Emmylou Harris’s Discography – Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town (1978)

After Dolly’s death this week the tribute statements and social media posts flowed in from family, friends, collaborators, fans and people all over the world. Her longtime friend and Trio collaborator Emmylou Harris did things differently. 

Emmylou is now 79 herself and was in Europe playing her farewell tour. She had made no public statement about Dolly’s death. Instead she chose to open her show on Wednesday evening in Stockholm, Sweden alone with an acoustic guitar by singing ‘To Daddy’, a song written by Dolly which she had been gifted by her friend back in the seventies. 

At the end of the track she simply said ‘I love you, Dolly.’ 

It was a fitting tribute to a musical connection that began many decades before. The story of how Emmylou came to record ‘To Daddy’ for her fifth album ‘Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town’ sums up much of what everyone loves about Dolly Parton: her talent, her kindness and her steely ambition.

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DOLLY PARTON FOREVER

I’ve always known what song I would listen to at the dreaded moment I found out Dolly Parton was dead. The Grass is Blue might sound on the surface like a breakup song, but for me it is a song of mourning, of sorrow, an exploration of the way humans can lie to themselves to cope with the infinite darkness of life. A perfectly written song for any time the world threatens to destroy your sanity. 

Yesterday evening, I pressed play.

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In Praise of Hayden Panettiere

When the news of Nashville star Hayden Panettiere’s death broke last week, I was extremely sad but to say I was shocked would unfortunately be a lie. The exact circumstances remain unclear but it was well known that Hayden had been struggling for years with addiction and horrific turmoil in her personal life. It’s depressing to me how inevitable her death was, how certain kinds of fame and particularly child stardom feel like a lingering curse leading to suffering, addiction and early death for far too many. 

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Album Review: Laura Veirs – Temple Songs

Laura Veirs’s new album is the first she’s entirely recorded and produced herself and the first in four years since Found Light. Her garden studio is called ‘Temple of Bloom’ and this was where ‘Temple Songs’ was born, after living through a songwriting drought she has reframed as a ‘gathering phase’. The seeds of that work have grown into songs whose roots feel surprisingly strong. 

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How to Cure Blue Dot Fever

Over the past few months many in the music industry have been struck down with what is being called ‘blue dot fever’. The name for this disease comes from the way Ticketmaster show unsold seats on their site but this problem of lack of ticket sales is not confined to seated concerts. In Scotland alone this summer we’ve had cancelled festivals, and other major events offering heavily discounted tickets for standing concerts. 

This week Brandi Carlile was the latest artist to come down with blue dot fever. She’s cancelled and rescheduled her entire European tour, with every venue in the UK being downgraded to venues that are less than half the size of the original ones booked. She’s used the ‘personal circumstances’ reason for the changes, which may be true but is suitably timed to save face and cover her losses. As a fan it’s irritating to have to rebook, especially as I’d carefully chosen the best seat for the lowest price in the previous venue. Other fans had booked flights and hotels for these shows leaving many much more out of pocket than me. 

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Album Review: Allison Russell – In the Hour of Chaos 

On her recent appearance on the lovely ‘Playing Along with Norah Jones’ podcast Allison Russell described her favourite part of making music as ‘the collaboration’, calling her fellow musicians on this new album ‘In the Hour of Chaos’ a ‘rainbow coalition’. 

Allison begins her third solo album by singing an ode to the ‘Rainbow’, offering herself a reminder to keep hold of her childhood innocence, knowing as an adult that’s ‘it’s not easy to keep all seven colours in your mind’. The song sets the tone for an album that understands the pain of the world, and seeks solace through connection and celebration. 

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Live Review: Alela Diane @ Days Off Festival, Paris 5/7/26

I hadn’t planned on going to Paris last weekend. I had seen a while back that Alela Diane and Kevin Morby were playing Paris one day after the other during my summer holiday but a trip to Paris in summer was surely going to be too hot and too expensive. 

And yet as the time drew nearer I felt like it would be more wrong not to go, especially considering these were two of my favourites who’d both released brilliant new albums this year and neither artist were playing Scotland on this tour schedule. The heat looked to be dipping a little back under thirty degrees on the weather forecast (in the end it was stifling) and I got some extra money for work I did in June. So off I went. 

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Album Review: Violet Grohl – Be Sweet to Me

I’m just going to start by saying that nepo babies are fine with me if they meet two criteria: they have to be talented and their parents have to be cool. I have no problem with Rosanne Cash, for example and I don’t think many other music fans do either. The thing that people hate about nepo babies is the same thing that draws us to them. We want to know if they have whatever their parents had. We want to know if they’d make it without their last name. 

Of all the nepo babies making waves right now the one I am instinctively drawn to is twenty year old Violet Grohl. She looks cool, with her soft goth aesthetic and attempt to bring back skinny eyebrows. Her influences are perfect – including The Breeders, PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley and Soundgarden. She’s who you’d want your kid to be, or your kids to listen to. 

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Live Album Review: The Highwomen – Live at The Gorge 2023 

This past weekend The Highwomen reunited at The Gorge for the first time since they last played that same venue in 2023. Honestly I’ve spent the last hour or so just watching the videos of the performances and I’ve felt a mixture of deep, deep FOMO, unabashed joy and just a sense of hope and optimism which only this group of women seem to create when they’re together. 

2019, when the Highwomen united to release their only album, feels like a century ago. They hoped to change the Nashville sound, to show that women were the beating heart of country music and deserved more respect. 

In the end their initial hopes and dreams for this project didn’t exactly come true. They did well but didn’t hit the country music airwaves and dominate the charts. While some progress has been made they unfortunately didn’t start a rainbow revolution that brought diversity to the genre.

In fact Maren actually dealt with some horrific trolling from country music fans after standing up for transgender rights, causing her to distance herself from the country music mainstream altogether. Brandi’s star skyrocketed after working with Joni and Elton but she released music that veered more towards epic stadium rock. Amanda’s last couple of albums went more rock and roll too. Natalie Hemby released a second solo album but mainly focused on writing songs for other artists. A word too for Yola who featured on the debut but seems to have distanced herself from Nashville and the genre too since that time. You wondered if The Highwomen would ever come back together again as a group. 

But listening to this new live album of their 2023 show reminded me of what the Highwomen did achieve. They sang songs for people who needed them, who craved them, who wanted country music to be something else. They created something beautiful – a crowded table of their own making. 

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