Willie Campbell - Nothing’s Going To Bring Me Down (2020)

Hailing from the Isle of Lewis, Willie Campbell’s CV includes being one half of Astrid and a founding member of The Reindeer Section alongside Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody as well as fronting The Open Day Rotation and Tumbling Souls in addition to his solo career.

Initially intended as the next Tumbling Souls album, lockdown saw it transform into a solo album, albeit featuring James Clifford on bass with assorted contributions from Keith Morrison, Lloyd Reid, and Neil and Rhona Johnstone. Firmly and proudly folk-rock, it strides purposefully into the world with Leave Home, Reid’s pedal steel bolstering a track that has the potential of a stadium arms-swaying anthem as it builds to its finale. Looking to a better future, Miracles of Joy, Miracles Of Pain opens with a driving drum pattern and ringing circular guitar riff and gallops along with that same sort of Celtic chest-bursting drive upon which Amy Macdonald has built a career. At which point, Keep My Dreams Of Yesterday, a song about looking forward rather than back, slows it down slightly for a slow march beat yet still carries that anthemic air before Morrison’s piano provides the frame for the determinedly positive outlook of the title track ballad, multi-tracked vocals carrying the title refrain.

The frisky acoustic guitar work of Back To The Edge Of The World builds the tempo back up with a country edge in what is basically a love song to Scotland (“lost in Glasgow/And the pace of city streets/It took me so long to remember exactly why my heart still beat”) with its image of the ghosts that those who left returning to the empty houses to find sanctuary, a theme that continues with the no less strident Wolves To Run with a Byrdsian guitar line and lyric that, inspired by the Dileab project exploring the social influences legacy of the Outer Hebrides, talks of not waxing melancholic over photographs old houses that have fallen into ruin but of rebuilding and filling them with life again. Pedal steel resurfacing, the five-minute slow walk soulful Pages Of The Past mellows things out as, backed by reverb guitar, he sings about learning to let go on a number you could hear the vintage era Van Morrison singing. Then, as it heads to the end, the cascading chords of the falsetto voiced Endless Rhythm and the gospel handclap jubilation of Lay Your Burden Down with the Johnstones on violin and cello bring the crowd to their feet before closing the lovely acoustic strummed countrified Home To Say Goodbye, a song about regrets for mistakes made (“I never called her back when she hoped that I would, she wanted just to hear about my life/Now I know that I’ll never see her face again”) and, with its chorus of “Gold, pearls and diamonds/Our memories more precious than them all/Gold pearls and diamonds/Less precious than the hand we hold before eternity’s called”, surely one of the finest things he’s ever written. Reflective and tinged with sadness, but also inspirational and optimistic, this makes a persuasive claim to be up there among the year’s best.