Josh Rouse – Drygate – Celtic Connections – support Roseanne Reid –January 26, 2025.

In the year that Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, George W Bush was still in the White House and Mariah Carey had the best-selling album, Josh Rouse released a farewell record titled NASHVILLE as he quit Music City for pastures new. It was 2005.

He clearly has a dominant nostalgia gene as another of his albums, 1972, marked the year he was born while the 20th anniversary of his fifth album, Nashville, is celebrated here, the final night of a short UK tour.

And the way he and his terrific, all-Spanish band play it, track by track, shows what this record means to him. This is joyous music, bittersweet at times, but his ready smiles show that Nebraskan native Rouse is having a ball – and so are we.

It’s The Nighttime is a mid-tempo, swaggering, confident opener that brings The Jayhawks to mind and Carolina has a gentle, luscious, winning groove that sounds as fresh today as ever. His chat includes a tale of playing the city’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut years ago and Robert Plant was in the audience: but he had to leave as everyone was staring at him.

Middle School Frown, written for a girl he knew in 8th grade at school, delivers a chunky bounce and plenty of smiles from this assured and hugely engaging frontman.

There’s an extra longing in his vocals when he sings My Love Has Gone, which is his favourite from the album. Here the band offers a delicate backing with fine, fine keyboards to savour.

Nashville complete, he goes back further to 1984 to sing solo The Blue Nile’s Tinseltown In The Rain and it is superb with gritty acoustic guitar and subtle vocals.

A sparkling closing section – including an invite to two audience members to dance on stage – is a deft and spirited dip in and out of his catalogue with His Majesty Rides (Subtitulo, 2006), Salton Seal (opening track from Love In the Modern Age from 2018) and a couple of real crackers from 1972, Come Back (Light Therapy) and Love Vibration.

It’s been a musical journey to the past with every step well worth taking.

Dundee-based ROSEANNE REID is always a different class support act – Steve Earle and Jason Isbell will agree, no doubt.

All I Need from current release, Lawside and Sweet Annie from debut album, Trails, are gorgeous songs with Reid’s poised vocals carrying powerful messages, supported with tenderness on violin, guitar and banjo by David McFarlane. Bring Me Down, a new song for her next album, came after a separation from her wife, but Reid’s delivery is defiant and strong. She gets better and better.

MIKE RITCHIE