Fair Mothers is the moniker of Kevin Allan, a Scottish songwriter who first came across our radar with an excellent album, Through Them Fingers Yours And Mine, with our friends at Fox Food Records. The record was one of collaboration, with the exceptional Kathryn Joseph lending her talents to the many duets. Allan says he “fail[ed] to capitalize on such illustrious connections [and] sank back into anxious obscurity,” though three years later Fair Mothers is back with not one but two albums, and a whole host of new collaborators in support.
By some miracle or black magic, the albums are coming out on Song, By Toad Records, the Edinburgh label that ceased around eighteen months ago after releasing some of our favourite Scottish bands over the last decade. Indeed, it was a support slot with one of those bands, Meursault, that saw Allan meet Song, By Toad’s Matthew Young, the latter offering an afternoon at a recording studio. Somehow, this escalated into an ambitious twenty-plus song project involving a musicians from Scotland and beyond, resulting in Separate Lives and a second LP as well as a series of accompanying singles.
“We got the core of all those songs in just the one afternoon on my acoustic,” Allan explains, “but it was cold that spring and I kept gravitating over to this squeaky old black piano next to the stove, which relaxed me and all these new melodies began to come out […] They kept turning into new songs that we kept on recording whenever and however we could. And it’s grown into this fantastic big project, involving some really wonderful musicians.”
So far two singles from Separate Lives have been released. A duet with fellow Fox Food alumni Dana Gavanski, ‘Rainfall, Canada’ is a slice of swelling melancholia that balances stark beauty with a kind of world weary self-deprecation. The tone is therefore plaintive yet not quite tortured, some small wick of amusement burning, no matter how black the humour. Think somewhere between Malcolm Middleton and Jason Molina‘s acoustic stuff—beat down yet still breathing, unsure whether to cry or to grin should help arrive, or the worst happen.
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This time featuring Faith Eliott, ‘Undone’ is cut from the same cloth, though something in the sound is brighter and a little more hopeful. Like the wistfulness of early mornings, when one’s problems have not deserted them but at least sit still enough to seem manageable. Where sadness can come to have its own curious comfort if only for a little while.
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Separate Lives is out via Song, By Toad Records on the 14th February and you can pre-order it now.