and bouzouki and Sean O Donnell on guitar. Our f i r s t g ig toge the r wa s at Ar r an Folk Fe s t i val in June 2002 . The months that followed were spent playing folk clubs and festivals when I could fit them alongside my studies at RSAMD until I graduated in July 2003.
In autumn 2004 I recorded my second album ‘A Different Life’.
I hadn’t really enjoyed recording my first album ‘A Day Like Today’ due to the pressure of feeling it needed to be released within the same year that I won the Young Trad Award. I felt it was rushed and could have been done much better had I been a bit more experienced and taken more time.
I was also struck with laryngitis in the middle of recording, which hampered progress adding to the pressure I felt all the more.
I think of that album as a snapshot of where I was when I just started out.
My approach to recording ‘the difficult second album’ was somewhat more cautious. Joe Rusby came on board as co-producer and we decided to self-release on my own record label ‘White Fall Records’. The band had gone through a line up change and I was now touring as a trio with Jamie still on fiddle and our good pal Steve Byrne on guitar and bouzouki. We had several guest musicians including the amazing Brian Finnegan on flute/whistles and Duncan Lyall on double bass. The album was launched at Celtic
Connections in January 2005 and again well received but having spent most of my budget on the recording costs I had very little left to spend on promotion, a lesson learnt for the future.
In 2006 Jamie and I married and moved from Glasgow back to Dumfriesshire in South West Scotland where I grew up. We had enjoyed living in Glasgow but I’m very much a country person and had begun to feel a bit like a caged bird living in tenement flats. Musically I was beginning to write more of my own songs alongside learning and re-working traditional material. My love of local history was replenished and I wrote several songs based on historical figures/stories from my home area. 2008 saw the release of my third album ‘Too Long Away’. The material for ‘Too Long Away’
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