LISTEN: Stornoway - 'Bag In The Wind'

It's a Monday night in June as I write this, and that can mean only one thing... Watching Birds by Stornoway on repeat. If you know, you know. (It's a tune - get listening!) What better way to spend my Monday night than writing a post about the band's new music? 

ICYMI, Stornoway (Brian, Jon and Oli) returned last month with the brilliant new single Trouble With The Green and the best news; they've got an album - Dig The Mountain! - arriving on 8th September. It's been quite a while since their previous record Bonxie (which came out way back in 2015... when I was first discovering the band) and I am counting down the days until this new record. It arrives a week before the new record from The Hoosiers (also their first studio album since 2015) and I may as well tell you now that I will be completely insufferable for all of September... sorry not sorry!

In case you hadn't guessed, I am so so soooooo delighted to have them back making, releasing and performing new music and excited to have a couple of shows lined up later this year (read my review of my last Storno gig, the last night of their farewell show in Oxford back in 2017.) Naturally, I'm delighted to have another new single to repeat over and over in the shape of Bag In The Wind. Classic Stornoway, this. I love it. 

On the track, Brian shares: "people are a bit like bags, weighed down with worries and endless jobs, hoping for someone to take us by the handle and tip the gravity out of us... The song was born from just noodling around on the guitar, playing muted chords with all my fingertips just resting gently on the strings. I recorded two guitars and panned them fully in stereo which gave the close-up effect you hear in the verses. The vocal melody was partly inspired by the recording of the Agisanang Choir you can hear at the beginning and end of the song, singing 'Tschelane' in the Tswana language. I found the song on a favourite compilation of mine called 'African Renaissance Sampler, Music from the South African Broadcasting Corporation Archives."

You can pre-order/save the new record Dig The Mountain! here.

Get your live Stornoway fix with a festival or on their UK tour across October and November - dates and tickets here.

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