The Argyll Cycle - Jackie Leven

The Argll Cycle is my name for the songs that I wrote between 1985-90 in Argyll, Scotland, when I was recovering from near murder by strangulation, heroin addiction and the love of my life running off with the Dalai Lama's bodyguard! The songs are not all about Argyll or Scotland, but I think they share a certain soulfulness and careful speech which makes them a kind of family.
Anyway, I released a few of these songs earlier, but then letters asking about the rest made me slowly notice (that's how I usually notice) that I was strangely reluctant to record the outstanding songs - the personal misery enshrined in these songs had become a kind of status symbol - beat this for misery as it were.
Well all good things come to an end - I had to let go of these creations-as-a-possible-therapeutic-source, and let the songs find their place in the world as citizens in their own right - not my personal property.
This sounds just a touch pompous, but that's the point - I was using the songs to aggrandize me and my pain instead of letting them live their own life. But much worse, the contents were hardening in my heart and making me slowly but surely unwell. I had forgotten two deadly lessons - "Too much weeping makes a stone of the heart" (W. B. Yeats via Michael Meade) and "The beauty of your thoughts does not reflect the condition of your soul" (Arthur Guirdham).
There is the personal wound and the collective world wound and it is the fundamental duty of soul that the first inform the second without sentimentality. As I put it in an unrecorded song of mine:

Times were hard when we stood in the rain
I can never go back there again
But the rain still falls on my face
Now the sound is a scar
In a man's holy place

1. Stranger On The Square
2. Walking In Argyll
3. Honeymoon Hill
4. Looking For Love
5. Grievin' At The Mish Nish
6. Ballad Of A Simple Heart
7. As We Sailed Into Skibbereen
8. Some Ancient Misty Morning
9. The History Of Rain
10. Gylen Gylen
11. Fly
12. The Crazy Song