During lockdown four people privately commissioned me to write music for loved ones – a great honour and hugely appreciated musical employment at the time. At the time, I roughly recorded these for people to hear them. I felt some of these sounded as if they would have fitted on my 2nd album from 2018 called The Railway - they had that kind of rhythmic, driving feel. I knew I ought to spruce up these rough recordings and release them in a collection.

In a way, this Iron Horse is about pushing through the great difficulties of the international pandemics of 2020-2022. All four new compositions on the album were private tune commissions. The penultimate music track ‘Hud Chapin’ is a North East expression meaning ‘Keep Powering On’.

So here I am, five years further down the line, still laying down more tracks for The Railway. I decided to call the collection The Iron Horse - a name Highlanders sometimes used to describe the powerful steam train engines when they first came to the Highlands.

It seems like an essential extension to the The Railway album - a continuation of the journey.

I decided also to revisit four of my favourite tracks from The Railway. Two of these, Helen’s Song and The Railwayman Air are new live versions recorded on Grandma Napier’s old upright piano in my home studio with ace fiddle player Patsy Reid. These were filmed by Somhairle MacDonald, the chap who designed all my Strathspey Trilogy album covers.

You can watch the films here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q41AXhxFY1U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZkIrXJ79-4

I’ve taken quite an interest in poetry in the last five years or so. I haven’t actually come up with my own railway poem for this particular release, but that’s okay. I’ve discovered some real beauties by leading Scottish poets such as Magi Dickson, Norman MacCaig, Kenneth Steven and an excerpt from a dramatic,nVictorian poem by a university professor written after he took the Iron Horse for the very first time in 18… up through the Highlands. I recite three myself, Kenneth does his own one and I asked my Aunty, Kirsteen Shilson, to recite Magi Gibbon’s amusing poem - well suited to her brilliant and natural comic timing.

So as you listen through to the Iron Horse, after half an hour of music played by some of my very favourite musicians, alongside poems by great Scottish poets and Black 5 steam engines recordings, there’s an epic big finale track that’s worth the wait: called the Memoirs of a Highland Railwayman, feat. Jimmy Gray at 92’

The interviews with Jimmy are by far the most engaging and interesting testimonies that I’ve had during the research phase of any of my Strathspey Trilogy albums. They were just sitting there on file, and I knew I wanted to do something special with them - maybe weave them into the suite of music I wrote especially for Jimmy.