For three years now I’ve been co-writing and recording songs with people who are living with dementia. What began as an unexpected little side project has become one of the main focuses of my creative life. By September 2021 there was enough music for an EP. By June 2023 there was enough for an album, Born to be Alive, and plans are now in place to write and record even more. As I write this I’m preparing to host a showcase event as part of Scotland’s first Dementia Arts Festival at Eden Court in Inverness.
Of the songs we’ve made so far, Suitcase of Songs might be the one I’m most proud of. It was co-written with Alan Farquharson, who lives in Stornoway and was diagnosed with dementia late last year. It’s the first song Alan has written, he sings it himself, and the lyrics are essentially his autobiography.
Now 68, Alan has been singing his whole life, starting when he worked down a mine in Bannockburn, a job he began straight after leaving school. As pits began to close, Alan was invited to sing at a social club for ex-miners in Valleyfield. This led to his first professional gig, still a source of pride. Later he worked in a care home on the Isle of Lewis, singing to the patients and building up a local fan club along the way. For years he has also sung with a group of Stornoway musicians, performing everything from country and western and Irish folk songs to hits by Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell and John Denver. Suitcase of Songs’ title was inspired by an actual suitcase in which Alan keeps the words of all the songs he has sung over the years. He doesn’t quite carry the suitcase with him wherever he goes, as the song says, but he always carries the songs. He sings to everyone he meets, still.
This whole project has prompted some reflection on the value of what I do as a songwriter. For years I’ve judged my music by how many people it’s managed to reach and have frequently felt like a failure as a result. The value of Suitcase of Songs, though, is in what it has meant to Alan and his partner Susannah, which is a lot. Writing and recording the song kept them going during a hugely difficult and stressful time last year; I know this because Susannah has told me several times. I also know because a few weeks ago I was at their wedding. Suitcase of Songs was playing in the church as people arrived, and Susannah walked down the aisle to Alan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, which also appears on the Born to be Alive album. For a song you’ve worked on to be played at someone’s wedding is a huge honour. For two to be played at the same one is even more special.
Suitcase of Songs is not the kind of music I would usually write or listen to, but that was the whole point; it reflects Alan’s tastes, Alan’s life, rather than mine. It also had to be made at a pace that would work for him. It took about four months to write the lyrics, each verse gradually emerging through conversations with Alan and Susannah. While I made a few structural suggestions the final draft of the lyrics was mostly their work. It’s a song about a lifetime’s relationship with music. By the final verse the suitcase of songs is ‘tattered and torn and falling apart’, a metaphor for Alan’s dementia, while the final chorus addresses mortality as a choir of angels (actually Back Gaelic Choir) sings along with him in the hereafter. It’s powerful because it’s so personal to him, lyrically and musically.
Both Sides Now felt like a poignant song for Alan to record for reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, but my plan for how to do it changed completely on the day. I’d imagined a slow, sparse piano arrangement, similar in tone to Mitchell’s stately re-recorded version from the year 2000, but Alan wanted to do a more upbeat, guitar-driven version like Glen Campbell’s, which was beyond my rudimentary guitar skills. And so Scott C Park, who was producing it, had to learn to play the whole song on guitar about 15 minutes. It was the right call. My arrangement would probably have been too melancholy, like a lot of the music I make for myself. What we ended up with was full of joy and hope, a much more fitting song to soundtrack a wedding.
To launch the album, Alan was determined to do a full live show at An Lanntair – 14 songs, accompanied by a band. I spent months worrying that this would be too ambitious and tiring for him, and gently tried to talk him down to nine or ten, but I was wrong about that too. He could have happily carried on for another hour, and got a standing ovation – not sympathy applause for someone with dementia, but simple recognition of a singer as charismatic and relaxed on that stage as anyone else who’s performed on it, even if he needed the lyrics on the screen and some prompts from Susannah along the way. It was a triumphant show.
