Don’t worry, if you’re sitting there thinking: “Grant who? It’s CD of the Week, and I’ve never even heard of him. I must be really, really out of touch.” I’d never heard of him either. Even after reading the press release and touring his website, I know only that he writes songs and was born in Glasgow. The former fact we could have deduced by listening to Postcards from Nowhere, but not the latter. We would probably have decided that he hails from one of the bleaker American cities. Wherever he lives, we can imagine Campbell (although this is tricky — his website doesn’t even have a photograph of the bloke) sitting late into the night, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, then picking up a guitar, firing up his four-track and having a go himself. The results are sometimes stunning. The overall mood is summed up neatly in the couplet “Said she’d set the world on fire/But all she got was ash”. These are songs to listen to when life hasn’t quite panned out the way you thought it would. Slow, simple, unadorned and powerful.

Luna Records

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