Scotland's Music: Two Down from Anna Massie

Anna Massie is a skilled backing musician on stage and in the recording studio, an ace collaborator at band work (she is a member of RANT and Blazin’ Fiddles), a gifted producer, and as the creator of The Black Isle Correspondent videos and presenter of BBC Scotland’s flagship folk radio show Travelling Folk, an award winning broadcaster.

Two Down is her recently released solo album

Indeed, Anna has a lot on her plate and many ways to share her musical gifts. So it makes sense that is has been some time -- since 2003 to be exact-- since she has recorded a solo album.

“I have been extremely lucky to work with a wide range of wonderful musicians over the years, but this is the first time I’ve recorded an entire Ot’album myself, playing all the musical roles,” Anna said.

“It’s ben a challenge, but a lot of fun. I’ve loved having complete creative control over the record and being able to explore my own individual sound.”

Anna is well known for her creative dexterity on guitar and her skill on fiddle. If you watched The Black Isle Correspondent you’ll know she is also a singer (if that’s new to you, this album is fine chance to hear her voice). Banjo, mandolin, tenor guitar, keyboards and mouth trumpet (“it’s exactly what you think, and it’s a real thing,” Anna points out in the sleeve notes) are instruments she brings into the mix as well.

A fine gathering of music it is, one that allows Anna space to show her creativity as a songwriter, arranger, and producer as well as a player. Her dry and wry wit comes out, too.

That wit is especially in evidence in her selection of songs to cover.

Among those are My Life Is Over Again from Cape Breton ’s JP Cormier which deftly pokes fun at a number of country music song tales, and Australian Tom Morgan’s The Outdoor Type, which finds the singer poking fun at herself for how much she’s not that.

On a bit of of a gentler note, Anna opens the album with her song Thanks for Writing, a light rhyming piece that yet contains some of that balance of connection and isolation found during lockdown times.

Dinner Medals is a lovely tune with a funny reason for its name (I will let you read the sleeve notes to find out about that).

The title tune of the Worth the Wait set is gentle, thoughtful, and lively, written to celebrate the marriage of Lauren MacColl and Ewan MacPherson (you have met both of them through their music here along the Music Road). It pairs with tunes written to honor a Black Isle naturalist and to mark the end of the first lockdown time in Scotland. ,

Tunes for friends’ weddings make up another set; there’s a tune written to mark one hundred days of the Black Isle Correspondent during lockdown, and a lovely arrangement of traditional tunes Battle of Waterloo and Out on the Ocean.

There’s also The Lovat Bar, a fine tune Anna wrote for her students in guitar class at the annual Blazin’ in Beauly music school that Blazin’ Fiddles members host each summer.

Two Down is almost a solo album -- but it seems only right that Anna invited her parents to join in.

Goren Berg’s Polka is a a tune her dad Bob Massie wrote and on which he plays mandolin. Her mum. Alison Massie, joins on spoons for that tune and also adds spoon percussion to that set of wedding tunes mentioned earlier.

There’s a tune inspired by Anna’ parents, too -- or at least their garden experiences. Anna spent the first pf Scotland’s lockdowns back in the Black Isle where she saw first hand how the veg growing was going. The tune is called The Pioneer Waltz. With that tune, and other songs and tunes on Two Down, you will have a fine time, whether you are exploring all the musical lines, laughing at the sound of the mouth trumpet, or taking the quieter tunes including The Pioneer Waltz, The Love Bar, and Out on the Ocean.

Anna has remarked that what she’d wish for Two Down is that it gives listeners a smile. That it does, on many levels.

You may also wish to see
Lauren MacColl’s album Haar, on which Anna plays guitars
About Blazin’ Fiddles
RANT’s album called Spin
From the Katie McNally Trio, the album Now More Than Ever. , which Anna produced

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Scotland's music: Haar from Lauren MacColl

Haar. In the northeast of Scotland that is the name for a mist that often comes in across the coast. It lends a feeling of uncertainty as one walks about and tries to find one’s way.

Musician Lauren MacColl had some of the grimmer aspects of what haar can suggest on her mind as she began writing music for an album, and working on music commissioned for Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters., MacColl’s instrument is the fiddle.

She found her way through the fog, though, to peace and hope.

“This music was written during a year of huge personal loss, when it often felt that the haar had engulfed me and those closest to me,” she said.

“Working on this album has been a solace,” MacColl continued, “and at the heart of it is a strong pull towards the coast both its fragility and its strength. Haar --- tor me-- is a reminder that that after the mist always comes the light.”

That idea appears that more than once in the music MacColl has composed and has chosen for the album she named Haar.

Most of is inspired by landscapes, seascapes, and stories of the place she calls home, the Black Isle in the northeast Highlands of Scotland.

The Black Isle is not an island, though it has a good bit of coast as it is a peninsula bounded by the Cromarty Firth, the Beauly Firth, and the Moray Firth. It lies just a bit north of Inverness. People have been coming to settle there, to work the waters and the land, since the time of the Picts and before.

Several of the tunes Lauren MacColl offers on Haar were inspired by histories of shipwrecks and lives lost at sea, and the effect these had on the communities left behind. In these tunes, MacColl has a gift for evoking hardship, change, and resilience through the music of her fiddle.

There are happier stories in the journey on which she tales her listeners as well.

One such is the set which pairs the tunes The Lost Bell and Women of the Shore. The fast paced opening tune is inspired by the true story of two bells cast in Holland for churches on the Black Isle back in 1624. They both almost made but...one lies beneath the waters to this day. That, Lauren decided, warranted a lively tune.

She pairs it with a tune of history and resilience honoring the women who had such a large part of in the lives of fishing communities in the Black Isle and all along Scotland’s coasts and waters.

Another story of resilience is honored and illuminated in the tune Culbin. The town of Culbin, east of Nairn, was overcome by a great sandstorm in 1694. Residents fled and did not return.

About a hundred years ago, Scotland’s Forestry Commission began planting trees, and now, as Lauren writes in her sleeve notes

”Culbin is a thriving home to nature.It is an ever changing place where shifting sands continue to remind us of the power of our coasts. A place full of dragonflies and singing seals.”

That love of and respect for nature, and a view of changing life along the coast both cleared eye and poetic come through clearly in Lauren’s work. Whether she is writing a tune inspired by the northern lights, or changes in spring weather, or a memory of how her grandmother’s love for the area her family calls home inspires her own love of the place and her work to share its stories through her music, without speaking a word Lauren evokes history. community, and landscape.

It is MacColl’s clear storytelling with her fiddle that anchors and informs the music on Haar.

She has gathered a group of musical friends to come along with her on the journey too, several of them with their own ties to the area. You will hear Rachel Newton on harp and spoken word, James Lindsay on bass, Alice Allen on cello, Jennifer Austin on piano, Anna Massie on acoustic and nylon guitars, and Mairearad Green on accordion.

You may also wish to see

Lauren MacColl has other projects on the go. Among them: she is a member of the bands RANT and Salt House, and the duo Heal and Harrow with Rachel Newton.
Rachel Newton is also part of the Spell Songs project
James LIndsay is a member of the top band Breabach
The title track of Haar is part of this story, in the Music for Shifting Times series at Wandering Educators

-->Music Road is reader supported . Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Another way to support: you could