Born and raised in Edinburgh but now based in Dundee, Roseanne Reid is the daughter of Craig Reid, who, with his twin brother Charlie, formed the duo The Proclaimers in 1983. With two albums and a series of single and EP releases behind her stretching back to 2016, alongside playing support slots for artists such as Teddy Thompson, Martha Wainwright, Hue & Cry, Kathy Mattea, Jason Isbell and Steve Earle, Reid has an established career, but apart from a nomination at the 2015 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, and winning an award for the song Amy in the Lyrics Only category at Nashville’s International Song Competition, she hasn’t really broken through as yet.
Roseanne appeared recently in the support slot on some dates of Earle’s Solo and Acoustic tour. I saw a show from that tour at the Princess Alexandra Auditorium in Yarm (a great venue). Earle is clearly a fan of Reid and went to great lengths from the stage to explain how he knows her and why he rates her; he didn’t mention her lineage. He went on to describe how Reid turned up at one of his Camp Copperhead songwriting camps for young songwriters in 2014, as a mere teenager; she bought what he described as the smallest, cheapest “pup” tent available, and it blew away in a storm. When she started to sing songs she had written, however, Earle said she was a “ringer“, and it’s fair to say that he has followed and even supported her career ever since. Reid has since returned to Camp Copperhead on a couple of occasions, helping out, rather than as a student.
Reid released her debut LP, Trails, in 2019; it was recorded in Brooklyn with Teddy Thompson as producer. You’d imagine that Thompson would be a good choice given his own family history, meaning he would have had some empathy for Reid’s situation. The record was recorded over a period of just five days and included the song Sweet Annie, which Earle and Reid duetted. The album appeared in the list of the “100 best records of the year, 2019” in The Sunday Times.
In 2020, Reid recorded and released The September Tapes EP, featuring three acoustic songs recorded in Nashville: I Couldn’t Wish More For You (a song which subsequently appeared in the 2022 movie As They Made Us), You Are My Sunshine, and a Miley Cyrus cover, Malibu. This was followed, in 2021, by the Horticulture EP, consisting of four songs that were written and recorded at home during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown; the vinyl version of this is augmented by the three songs from The September Tapes.
The second full-length release came along in 2023, entitled Lawside, after an area of Dundee where Reid lives. Rather than going all the way to the USA to record this album, Reid made this record over a period of a number of months, down the road in Perth, Scotland, with David Macfarlane producing. This approach suited Reid, who had become a parent the previous summer.
Currently working on her third album, Reid released two tracks as a single to coincide with the dates supporting Earle; these are Mama and Bring Me Down.