This week’s Album of the Week is from Iain Thomson, who is sometimes known as … the Singing Shepherd.
A folk singing solo act with a varied repertoire of Scottish, Irish, and contemporary songs and tunes. The Iain Thomson Trio and Iain Thomson band also perform for ceilidh dancing and festivals.
Campbell Cameron of Oban FM writes:
“The singing shepherd has grown up, matured and is playing with the big boys now. When I first met Iain all those years ago we had similar dreams and ambitions and a friendship grew from that meeting of minds. Since then my friend has had some serious growing pains to contend with, moving away from his beloved Isle of Mull tentatively to the mainland and a house south of Oban while he shepherded locally, then to Glasgow for the ‘single man in the city’ experience.
That involved developing business online and driving lorries long distance at night then to Fintry and a gradual progression back to the land and the love of a new family to bolster his confidence and a wedding and Aileen which has nourished the hero inside.
Then finally the move back to Mull, the magnetism and the land and the hills calling, but always the music. Always the songs; the lyrics, the links, and hook, the line as he drove thousands of miles or walked the foreign lands of the central belt. Always the music for that is the passion.
This album ‘Fields of Dreams’ is the result of the distillation of all those disperse ingredients and experiences. A fine man was established as producer and a great studio and director found in Leith and the process began. The director has patience; the producer is a perfectionist and all three are well connected. Fine established musicians pop in here and there and add the magic; the wee touches that are hard to spot unless you sit back with a dram and the music when they become evident.
Many a night we talked. Sometimes over a dram sometimes over the phone many times as he hauled a forty foot articulated lorry over the Sloch into Inverness or navigated the side streets of a southern city on an overnight trunker taking goods to market down the M6. We chatted at the end and during our many adventures on business going to see folk all over the UK and developing our dreams by building theirs.
But always we returned to the music and the land. A wee croft for Iain where he could raise the animals he loves working with and where he can play the music and write the songs.
I hope you enjoy the results. I know you will as the stories take you into the hills of Mull, down the M6 to Manchester and back around the world to New Zealand and finally back to the old country.
The Singing Shepherd has grown up – in the Fields of Dreams.”