Sometimes it is the lower key and lesser heard that most catches the ear, and Adam Holmes a prime example. If you follow the contemporary Scottish folk (and beyond) scene, you may well know Holmes already, for having one of the more soulful instruments in the country, a warm burr with a distant flavor of John Martyn. Starting off as a member of neo-trad outfit Rura, Holmes’ singing and songs were a tidy contrast to their instrumental elemental fare of fiddle, flute and pipes. With time, the mix became perhaps too schizophrenic, he needing a platform to stay on stage the whole set. This he found, forming a band, the Embers, lasting for a well-received year or three.
Since then he has been on his own, give or take a duo, with Heidi Talbot, and a brief membership of Anglo-Scots folk-rock supergroup, The Magpie Arc. A veritable one man industry, he releases his own albums and sorts out his own gigs and shows, no middlemen to sour the pitch. As such, the gap between he and his audience is thin; if you fancy him writing a song for you, or for him to play in your own home, he will; contact him, via his website.
Songs for My Father, the second of two recent releases, each dedicated to cover versions, is in his father’s memory, the songs of his childhood and his father’s record collection. (The earlier one, last year’s The Voice of Scotland, covered more the traditional songs he grew up with, together with a couple that have near earnt that same soubriquet: we included “You Are My Sunshine” from that set recently.) Holmes’ father, dying of throat cancer, made a last request his son record his favorite songs; it was a task that took Holmes ten years to work up the initiative to address.
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The title More Than A Whisper – Celebrating The Music Of Nanci Griffith probably says it all, given the disproportionate heft of the footprint left behind by this self-effacing singer. Her mild and bookish persona, all ankle socks and cardigans, might suggest a small town librarian or primary school teacher, but what she gave, and what you got, was so very much more. A consummate writer of literate story songs (she called them folkabilly), Griffith could captivate any an audience with her Texas charm and sweet/sour voice, attracting the best musicians to play by her side. Both as a writer and an interpreter, she lived and breathed the characters in songs she made her own, several of which are well on the to becoming standards. Her run of albums, from her 1978 debut There’s A Light Beyond These Woods through to Storms, a decade and a bit later, was little short of astonishing, the traction of the one building on the next until she became quite the star. And if she became, latterly, drawn, or possibly led, more to the mainstream, with the country hayride honed down a little, still the songs remained the same, elegant constructions, meticulously put together. Illness quietened her workload this century, her last album made in 2012, before her death in 2021.