Up Close & Personal with Alasdair Bouch

Alasdair Bouch has paid his dues at many a venue around the city.  With the release of his masterfully produced debut album, ‘First Person Singular´, one of the mainstays of Prague´s singer-songwriter scene shows no signs of slowing down.

Throughout all ten tracks of the album, Alasdair showcases his sophisticated songwriting abilities; every song strikes you as an instant classic.  But the familiarity of his sound is nicely counter-balanced by an almost confrontational level of honesty.  Perhaps the most important aspect of the album is that, through combination of pure craft, wit, and candor, Alasdair easily manages to avoid the death trap of sentimentality.

Most of Alasdair´s lyrics focus on both love and love – too much and not enough, that is.  While every note and word clearly comes from the heart, you never feel alienated by the album´s honesty.  It shows a lot of ambition to begin his recording career with such a revealing work of self-portrayal and it pays off.  There are only 1000 copies of ‘First Person Singular´ available, so pick yours up while they last.

Ever since I had pocket money, I´ve been spending it on music.  The rarer, or harder to find it was, the more special the place in my heart it found.  I am a sucker for coloured vinyl, special editions and signed posters.  It made me feel somehow closer to the artist to know they had put out a limited number of these artefacts, and this one was especially for me.  They were rewarding the fans that turned up every Monday at their local record store to check out the new releases.  

Even the cover pays homage to old vinyl sleeves – a simple, ecologically conscious, cardboard slipcase.  In a sense, by only making 1000 of these, I wanted to foist my collector´s mentality on the unsuspecting public.  Buy this now, or it´s gone forever, folks!  

Haha, I did, didn´t I?  I´m not a purist, but I love that era of honest, clever singer-songwriting – Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, and the like – people with experience, singing about what they knew best.  If you can pull that off without a studied pose, you´re going to have career longevity, not just be a flash in the pan, like the latest flavour-of-the-month the media tells us to listen to.  

I saw little point in including covers on this album – I had so much I wanted to add already.  Also, the songs I really love are sacrosanct to me – why change a good thing?  Jeff Buckley was able to do this, in effect, by making a cover almost unrecognizable, and creating a new beast.  But I still wanted to hear more of his original material!

That´s true, well spotted!  I´m not sure about the greater success, though!  I suppose it´s relative to how much time and care has gone into this album.  It´s incredibly personal in a sense – the songs reflect varyingly momentous periods of my life – but at the same time, I have to put it out there and let it go.  The production process was no smooth ride for me – I am a perfectionist, and this being my debut album, I was concerned about getting it right for posterity.  But the strangest thing is standing in front of an audience and spilling my heart out every night, through these songs.  Sometimes I hope people aren´t paying too much attention to the lyrics!

Fantastic.  Steve, Carole and the team consistently put on an amazing selection of acts, and I´m honoured to be selected.  I go every year, and there´s always something extraordinary to discover.  I´m looking forward to hearing some other musical acts there too – The Human Jukebox and Ocean vs. Daughter, in particular.

What can we expect from your next project, “Second Hand Lullabies”?

The next album is already half-finished, and it´s taking quite a different direction.  If the first album is more introspective, acoustic alt-folk blues, the second is what I call ‘blue-eyed soul´ – lighter-in-the-air, arm-waving anthems.  I´ve been playing a lot of the songs from it live so there´ll be some audience favourites on it.  But considering how long it took to get the first album out, I wouldn´t hold your breath!