When Kris Drever released his debut solo album, Dark Water, in 2006, it was still early days for Lau, the folk trio he plays with alongside fiddler Aidan O’Rourke and accordionist Martin Green. Already an acclaimed session musician and collaborator, he’d formed the band in 2005 but it would be two years after that before Lau released an album of their own, Lightweights And Gentlemen.
The band quickly became a live sensation, being named Best Group at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2013. But they’ve grown in stature in the studio too, and last year their bravely experimental album The Bell That Never Rang was placed at No 1 on the Sunday Herald’s Top 50 Scottish Albums of 2015 list. After a quieter summer last year when Drever became a dad, Lau are currently planning to throw themselves into 2016’s summer music festival calendar.
“On the last Lau record, with the exception of Ghosts, everything was co-written,” says Drever of the Lau method of working. “We developed pieces of music and developed top lines that included vocal top lines which I then took away and constructed lyrics around.
“It’s quite a proscribed way of writing but if you’ve got three people trying to write a song, the nature of the process is that it has to be. Sometimes you get the feeling with a track that it’s the spirit for the trio or for a solo thing or even, occasionally, other singers.”
As a songwriter, Drever has always relished a collaborative way of working, and a couple of songs co-written with Boo Hewerdine appear on the new solo album.
“Sometimes if a song doesn’t get finished quickly, the momentum goes and it might take a month to finish it,” he admits. “Or you end up agonising over things that don’t really matter and you just need somebody else there to go ‘I actually think that what you had already was fine.’ Sometimes it’s just a case of playing it to somebody who knows your craft, to have a second professional opinion.”
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