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Roseanne Reid
Singer-songwriter Roseanne Reid on her new EP – and being the scion of a famous Scottish family
SOMETIMES, to write a song, you just need to be able to wait a while, Roseanne Reid tells me. “I would love to be someone who writes every day, but I’ve not got that sort of discipline,” she admits. “I’m very much someone who is patient enough to just wait. I know it will come eventually. And it can take months in between ideas. It can take me months to write anything at all.
But I know I will have an idea in the middle of Tesco one day.”
What with Covid, patience has not just been needed for songwriting this last year, of course. Reid is 28 years old and lives in Dundee with her wife. She is the daughter of a Proclaimer and is currently doing a horticulture course at college while working in a plant nursery. She is also slowly, patiently growing her own career as a singersongwriter.
Appropriately enough, she has a new EP coming out, called Horticulture. And yes, it’s her lockdown record.
“All four songs were written and recorded during this last year,” she explains.
“It was quite an organic process. It was a very loose idea I had at the start of lockdown to try and get some new music out. I invested in home recording equipment and just did it myself.”
The result is an EP of Scotsflavoured Americana that showcases both Reid’s ear for surging yet melancholic melodies and a voice that is both intimate and affecting.
It’s a Thursday afternoon, late March, when we speak. Reid is a bright, enthusiastic conversationalist, talking away about music and friends and family on her lunch break.
She was 14 when she told her parents that she wanted to be a songwriter. Half a lifetime ago. She’s spent the years in between becoming one, with one album to her name and a growing live reputation, having toured with the likes of Teddy Thompson and the late Justin Townes Earle. She’s in the spring of her career and beginning to flourish. Or she was until coronavirus intervened.
“I feel as if I know what my sound is now, and I know what works for me in terms of the musical side of it.
“But in terms of difficult stuff like trying to really grow your fanbase and getting those bigger gigs, it was happening and the pandemic ground it to a halt unfortunately.
“But I think in a way the time at home has allowed me to see what I achieved pre-Covid and I am proud of that. I know I’ve got a solid fanbase and I’ve got people who genuinely want to listen to what I do. And I know I’ve got a second album in me.”
That’s for the future. In the meantime, we have an EP to be getting on with, one that salutes the beauty of north-east Fife and laments the loss of Earle, with whom Reid toured in 2019, before his early death last August of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 38.
The song Tentsmuir Sky offers the former. “Tentsmuir is a quite unbelievable place,” Reid explains. “It’s so vast and it feels quite mysterious. You’ve got Tentsmuir Forest, which is a beautiful green space in itself. And then you walk for not even half a mile and you’re on the shorefront and you’re standing at the edge of the ocean. There is no protection. You are totally exposed to the elements. The wind goes right through you.
“It’s just one of these places. It never leaves you once you’ve been there. It leaves its mark on you.”
Reid’s music can also have that sense of space in it, but alternatively it can be close-up and heartfelt, as in Fly High, her song written in response to Earle’s death.
“I don’t think there is any other way I could remember him other than through a song,” she says of Fly High.
What do she think we have lost? “I think the world has lost a colossal singer-songwriter, someone who really had so much to give. I’m sure he had many more albums in him and that is difficult to accept.
“But also, you’ve got to strip it back. His family has lost a husband and a father and a son. There’s that whole level of pain as well. A huge loss and one that was so premature.”
My mum taught me the basics on the guitar and helped me with my vocals as well
Earle was, of course, the son of Steve Earle so, like Reid, had the experience of following in his father’s footsteps. Reid is the daughter of Proclaimer Craig Reid, although, she points out, her mum Petra (the daughter of politician Margo MacDonald) had as much to do with her musical development as her dad.
“My mum was the one who taught me my first chords on the guitar. She taught me the basics on that and tried to help me with my vocals as well, because I don’t naturally project all that much. I’m not a loud singer at all and she really tried to help me with singing from the tummy. So, yeah, my mum deserves a massive amount of credit for getting me into music and instruments in general.”
Her father was encouraging too. But he was honest as well. When Reid announced she wanted to be a singersongwriter it was her dad who pointed out how tough the industry can be.
“I remember my dad saying there’s thousands, millions of tremendous songwriters out there that you’ll never hear of and the vast majority of people never make much money from music.
“When I’m really struggling to see where this is going and see where I can actually make music sustainable for me and my family long-term, I’ve remembered that.
“There are lots of people like me who are good at what they do but struggle to reach a point where they are making a great living from it. I think it’s important not to get carried away. You’ve got to be realistic and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
That realism may be behind her current swerve into horticultural studies, although that’s not the only explanation.
“I’ve always had a fascination with the natural world and the various complex and vast ecosystems that sustain life on this planet. And in these times when all the natural stuff has been stripped away for pre-packaged and ready-made stuff and industrial consumerism, it just felt like, ‘What can I do to help?’
“I wouldn’t say I’m doing it because I need to. I’m doing it because I really do love the subject and we’re lucky enough to have a garden here, and I want to make that a nice little sanctuary while we’re all at home more.”
Are you naturally green-fingered, Roseanne? “I’m not entirely convinced I was particularly green-fingered at the start, but it’s one of these subjects where you get thrown in at the deep end. ‘Here, away and prune this.’
“You very much learn on the job.
I’ve learned a lot in a short space of time.”
Reid is one of the growing numbers of Scottish and Irish artists who have embraced Americana and are twisting it to their own ends. In that sense you could argue she is following in the footsteps of her father. I wonder if she ever wanted to rebel when she was younger, to embrace, I don’t know, dubstep or S Club 7?
“I never felt the need to rebel musically. But I did have a lot of rubbish I listened to. I was in primary six, primary seven, when S Club 7 were really big. You’re just immersed by that sort of pop music and it’s played at all the parties and the discos.”
THERE ain’t no party like an S Club Party, as we all know, Roseanne. “Amen,” she says, laughing. “A lot of that I did enjoy. Some of it I still enjoy. I’ll admit that.” But it’s not what she does. “In terms of what I write, it’s always been along a rootsy, folky vein.”
We talk about her voice. What I love about it, I tell her, is that it has this thrilling draggy catch to it.
“I think it happened pretty organically, because I started out doing open mics on the folk circuit and my voice sounded very, very different in the early days. It didn’t sound as ragged. It had a much cleaner sound and it probably wasn’t as rich. It’s developed over the years from just doing loads of gigs and really honing how I wanted to sound.”
Unlike her father, she doesn’t sing in her own accent. It’s something she has reflected on.
“There are a couple of songs where I go, ‘No, this sounds good in my own accent’. But I genuinely believe most of the stuff I write sounds better in a kind of American accent. That doesn’t detract from how much truth there is in these songs or how authentic they are. It’s just the way I like to sing them.”
There speaks an artist who knows exactly who she is. I leave her to her songs and her plants. It’s time for her to bloom.