Green Ribbons, Alasdair Roberts

Edition of 300. The Scottish folk tradition runs deep in the bones of Alasdair Roberts, a singer and songwriter whose voice seems to carry centuries of Highland mist and ancient balladry. With Green Ribbons, Roberts joins forces with an ensemble of kindred spirits - fiddle, accordion, double bass, and assorted strings - to create a work that sits comfortably alongside the great British folk recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet sounds utterly contemporary in its execution. This is music that breathes the same air as Pentangle, Shirley Collins, and the Incredible String Band, yet Roberts has carved out a territory entirely his own over the course of a remarkable career that has seen him collaborate with everyone from Will Oldham to Jandek.

The arrangements here are sparse yet richly detailed, allowing Roberts' extraordinary voice - at once fragile and commanding, ancient and immediate - to weave through traditional melodies and original compositions with equal conviction. The ensemble playing is nothing short of exquisite, each instrument finding its place in a tapestry of sound that evokes firelit evenings, windswept coastlines, and stories passed down through generations. Green Ribbons stands as one of the finest documents of the contemporary Scottish folk revival, a record that honors tradition while pushing it gently but firmly into new territory. Essential listening for anyone who believes that folk music remains a living, breathing art form.

“Very broadly speaking, unaccompanied singing seems to have gone out of fashion in more recent years – but it’s always something I have enjoyed performing and listening to when I’ve had the chance. I wanted to get a group together whose voices I feel really lend themselves to storytelling, and focus purely on the voice and the stories. We wanted to make something very rough around the edges and unpolished, a kind of documented swapping of songs...”

Of the track that gives its name to the project and album, he says:

“I found these words in the Bodleian Archive and set them to my own melody. Green Ribbons were used to label people as ‘insane’ in the 1800s. I enjoyed the historical reference to men- tal health, a subject which features in some of my own writing. I liked, too, the directness of the lyric.”