Interview with Braw: ‘A Few Miles More is an album about life in your early 20s, as you try to get a grip of where and how you should spend it’

Scottish folk-pop duo Braw – brothers Iain and Andrew Mundy – will release their debut album, A Few More Miles, tomorrow (19 March), a beautiful, uplifting album about life in your early 20s and trying to make your dreams come true.

Based in Glasgow’s southside but originally from Edinburgh, the brothers specialise in close harmony vocals and have been performing across the Glasgow music scene, with a focus on the southside since 2019. They picked their name because it sounds a bit like the word ‘bro’, according to Iain.

They describe A Few Miles More as ‘an album about life in your early 20s, as you try to get a grip of where and how you should spend it’. Four of the 10 tracks, all of which have stunning arrangements for strings (six players feature on the album), have been released as singles: ‘Swing Door’, ‘Piece By Piece’, ‘Home From Home’ and ‘Whisky in Hand’. Iain’s wife, Steph, wrote the lyrics for ‘Home from Home’, ‘Feel It All’ and ‘Real Illusions’ and Iain and Andrew wrote the remaining tracks.

‘Some things are so important to you that they interweave between your daily life and your dreams’

‘Real Illusions’ is my joint favourite track on the album (along with ‘Auchtermuchty Sky’) and it turns out to be Iain’s, too: ‘Steph, she’s good at writing lyrics,’ he said. ‘She’s good at writing lyrics where it’s not immediately apparent what they mean. The first line in ‘Real Illusions’ is ‘There are some things that happen to us that we call dreams’, that actually came from a work colleague of hers, John, on Twitter! The song’s about things that have happened to her in her life.’ Andrew joins in: ‘From my end, ‘Real Illusions’ is about the journey towards your dreams. Some things are so important to you that they interweave between your daily life and your dreams.’

Even the lyrics have a serene, dreamlike quality to them: ‘Ninety-three clouds and twenty odd doors, under a blue moon’s glow, under a blue moon’s glow. Swimming pool and pirate ships and enough love, to fill a millions quaichs (cups) over and over again…’

Another song, ‘Auld Grey Town’, is about St. Andrews in Scotland, where Andrew went to university and is a homage to how much he enjoyed being there: ‘I left St. Andrews in 2018 and I look back with a bit of sadness,’ he said. ‘I wrote it recently, I thought I’d stop myself – why should I be sad? I had such a fantastic time there, you shouldn’t regret you have to leave, you should treasure your memories. The people are great there, I did a lot of choir stuff and opera. It is grey, though.’ Iain chips in: ‘The stone there is very grey, so it does make the city look grey!’

‘When people move there, they never want to leave’

Interestingly, the track ‘The Tide’, their Arran anthem to their grandad Tom, is a re-worked version of the song by the same name on Iain’s solo EP, The Tide (2016). The new version of the song is slower and has a gorgeous string section on it: ‘I wrote it when I was dabbling with songwriting, when Steph was working down there as a journalist,’ Iain said. ‘I wrote a wee EP and went to a wee studio that used to be a bakery to record it.’ They try to remember when grandpa Tom died and are surprised to realise that it was seven years ago: ‘He retired to the Isle of Arran (off the west coast of Scotland). When people move there, they never want to leave,’ he laughed. ‘He was happy there and whenever he visited, the first thing he’d ask dad was when the boat was going back again!’

Their other grandad has not been forgotten either and they’ve penned ‘The Golfer’ about him. ‘We used to go after school to a golf range with mum’s dad, Papa, and just hit hundreds of golf balls,’ Andrew said. ‘I was 5, Iain was 8 or 9. We realise now how lucky we were to be able to do that with him.’ Their affection for him is clear from the lyrics: ‘It’s not far away, just around the corner. A place to learn to play, a man who cares to teach you how, gave up his days, showed you the way, his heroes there, within the bays.’

I ask them how good their golf is: ‘I can confirm we are both very average golfers, but Andrew is much better than me, something we really need to get back to once restrictions lift!,’ Iain said.

They clearly come from a very close-knit, albeit not very large family: ‘We’re the only kids in the small family, although we’ve recently met some second cousins who are great,’ Andrew explained. ‘We’ve still got a Nana, she’s in a care home but she’s done really well indeed. Mum saw her recently for the first time in a year so hopefully we can see her soon.’

