Kris Drever, John McCusker, Roddy Woomble - Before The Ruin (2008)

As the old adage goes, if you want something done, ask someone busy. And if you want to hear some of the freshest, savviest, sweetest and most original songwriting around, look no further than three of the busiest musicians in Scotland, newly in cahoots as a trio: Kris Drever, John McCusker and Roddy Woomble.
"Our paths had all crossed in various ways over the past few years - working with Kate Rusby, and on Kris and Roddy's solo albums - and our starting-point was basically just that we all really liked each other's stuff," says McCusker, equally renowned as a producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist.
For Woomble, who recently marked ten years as lead singer of Idlewild, the new trio project is a natural onward step from his acclaimed 2006 solo debut, My Secret Is My Silence. "Being in the same band for that long, you get used to writing songs in that context," he says. "The solo record was the first time I'd really pushed myself in other directions, and that's given me the confidence to take it further: Kris and John each have such a different take on things like melody and lyrics, but we're all working equally on the songs together, so the whole thing feels totally new."
That forthcoming fresh yet seasoned debut, named simply for its authorial triumvirate, was written over the course of just six or seven afternoons in McCusker's Edinburgh living-room, demo-ed on a laptop, then transferred to the studio with judiciously minimal embellishment. "It was amazingly quick," says Drever, the Orcadian singer-guitarist who won a 2007 Radio 2 Folk Award for his own first solo album, Black Water, and is a member of firebrand folk trio Lau. "We had a target number of songs we wanted to record, and we really didn't discard many. A lot of them have stayed quite stripped-down, keeping that rawness."
An array of stellar guests from both the folk and rock spheres contribute to the album, including Radiohead drummer Philip Selway, Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake (vocals) and Francis MacDonald (drums), Capercaillie bandmates Donald Shaw (keyboards), Mike McGoldrick (flute/whistles) and Ewen Vernal (bass), plus Irish singer Heidi Talbot.