Sound Of Scotland
Idlewild’s Roddy Woomble spent lockdown recording an album on a Hebridean island
Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble talks his new solo album, Lo! Soul
RODDY WOOMBLE was meant to have spent part of 2020 on the road with his Idlewild bandmates, celebrating 25 years of the band with a series of big UK shows.
Instead, locked down at his Hebrides home, he ended up creating his fifth solo album.
Recorded mostly remotely – with collaborators including Idlewild bassist Andrew Mitchell and electronic musician Danny Grant – Lo! Soul is a first for Roddy, who says he “didn’t even have an email address until I was 25”.
It combines the ambient soundscapes and abstract spoken word imagery of last year’s Everyday Sun EP, also recorded with Mitchell, with optimistic melodies and a little bit of wanderlust.
That mixture of moods, says Roddy, is partly because they never set out to make an album in the first place.
“With creative things, the more you plan the less they’re going to work out,” he says, “but generally there’s a loose idea when you’re working on something that’s going to become an album.
“But I’m really a melodic songwriter, so when I was sat at home on my own working on songs before sending them to Andrew, it felt like we were purposely being obtuse trying to pull the melodies apart.
“We were about three-quarters of the way through when we realised we had an album.”
With a title that Roddy describes as “a call to attention to the self”, the album takes the listener on a journey from the remote Scottish islands via a Parisian café to the empty streets of a quarantined Los Angeles, summer-haze backing vocals by Jill Lorean bouncing off of buildings.
Take It To The Street channels the magic of a city after dark through lounge piano and a warped beat, while
Lo! Soul sets its yearning melody to click-track and synth.
“André Breton said that poetry is like dreaming with your eyes open, and I think there’s an element of that with songwriting – you can put yourself anywhere,” says Roddy.
“I like to travel when writing songs – I don’t feel like they all need to be set in the Hebrides, or wherever.”
Used to recording in a studio setting, Roddy describes the process this time as challenging and creative.
“The more you plan the less they’re going out” to work
“You’re not self-conscious, recording on your own. You’ve only yourself to blame if you can’t come up with something,” he says. “It might be why there are more words on this record than on anything else I’ve put out.”
A run of solo shows, rescheduled from last year, are now planned as album release shows, while Idlewild’s big anniversary tour is set to go ahead in November.
“We’ll definitely play those shows whenever we’re allowed to play them,” says Roddy.
“The music world has pretty much been on pause, so when it restarts it’ll be like those two years didn’t happen. We can celebrate the 25th anniversary on the 27th anniversary if we need to.”
Lo! Soul is out now digitally on A Modern Way, and will be released on August 13 on vinyl and CD. Idlewild play Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on November 27.