FUNNY, the people you encounter while jogging through the City of the Dead. Singer-songwriter Findlay Napier remembers one particular day when he was out for a run. He lived in Glasgow’s east end at the time, and the route he eventually settled on took him up Alexandra Parade, behind the Cathedral and up into the Necropolis.

“I’d go up the hill and try to reach John Knox. I could never quite make it that far, and that became my bar to judge how fit I was getting,” Napier says. “One day I made it to the top, partly because I’d seen these kids, goths, walking down the hill towards me. I thought they were going to take the mickey out of me but instead they started shouting encouraging things, and they got me up the hill.”

And this is why Findlay’s new album, Glasgow, opens with a song written for them, and entitled Young Goths in the Necropolis. It begins with the peal of the Cathedral bells, recorded one Sunday morning at John Knox’s feet. The opening lines: “Up there in the graveyard where all the weirdos go/ I saw you making footprints in the freshly sprinkled snow.”

Glasgow is an unusual album by an unusual songwriter. Napier showed his songwriting gifts on his 2015 debut solo album, VIP, whose subjects ranged from Hedy Lamarr to the Japanese soldier who continued to fight the Second World War until 1974. The Sunday Herald has praised his “songcraft and wit in the Difford and Tilbrook tradition” and the Irish American Times described his music as a “beautiful amalgam of Scottish soul, funk and folk.”

Napier’s ravenous magpie eye has alighted, for the new album, on many different institutions in Glasgow: not just the Necropolis, but also the Blue Lagoon fish and chip shop at Central Station, the old Locarno dancehall on Sauchiehall Street, and the fabled Clyde shipyards. One of the most interesting songs, Wire Burners, is about homeless people who exist by collecting and selling scrap metal from construction sites.

Napier has covered other people’s songs, too, from The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops to Emma Pollock’s Marchtown and Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice.

Countless songs have been written about cities – Springsteen’s Atlantic City, Jimmy Webb’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix and The Stranglers’ Goodbye Toulouse are just three to come to mind. When it comes to albums about, or inspired by, specific cities, it’s a smaller, more select list, and Glasgow – home, after all, to many of Scotland’s finest groups and singers – now joins it.

Napier, 39 next month, was born in Glasgow, in 1978, but he and his family almost immediately relocated northwards, in Grantown on Spey. As he grew older he made the occasional visit back to the city of his birth before deciding, aged 17, to live here full-time. The city has been his home now for 21 years.

“I was at Looe Festival in Cornwall and was talking to Boo [Hewerdine, his friend, collaborator and producer] about what we should do as a follow-up to VIP,” he says. “I had lots of songs and had the idea of doing a band album, but he said, ‘It might be a good idea to do something simple that reflects what it is you do live’.

“I said I had had an idea of doing an album about Glasgow, and about being in Glasgow, and Boo immediately said, ‘That’s it’. The minute we started talking, we started drawing up a list of songs.”

At Hewerdine’s suggestion Napier began casting around for songs to cover, in addition to his self-penned numbers. He took to Facebook and asked for suggestions; in time he received no fewer than 85 responses, many of which were for songs by The Blue Nile. “I remember,” he says, “when I heard A Walk Across the Rooftops [the title track of the trio’s astonishing 1984 debut], I was instantly transported: I thought, bloody hell, this is fantastic.”

In the album notes Napier observes that there’s a “glorious moment” between receiving your final exam results and graduating. “I remember those weeks,” he writes of his time at RSAMD, “as the sunniest, more carefree I have ever spent in Glasgow. Every time I hear this … song I’m reminded of days hanging out between the city centre and the west end, barbecues, carry-outs and late-night sing-songs in tenement flats.”

Emma Pollock’s Marchtown is another interesting choice; lest we’ve forgotten (or didn’t know in the first place), Marchtown is the original name of Strathbungo, on the city’s Southside, where Napier now lives. Another song, Glasgow, by Julia Doogan (“one of Glasgow’s hidden songwriting gems” is his view of her) refers to streets readying themselves for another fight “between the boys in blue and green and white”; it’s no surprise that he recalls this song whenever there’s an Old Firm game on.

As for Cod Liver Oil …: Hamish Imlach died all of 21 years ago but Napier is old enough to have seen him play the song in person, at Pittentrail Inn in Rogart, Sutherland (a show, apparently, that kept going until five in the morning). “I’d been told to sing that song by various folk over the years but had never got round to it, so this album was the perfect excuse.”

There’s More to Building Ships, one of six Napier originals, was inspired by a chat with his father, a marine engineer and occasional builder of ships, about bringing the Clyde yards back to life. Napier snr worked at Kvaerner's yard and at UIE, the old John Brown's yard, and was also chief engineer on boats that had been built at Ferguson's yard.

