ADAM STAFFORD, Song, By Toad’s rather excellent Falkirk folk guitarist, has just released the title track of his forthcoming LP Diamonds of a Horse Famine for your delectation. And a very fine and atmospheric, dreamstate rattlin’ blues it is. Cop a listen below.
It’s another track culled from a notebook of half-finished ideas that Adam stumbled across during lockdown and which he decided to cast new, recorded life on; it was written when he was 19; it’s the oldest track on the album.
It springs into being on a sustained strum and an eerie voice sample taken from a sermon by an eight-year-old preacher, hitting a slow stride of evocative slide, steeped in a world of white clapboard churches and cotton fields; a Stirlingshire soundtrack to a southern gothic novel.
“I was obsessed with slide blues and Blind Willie Johnson then and this was a kind of tribute,” Adam explains.
And the title, both of the song and necessarily the album? Adam says he had the words jotted down for some time; they brought to mind Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor.
The album unearths nine forgotten stories in a snapshot of a former life. Take it alongside previous single “Erotic Thistle” – handily, we took a look at that, here – and you know the album is set to be a wide-ranging acoustic guitar treat.
Adam Stafford’s Diamonds of a Horse Famine will be released by Song, By Toad Records on digital and limited red vinyl formats on October 16th. You can place an order for it right now, over here.
