The Herald - The Herald Magazine
From Sweden with love James Yorkston on his love of collaboration, touring with John Martyn and his new album
TEDDY JAMIESON
ILOVE pop music, don’t get me wrong. I love a well-put-together pop song. But there’s a real beauty and excitement in exploring what’s going to happen when you just go into a room with someone and you don’t really know what anyone’s going to bring to the table.” Near the end of our conversation, James Yorkston is summing up what for him is so often the starting point. The musician, songwriter, Fifer, is no stranger to collaborating with new musicians and surprising everyone, including himself.
“It can be thrilling,” he says. “It can be a disaster as well, of course, but it’s something I love to do.”
In short, when it comes to James Yorkston, uncertainty is a mission statement. Or experiment is the default setting, if you prefer. If anything sums up Yorkston’s fascinating, meandering two decades and counting in music it’s that willingness to not do what he did before.
There’s a temptation even now to peg
Yorkston as simply a folky singersongwriter who offers up songs full of sea frets, bruised hearts and woozy rhythms. And there is something in that. But it underestimates his love for stretching himself and his music.
That desire might be most obvious in his involvement in Yorkston Thorne Khan, the Indian-folk-jazz fusion trio he plays in with sarangi player Suhail
Yusuf Khan and bassist and composer Jon Thorne.
But, really, collaboration is often his modus operandi. Over the years he has worked with everyone from Four Tet to Norma and Mike Waterson, after all.
IT can certainly be heard on his new album The Wide, Wide River, the gorgeous, warm, often joyous and, yes, at times woozy, offering on which he is joined by Swedish musicians The Second Hand Orchestra, led by Karl-Jonas Winqvist.
The result may well be the first great album of 2021.
It’s still December 2020 when we speak on a cold clear day in Cellardyke where he lives. A week before Christmas at the end of the strangest of years.
The Wide, Wide River was recorded before coronavirus became a clear and pleasant danger and is the result of a way of working that has since become impossible.
It grew out of Yorkston’s friendship with Winqvist. Yorkston was touring Germany when Winqvist invited him to play a gig in Sweden. To make the journey worthwhile they added in a recording session.
Out of that grew the collaboration with The Second Hand Orchestra, a group of musicians which includes cellist and pianist Emma Nordenstam and violinist Ulrika Gyllenberg.
Peter Moren of Peter, Bjorn and John fame and nyckelharpa player Emma Nordenstam were also involved.
Yorkston brought along the bare bones of tunes and lyrics and the music was then largely improvised in the studio. It gave birth to an album of infectious, rolling songs that offer a new texture to Yorkston’s palette.
“It did feel as though I was playing with a rock and roll band, which is kind of missing from my career,” Yorkston suggests, “because I’ve never really had a band who played like that.”
The pleasure for him was the distinctive new flavours the Swedish musicians added to the mix.
“Sometimes with musicians, especially if they’re nervous, they want to play as many notes as possible to show everyone that they can play a lot of notes.
“There was none of that at all. Everyone there was my favourite type of musician. There was no huge ego going on. They just wanted to fit in and make the music as good as possible.”
Take a song like There is No Upside, he says. “It’s a real rattle bag. I can hear