Scottish artist Andrew Eaton Lewis has shared details of his forthcoming new album Tourism out 18 March on Wee Studio pre-order here: https://allofthedays.co.uk/listen/
We are thrilled to learn his the album closes with his version of R.E.M.‘s ‘Find the River’ that featured on our covers album A Carnival of Sorts that we released on Bandcamp in aid of Help Musicians last year.
The lead single ‘Tourist Information’ is a wistful, yearning track from Eaton Lewis, ushered in by a wonderful piano motif: his quivering weathered yet beautiful vocal exploring the themes of moving, escape and feeling out of place. He explains:
“The title of this song is a bit of a joke. I thought it’d be funny to start an album called Tourism with a song called ‘Tourist Information’, it being the first place you go when you visit somewhere. The whole album was inspired by moving from the centre of Edinburgh to a village on the Outer Hebrides almost four years ago. They’re songs about feeling like a tourist in someone else’s culture, about what it means to belong, or not, and also about the strangeness of the past couple of years, when we haven’t been allowed to go anywhere and the whole idea of tourism has felt like an exotic and dangerous indulgence.”
“The closing song on Tourism is my version of ‘Find the River’ by R.E.M which I recorded for God is in the TV’s R.E.M compilation last year. I hadn’t planned to include it but it ended up fitting perfectly. A big part of the reason why I moved to the Hebrides was to try and slow down my life a bit, become less of a ‘speedy-head’ as Michael Stipe puts it. A lot of my songs these days are about growing older, confronting mortality, looking for some peace and stillness, all those things that Find the River describes so beautifully, so it ended up being a perfect way to conclude it. So, thank you, God Is In The TV!”
In 2018 Andrew Eaton Lewis moved from the centre of Edinburgh to the edge of the Outer Hebrides, where he now lives in an abandoned clifftop hotel on a former RAF radar station.
Tourism, his debut album for Wee Studio Records, is a collection of evocative, poetic and interconnected songs shaped by that experience. They are songs about feeling like a tourist in someone else’s culture, about the ‘mainland’ becoming somewhere on the edge of your experience, and ultimately about whether we are all just tourists on Earth, on a brief visit from somewhere more permanent that we return to afterwards.
Andrew’s music – as Seafieldroad and a member of the band Swimmer One – has previously found its way to a Hollywood movie, daytime Radio One, and numerous theatre shows, festivals and short films. He has shared stages with Emma Pollock, Ricky Ross, Rachel Sermanni, Withered Hand and RM Hubbert, among others, and his music has won widespread acclaim from critics, who have variously compared it to John Cale, Belle and Sebastian, Prefab Sprout, the Pet Shop Boys and the Blue Nile.
TRACKLIST
- Tourist Information
- Pulling Ragwort on the Sabbath
- Donny, Don’t Take My Croft From Me
- A Guide To The Western Isles
- Jump the fence
- The Mainland
- Valhalla
- Sad Country Boy
- Still
- All Art is Worthless
- Pulling Ragwort on the Sabbath (part two)
- Find the River
