Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.
Roberts: Near where I grew up in central Scotland is the town of Aberfoyle, which was formerly the home place of the Rev. Robert Kirk. Although a godly man, a minister in the Church of Scotland who nominally professed a faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and the redeemer of all humankind, the old beliefs nevertheless ran deep in Kirk’s soul; this is attested by his personal interactions with the Otherworld that are documented in his classic work The Secret Commonwealth Of Elves, Fauns And Fairies. I imagine that he shared with many of his countryfolk at that time a belief in the “little people,” whom according to his description were made of “congeal’d air” and, in that part of Scotland, lived in a “fairy mound” just outside Aberfoyle. Traces of ancient Scottish fairy belief can be seen in such old songs and ballads as “Thomas The Rhymer,” “Tam Lin,” “Alison Cross” and “The Broomfield Hill.” The Aberfoyle fairy mound, into which the Rev. Robert Kirk mysteriously disappeared after circumambulating it thrice, is still a site of pilgrimage for contemporary believers, who beribbon the branches of its trees with spells, prayers and incantations and scatter talismans and other such offerings on its sacred summit.
Video after the jump.
