Extremely happy to say that we’re proud partners in this landmark 10th album, able to bring you an exclusive edition courtesy of our pals AED.
Here’s a very welcome return – Edwyn Collins spectacularly hits ten with Nation Shall Speak To Nation. We’re extremely happy to say that we’re proud partners in this landmark 10th album, able to bring you a righteous exclusive edition courtesy of our friends at AED – a set of letterpress A6 postcards with lyrics from this essential late-period gem.
Memorably a younger Edwyn once sung of over-elaboration being his curse. After his stroke he found he could express himself with simpler, more direct words. The melodies simplified too, becoming a bit less eccentric, and more universal. One of Edwyn’s closest cohorts suggests that Nation Shall Speak To Nation is a belated follow-up to Home Again, the beautiful 2007 record he completed after his stroke.
Recorded in his Clashnarrow Studio in Helmsdale with a trusted crew including Sean Read, Jake Hutton, Carwyn Ellis, James Walbourne and his son, William, Nation Shall Speak to Nation is an album about knowledge and experience and the things in front of us and the things behind us. Its message is weighty even as the songs seem to soar over the Moray Firth, which the studio gloriously overlooks, occasionally high on their own big choruses.
But it’s in the mid-tempos, the slower trails that you find yourself leaning closest into the narrative – the coastal colours and his unique brilliant voice bringing timeless truths to songs like The Mountains Are My Home and It Must Be Real – which I have to say are amongst the very best of his solo career.
Like Jonathan Richman, an early touchstone for Edwyn, he just keeps finding a way through, always finding a way to make something that’s different from what’s come before but with the same essence. I want to see more musicians aging like visual artists or writers or rare musicians – not trying to pass themselves off as the same as they were before. One of the things with making a write-up like this, reacting to a record you’ve heard for the first time a few hours ago is that there’s no sink in but I think Edwyn has done this really successfully on Nation Shall Speak To Nation.
There’s something important to treasure here.
SP
PS. It later came back to me that the over-elaboration line is actually by Edwyn’s OJ cohort, James Kirk.
