Eddi Reader – Vagabond (Reveal Records)

Her first album since 2009, Vagabond is a stylistic potpourri, with the loose theme of her personal experiences of travelling and living on the road, and remembrance of family members and matters, past and present. It is also a reflection of how music (and if truth be told how the 1988 number one hit – Perfect – she scored with her band at the time, Fairground Attraction, opened a few unexpected doors) has taken her all over the world, and, metaphorically speaking, through the centuries as she has delved and discovered music from the ages: for instance, her well-received Sings the Songs of Robert Burns album of 2003, where she set music to the words of the Scottish Bard.

Featuring many of her familiar musician friends, including Ian Carr, Alan Kelly, John McCusker and Boo Hewerdine, it’s an album that rises above the turmoil that has inhabited her life: Reader had just married longtime partner John Douglas, when it was discovered in 2012 that he had an incurable illness. And while his condition has improved, there’s a strong sense that this is an album about life-affirmation and memories, feelings that perhaps only truly rise to the surface in times of anguish.

Vagabond is a mixture of generally gentle folk, country, French cabaret and pop; from the accordion-inflected title track itself (based on a John Masefield poem) to the personal narrative of the Declan O’Rourke song Married to the Sea – delivered in much the same vein as Joni MItchell. Reader is in fine voice throughout, for instance on Edinah, a song influenced by the life of Amy Winehouse, and a song dedicated to all musical humans trying to survive, as Reader puts it in the album notes; while Snowflakes in the Sun is one of several excursions to the land of dreamy old school, jazzy, soft-shoe shuffles, that cant help but uplift the spirits. Even a time-honoured cover of the jazz standard I’ll Never Be The Same, is given new life by the wonderful musicality, a feature throughout the album, where little moments of flair and skill dot the musical landscape.

The back-to-back Scottish traditional songs of Buain Na Rainich and Ma Ain Country, both beautifully rendered, sees Reader sing in the ancient Scots Gaelic tongue for the first time, with Gaelic singer Karen Metheson (of Capercaillie) for accompaniment.

Then there’s the life-affirming waltz version of a Michael Marra song (now sadly deceased), one of the songwriting greats, north of the border. And Midnight in Paris 1979 recounts her time when barely out of her teens Reader was actually living life on the road, busking in Paris.

As she says, it totally changed her life. But still, the Vagabond travels on.

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