‘It’s about that moment of the day when it’s time to have a rest and a wee dram’

Andrew wrote the lyrics to ‘Whisky in Hand’ after he’d finished university at St. Andrews and had started working for the Eden Mill gin company in 2018. ‘He wrote that living at our auntie and uncle’s holiday home when he was doing his first job and living in a little village on the coast of Fife where the average age was 70,’ Iain laughed. ‘It’s about that moment of the day when it’s time to have a rest and a wee dram.’

The lyrics encapsulate that beautifully: ‘Tak’ a minute fill your glass, raise a toast to all that’s passed, for a moment close your eyes, let the evening fleet on by.’ It’s also a song that’s designed to let you kick back and think of loved ones, they say. With this in mind, they ended the song with a ‘virtual crowd’ of family and friends singing the chorus repeated. With COVID-19 restrictions in place, everyone recorded themselves individually on their mobile phones and then they pieced together their voices.

The closing track, ‘Auchtermuchty Sky’, is a perfect way to end the album and is one of the most heartwarming songs on it, showing what a close-knit bond they have. The title refers to Auchtermuchty, a small village in the middle of Fife that Andrew jokes is best known as the birthplace of fellow Scottish brothers duo, The Proclaimers: ‘When I worked in Pittemweem for the Eden Gin company, we were playing a lot of open mic gigs in Glasgow and I’d drive to Glasgow from there 2-3 times a week, which takes an hour and a half. A third of the way down was Auchtermuchty, so although I wasn’t quite there, I knew I was on my way,’ Andrew said. As the song goes: ‘The firth its water guides the way, beneath the pylons vast and grey. The little brother o’er the river, of southern lights, you catch a spark.’ The ‘few miles more’ of the album title comes from this song, where ‘there is a road that takes you where you need to be’, where ‘your voice can have its day’, and it seems a very fitting tribute to just how far they have come since then. The uplifting ending of ‘Auchtermuchty Sky’ shows, too, how their motivation then remains equally true today, as they sing in unison: ‘A fair old journey, a just wee cause, to sing together, to not feel lost…’

The beautiful painting that they commissioned from Scottish artist Orla Stevens for the album cover is actually a reference to those journeys, with a winding road and the mountains behind Glasgow looming in the distance: ‘That’s Andrew on the road to Glasgow in his car!,’ Iain said excitedly. ‘The hills behind Glasgow do look like that.’ The painting also ties in nicely to Arran: ‘On Arran, there’s a famous hill called the ‘Sleeping Warrier’ and the hills behind Glasgow look similar,’ Andrew said.

‘Our recording engineer, Eddie Macarthur, came to us and said “You can’t finish with that, you need a bang!”‘

Incredibly, ‘Auchtermuchty Sky’ almost didn’t make the cut: ‘Our recording engineer, Eddie Macarthur, came to us and said “You can’t finish with that, you need a bang!” but right at the end, he heard the string outro and said that’s nice!’ Iain is smiling: It fitted very nicely,’ he said. ‘It’s a nice, gentle finish.’

One song that Andrew wishes he’d written is ‘This Christmas Time’, which Glasgow-based band Tide Lines released in December and who they have tickets to see in August. We chat for a while about how lovely it is: ‘It’s one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in the last 3-4 years,’ he said. It could so easily be a Braw song, particularly in light of the soaring harmonies, heartfelt lyrics and gorgeous melody. Iain is trying to decide which Jamie Cullum song to pick from his Christmas album, The Pianoman at Christmas, which was also released last year. Last time Iain and I talked, Cullum had just released two singles from the album and we chatted animatedly about how good they are. Iain went to the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where he played the trumpet, so he still loves to write for brass: ‘I’ll say ‘How Do You Fly’, there’s a lot of brass in that one!’

If they could have any songs from the album feature on a TV show, Iain picks Still Game, a Scottish sitcom: ‘It’s about two old Scottish friends (played by Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill) in Glasgow. There’s an episode where they go to a distillery and get stinking drunk, so ‘Whisky in Hand’ would be perfect!’ Andrew picks their song ‘Auchtermuchty Sky’: ‘There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother (when Ted and Marshall go on a road trip) when The Proclaimers tape in the car gets stuck on ‘I Wanna Be (500 Miles)’, so Braw could get stuck instead!’

(Photo from left to right: Andrew and Iain)