Broken Records frontman Jamie Sutherland has announced his new solo album “The World As It Used To Be”, will be out in September 2024 via Frictionless Music. Fresh from promoting the latest album “The Dreamless Sleep of the 1990’s” released at the end of last year, the singer songwriter is once again venturing out on his own, having released his debut solo album “Bruise” back in 2020. Sutherland also works as Creative Director of the Rural Arts organization SEALL, and for the last ten years has been the founder of Nothing Ever Happens Here and Music Programme Manager at Edinburgh’s seminal Summerhall Arts Venue. He is patently a very busy man!
He explains: ‘I self-consciously wanted to write an adult record, in the style of John Prine, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen’s later work, and as I have gotten (a little) older, I have found myself gravitating to songs which talk with the sense of experience that I was starting to feel. That things aren’t black and white, good and bad, ecstatic or despairing, that there is nuance in everything and detail is most important – all with the knowledge that in understanding a little there was so much more to learn.’
The lead single is out now and is aptly entitled ‘Start Again’. Speaking about the track, Jamie describes it as “A love song, a story song and a character song, some based on people I know and some imagined. The song has a wide-open feel to it with plenty of momentum, and I wanted the subject to feel as such. I wanted the characters to feel like they were moving, escaping from something. When writing the song, I definitely had the wide-open spaces of America pictured, so the lyric and the arrangement were created with that in mind.”