One of Scotland’s finest and most acclaimed songwriters, Orcadian Kris Drever will tour with his own band (for the first time outside of his work with Lau) in 2023, coinciding with the release of an expansive career-spanning compilation album of Kris’ work to date. The new compilation album, on Reveal Records, will also feature some exclusive new songs written and recorded for the band, which features Louis Abbot, Euan Burton and Rachel Lightbody.
Cherished and admired in equal measure by listeners and fellow musicians, Kris is an award-winning guitarist, singer, songwriter and prolific collaborator, and a leading light on the UK roots scene for well over a decade.
A highly skilled guitarist, who adroitly blends traditional folk and flat picking with more contemporary influences – allied to a distinctively relaxed and poised vocal burr – Drever is an astonishingly fine interpreter of others’ songs, with an increasingly frequent knack for concocting seriously smart lyrical observations and earworm melodies of his own.
Since the release of his acclaimed 2020 album, Where The World Is Thin, Kris has been busy collaborating in the studio and playing major shows with Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, Sekou Keita and Jackie Morris for their Lost Spell Songs project, won yet another BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Original Song, as well as Album of The Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards 2021, duetted with Aoife O’Donovan and toured with Lau and Rachel Baiman.
About the forthcoming tour Kris says; "Collaboration has always been at the heart of my enjoyment of music. I love the freedom of heading out on my own; I love the challenge of trying to realise full arrangements with just a guitar and a vocal but, for me, nothing comes close to building those invisible cathedrals with my comrades. The excitement of real musical dialogue is overwhelming: the knowledge that something is happening in front of me that can’t ever be exactly replicated is fascinating and frankly, even after 30 years as a musician, miraculous.
"For the last few years, I’ve been working with a really special group of musicians, mostly in the studio – although we have made it out into the light very occasionally to perform. It’s time now, though, to share these wonderful people and the experiences they create with as wide an audience as possible, because they’re fabulous.
"Louis Abbott is a multi-instrumentalist (drums, guitars, keys) and vocalist who is best known for his work as the front man of Scottish Indie collective Admiral Fallow; Euan Burton is my long time co-producer (studio adult) and absolutely stellar double bassist; and Rachel Lightbody is a highly prized jazz singer who also excels in her work as a backing vocal artist.
"Having gotten together increasingly frequently in recent times for various TV and online performances, we’ve worked up a broad variety of my own material. We’ve found a route into songs from across my back catalogue, and in many cases opened them up in ways that I could never have figured out on my own. The upshot of all this is that it’s time to take this fresh sound and retrospective collection on the road."