The Scotsman Sessions #262: Adam Holmes

Welcome to the award-winning Scotsman Sessions. With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman.com, with introductions from our critics. Here, Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Adam Holmes performs his song If You Ever Needed Me, taken from his new album Dreamweaver

Adam Holmes’s music is so gentle and soothing that it can be the aural equivalent of lying down in a darkened room. Appropriate then, that he would choose to record his Scotsman Session in a room swathed in blackout curtains. “It feels most natural for me to perform at night, so it was helpful to create a sense of that,” he says.

The lullaby quality of his song, If You Ever Needed Me, is intentional, as it was written “about the feeling of being a father in the early days – the sense of observing from the sidelines and trying to be useful. It’s a song about the beauty and the pain of sacrifice.”

This Edinburgh-based singer/songwriter is an old soul on young shoulders, taking lessons from lockdown. “Lockdown has changed the way I think about time and money,” he says. “I've become a lot more defensive of my calendar. Time is our most precious resource. Non-renewable. Removing the surface level distractions has allowed me to see clearly what I desire most deeply. God places the best ideas on the other side of boredom.”

Holmes used that precious time to self-release Dreamweaver, his fourth album of good musical medicine, and has another ready to go later this year.

“I personally found lockdown amazing,” he says. “I loved the quiet and the lack of social obligation. I walked and I wrote. Mainly I spent time with my daughter and a handful of close people. Apart from the lack of live performance, my life held on to many constants, so I’ve been fortunate. But it’s been a very different experience for everyone. Same sea, different boats.”

However, Holmes is certainly in the same boat as his fellow musicians when it comes to his upcoming schedule of shows. “I know as much as anyone as to whether they will happen. I hope so!”

Dreamweaver is out now and available from www.adamholmesmusic.co.uk

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