I sang "Only One Way" for the first time at a gig in Glasgow on the day that the war in Iraq broke out in March 2003. I introduce it, mockingly, as an exploration of the links between cosmetic dentistry and world domination. But, sadly, there's more truth in that link than there should be. The mantra - "make all the trouble we can" - is inspired by the great English writer and political activist, George Monbiot. It's his ethos in life and he makes his own brand of polite trouble both in lucid articles and books (like "Captive State") and in more direct ways too. Find out more about him at www.monbiot.com.
The title track “Faultlines” is the thread on which the others hang. It's deliberately ambiguous - a kind of metaphor for uncertainty, anxiety and loss. I guess quite a few of the tracks have this theme because I think it fuels a lot of what's going on around us right now. The "who looks like you do?" refrain in “Resolution Road” and the notion of "speaking your heart in code" also hint at this distrust of everything unfamiliar. It's at the core of some of the major political decisions of our time. “Harder to Walk These Days Than Run” picks up on this in the fear that if everyone is "odourless" then how on earth do you sniff out the baddies?
I'm constantly inspired by people who "find joy" despite difficult and even desperate life circumstances: indeed it’s the most positive thing I've taken from my previous work. And whilst I'm deeply suspicious of the notion that everyone gets what’s coming to them (it's a fantastic excuse for not tackling societal problems), I do believe in individual resilience and choice. I have very little time for relatively affluent and healthy people who take no responsibility for making their own happiness. But I am fascinated by how people cope with life. These are the themes explored in different ways in both “Sun’s Comin Over the Hill” and "What Are You Waiting For?"
The inspiration for “Waterlily” is the book "Cold Night Lullaby" by Edinburgh writer Colin Mackay. In the early nineties, at the height of the Bosnian war, he and a friend packed up a mini van with tinned food and medical supplies and drove across Europe to the heart of the conflict. He wasn't alone in taking such direct and personal action to help the people of the area. But he had no idea what to expect and quickly got in much deeper than he'd intended. He fell in love, both with the country, which reminded him so much of Scotland, and with a woman. He wrote:
"Her name was Svetlana. She was a widow with two young
children called Ahmad and Ludmilla, and she was a Serb,
a Christian of the Orthodox faith. The village was Muslim.
It had driven its Serbs out over the Drina river, though
Muslim and Serb had lived there together since before the
oldest inhabitants were born. They let Svetlana stay out
of respect, because her husband had been a Muslim who had
been killed fighting for Bosnian independence.
I thought that showed a chink of light in darkness of their
hate, and that where there was light there was hope and
life. But then I still did not know what hate could do.
On the other side of the river were Serbian fighters breathing
vengeance. The morning came that we drove to Sarajevo to
arrange passage for Svetlana and her children on an outgoing
flight. When we returned that afternoon, it was a place
of corpses. The Serbs reserved their greatest hatred for
the Serbian woman they doubtless regarded as a traitor and
a whore."
It’s a story infinitely more strange, complex and tragic than this suggests but you can follow the threads for yourself …
One reviewer described “Skater of the Surface” as "veering dangerously close to facile pop". But it's actually intended to be an ironic piss-take on everything facile, and on people who don't think about anything - which only confirms all the more that people will make up their own minds about what songs mean! “Four String Walls” on the other hand? Well call it facile pop if you like!
“Light on the Shore” was inspired by a friend who worked in a care home for the elderly at the time. He was always full of stories about the people who lived there, and especially about this one particular woman, who was pure mischief; always up for a laugh and the oldest woman in the place, at 93. My friend arrived at work one morning and found her crying in her room. And it shocked him more than it otherwise would because she was normally so cheerful. So he sat with her and asked her what was wrong and she said that she'd woken that morning and, for the first time in many, many years, she'd been afraid to die. She'd thought she was over it. And it got me to thinking about old age and worth and how it can look, from a distance, like losing someone old must be easier than losing someone young. But an old woman is most often someone's mum or the love of someone's entire life. And what's easy about losing that at any time? The other key factor is that she'd grown up in lighthouses as a child. And so the image of "the light on the shore" just seemed to fit.
Rounding off the album, I guess “Azalea Flower”
takes a look at our collective fear of being invaded from
the outside - by a bogeyman. When I was young I really did
leave a handwritten note addressed to a prospective intruder
upon my bed in the room I shared with my younger sister,
Kerry. And I genuinely believed it would be possible to
reason with such a man, if I had to, and that he would spare
us for being wee and harmless. It took me a long time -
and a few years of extreme reasoning as a philosophy student
and tutor - to realise that it might not be the answer to
everything. Indeed, that very realisation fuels a great
deal of my songwriting.
