Adrian Nation announces third solo album

Adrian Nation

The spring of 2014 saw the release of the third Adrian Nation album entitled Live At Crossroads which was recorded during his 2013 tour of the Netherlands. Toward the end of 2014 that album was picked up by Andy Donnelly of the CKUA Radio Network in Alberta, Canada and he immediately began playing tracks from the album on his hugely popular weekly show. Other presenters at the station were soon following suit and Adrian’s name quickly spread around the province. This led to the idea of putting together a tour of Alberta and such was the appetite for his music that November 2015 saw Adrian perform 17 shows in eighteen days from Edmonton down to Calgary, from Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan border across to Canmore and Jasper in the Rocky Mountains. The success of this tour led to bookings at major roots and folk music festivals in the summer of 2016 in both Alberta and British Columbia and Adrian will return again this autumn for a further five week tour.

With ongoing tours in the UK and Europe as well as featuring on SkyArts series Guitar Star, it has been a busy and fruitful few years since that last album but the songs for the next began to come through and in early 2017 Adrian headed out to Sardinia with Chris West, producer of his second studio album Fall Or Fly, to Lake Studio to begin work on a new record.

The result is Anarchy And Love. An album which is instantly recognizable as being Adrian Nation yet it also displays not necessarily a change of direction but certainly a divergence of styles. For the first time Adrian has written and recorded songs on electric guitar yet with his clearly unique acoustic style, resulting in a new dynamic and a fresh exciting flavour. Guests on the album include additional guitar from Joel Schwartz (Birds of Chicago) who Adrian met and performed with in Canada last summer, as he did with Gino Mirizio (Pavlo) who plays drums on four tracks of the album. There is also a strong Scottish ingredient evident by a cover of Runrig’s ‘Rocket To The Moon’, a song that speaks of the migration of pioneering Scots to Canada, as well as ‘The Benderloch Stone’, an original song written on the shores of the tiny west coast Scottish village. So it was fitting for this track that fiddle was to be provided by Hannah Fisher (Roddy Woomble, Idlewild, Dougie Maclean).

With contributions also from Jonathan Potts on fiddle and Brad Lang (Barbara Dickson, ABC) on bass, both of whom have performed on Adrian’s previous two studio albums, as well as producer Chris West providing some more bass and piano, Anarchy and Love is very much about a group of fine musicians coming around the main focus of a solo performer and doing so with sensitivity and creativity.

Anarchy And Love is a blend of both politically charged protest, rolling road songs, high energy instrumentals as well as a moving tribute to the life of his father who passed away just before the release of the previous album and as Adrian explains in the sleeve notes, some of these songs are “the songs he left in me”, for a long time a strong contender for the title of the album.

Artist’s website: www.adriannation.com

‘The Benderloch Stone’ – live: