too long, I'd look back one day and it would be gone.
"Having my feet on the ground fuels my song-writing. Everything I draw on comes from being outside."
* C Macleod plays Mad Hatters on Wednesday, September 6 and tickets are on sale from www.beyondpresents.co.uk, www.ticketmaster.co.uk and www.seetickets.com