The support act at the Born to be Alive album launch was Heather Murray performing Who’s Ken, another song from the album, again accompanied by Back Gaelic Choir. Who’s Ken might be the most unusual piece of music I’ve ever worked on. Heather’s mother, Barbara, has dementia, and the plan we came up with was to create a song about three generations of Hebridean women, Heather, Barbara, and Heather’s grandmother Mearag, all of whom had left the Isle of Lewis but ultimately been pulled back there because of family.
Heather wanted to combine musical forms that were meaningful to each woman in the song – Jim Reeves style 1950s ballads (Barbara), reggae (Heather), and Gaelic choral singing (Mearag, and also Heather who has sung in a choir). In particular she wanted the final, spoken word verse to be performed in the style of Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose music she associated with her time in London. It took me months to figure out how we could combine these completely different elements – all of which are completely different rhythmically, let alone melodically – but somehow we did it. There were three defining moments. The first was the realisation that dub reggae – with its fragmented, decaying, echo sounds – would work as a metaphor for a mind in decay. The second was finding Graham Campbell, a Glasgow poet with Jamaican roots who could actually perform Heather’s lyrics in a Linton Kwesi Johnson style, and who was instantly drawn to the project because his own mother had died from dementia. I had no idea about this when I approached him and it felt like a sign. The final one was Heather finding the confidence to sing the lead vocal herself.
Almost seven minutes long, the final result is the Bohemian Rhapsody of dementia activism. As Ron Coleman, who instigated the whole project, is fond of saying, “It shouldn’t work, but it does.” We also had a lovely piece of feedback from Janice Forsyth, who played the entire song on her Radio Scotland afternoon show. “I’m completely knocked out by that song, Who’s Ken, from that extraordinary album Born to be Alive. You can think of that as a very personal song but actually it speaks to everybody. I just thought that was utterly awesome, absolutely amazing.” I’ll be quoting that review for ever, probably.
All of these songs now mean more to me than any song I’ve written myself about dementia. Before starting the project I’d done that a couple of times, having watched my mum endure it for the final three years of her life. The most obvious example is Donny Don’t Take My Croft From Me, which fictionalises the painful experience of having to put Mum in a care home because she clearly wasn’t coping at home anymore, and because none of her children was in a position to look after her in our own small homes.
In the song, Mum becomes a Lewis crofter who, rather than just being moved a mile along the road to a different part of Helensburgh, is being dragged away from island life to a home in Glasgow where his son Donny lives. Donny’s father is defiant, angry, determined not to go. He hates the city and can’t stand the idea of leaving his Hebridean village. “How can you talk about prosperity when out of my window I can see galaxies?” he protests. Then in the final verse the song switches voices and we discover what’s really happening – Donny’s father has become so confused and incoherent that his son can’t understand anything he is saying, and the sheep are dying from neglect. He is not coping and if he stays he is likely to die too. The point of the song is that two things can be simultaneously true. 1. Moving Donny’s father from his croft is wrong. 2. Moving him from his croft is the only option available. It was an attempt – subconscious at the time, until I later realised what I was doing – to process the guilt, shame and sadness of taking my mum away from the home she’d lived in since I was a teenager, without me having to confront it directly.
I hardly ever write character songs, I think because I so rarely see them done well. Much of the time they can be patronising and say more about the writer’s prejudices and hang-ups than the people being written about. In fact I think I was mostly put off character songs by Blur’s The Great Escape album, which had a sneering tone that I strongly disliked and never forgot. I’m fond of Donny though and think it’s quite good, but I’m not sure I’ll write something like it again. It feels difficult to go back to that once you’ve worked in such a collaborative way with someone in order to tell their story, on their terms.
If I’m completely honest though, in co-writing Suitcase of Songs and Who’s Ken I’m still processing my guilt and sadness at what happened to my mum. I’m also trying to atone for it, I think. The best I could do for my mum was travel through to Helensburgh as often as I could, take her out for walks, or just sit by her bedside. I always had a nagging feeling that I should have done more. I couldn’t then, so I’m doing it now instead.