“He was involved in building the last commercial ship at Kvaerner. That would be in ’97 or ’98. We were living in a flat in North Street at the time, and dad would come and take us out to dinner when he was in Glasgow. He’d arrive on a Thursday night and say to me and my flat-mates, ‘Right, who’s for a curry?’

“He'd worked on tankers and bulk carriers then he got into the health and safety side and then, in the end, the shipbuilding side.

“For the song I wrote the opening line, ‘There’s more to building ships than smashing champagne of the stern’. When you look at the photographs and you go to the library and go through all the books, that’s all you see.

“But it’s a different story when you talk to the people who were involved in shipbuilding. My brother-in-law Mark’s father and brother were. It wasn’t very nice, it wasn’t pretty: it was cold, and dirty and hard. Jez Lowe, the songwriter from County Durham, has a great song called Black Trade, which talks about the shipbuilding guys doing horrible work. Mark’s dad eventually died of pneumonia, exacerbated by the asbestos in his lungs."

So many different aspects of Glasgow in 11 songs, then. “The album is like my personal photograph of the city,” he says. “I tried to get as much humour in as possible, because I’ve always felt that that has been an important part of it.

“I didn’t want to make it all doom and gloom and dirt, although Glasgow has that dark side. That’s what so brilliant about the cover picture, by Raymond Depardon [of the Magnum picture agency, which shows a couple of Glasgow tenement kids blowing bubble gum].

“You see the black tenements in the picture, which I remember seeing when I first came down as a kid. You see the dark backdrop, and the humour shining through. The picture was taken in Govan, on the corner of Luath Street and Howat Street, looking north to Taransay Street and the shipyard wall. The photo of me on the back cover, and most of the ones on the inside, are taken in exactly the same spot, 30-odd years later."

“I made a few visits back to Glasgow when I was younger," he adds. "I remember coming down here to see the Garden Festival in 1988, which was amazing. I saw something about it the other day and thought, bloody hell, that was 30 years ago next year.

“Sauchiehall Street was still black, it was only later that they cleared it up. I can remember cars on Buchanan Street, and a big board along where St Enoch’s Square is. The St Enoch Centre was either being built or finished, and I went in maybe a couple of years later and seeing a skating rink. So I have lots of these really strange memories of Glasgow.”

We discuss some of the great bands and singers who have come from Glasgow. “Frankie Miller, whom I love, and Del Amitri – I was a huge fan of theirs when I was a teenager. Travis, too – I loved that album that had Why Does It Always Rain on Me? on it [The Man Who, released in 1999]. It was great. When that came out, a lot of people who I didn’t think would like that sort of acoustic pop, really loved it. When it arrived, it was really clean and simple good pop songs. The videos were great, too. The Blue Nile, I got into them so late. Robert Buchanan’s solo album was stunning. I could do with hearing more of their stuff.”

In common with many other musicians, Napier funded the new album by means of the Kickstarter website: essentially, people who liked his music, or were drawn to the idea of an album about Glasgow, dipped into their pockets. He even managed to raise £1,000 in order to use Depardon’s shot for the cover.

In the end, a total of £5,266 was raised – well in excess of the target of £4,000 – and 163 people contributed. One woman who was particularly generous has received an ‘executive producer’ credit on the album. Kickstarter says music projects have attracted more than a million backers via the site.

“Kickstarter seems to be the only way to do it these days,” he reflects. “It would be lovely for a record company to pay me to do an album but I don’t think that really exists any more. And it’s getting harder and harder for a record company to make money now. Although [Kickstarter] means a lot more work for me, I’ll probably make more money than from using a record company. But I’m really grateful to everyone who contributed – I was really chuffed with the way people got behind it.”

Napier has a lot to keep him busy. Apart from his solo and band projects he’s the organiser of the annual Glasgow Songwriting Festival and is one of the tutors at the Songwriting Retreat at Moniack Mhor, outside Inverness. It turns out, too, that he’s more than happy to come back home to Glasgow, and the south side.

“I often flirt with the idea of moving back up north,” he says. “My brother Hamish [a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with Karen Matheson and Eddi Reader, amongst others] has just moved up north. But not really for me, no. In the south side it’s just glorious – trees, and greenery, and a never-ending supply of the most fantastic home-style curry.”

He laughs. “It’s like my upstairs neighbour said to me: ‘They’re going to have to carry me out of this f------ flat in a box.”

Glasgow is released on Cheerygroove Records. www.findlaynapier.com