“My yearbook quote in high school was: ‘If you pretend you know what you’re doing, you can do anything at all.’”
And that, Rianne Downey says now, “was my philosophy: just see what happens.” To be clear, the Scottish singer-songwriter isn’t a fantasist. Although when you hear the story of how this Celtic maestro of Americana got to where she has – multiple sold-out shows and a Glastonbury Pyramid Stage performance already under her guitar strap; a young veteran of supports with Paolo Nutini, Texas, Deacon Blue and Tom Jones; on the cusp of releasing what is one of the classiest, sunniest, sharpest debut albums of the year – you may well think she’s making it up.
But no. Rianne Downey is less great pretender than great artist. She’s a writer, guitarist, performer and golden-voiced singer whose passion for country, folk and more has instinctively propelled her – via accidentally astute use of social media and authentically viral acclaim – to the creation of The Consequence of Love, a storming and seductive debut album recorded with producer Ryan Hadlock (Zach Bryan, Brandi Carlisle) in Seattle’s Bear Creek Studio.
Downey’s magical talents are front and centre, forceful and joyful, on ‘Good in Goodbye’. A wriggling earworm of a lead single, it’s a mandolin and banjo-brightened song that has its roots in pain but alchemises that into a feel good fun-burst of positivity. In that regard, it sums up who she is, where she is and who she wants to be, personally and artistically. The clue, she says, lies in the opening lyric: “When I turned 21 that’s when I really got to trying”
“It’s not metaphorical in any way,” she explains. “I was 21 when I signed my record deal, when I moved to Liverpool, and when I really decided to run with music and try and make something of myself.
“Around that time, I ended a five-year relationship. So that was my first taste of freedom. But it was Covid as well, and I lost my papa.” Her beloved grandad’s funeral was the day before the first UK lockdown. “So it felt like at that time, I was just hit with so much loss,” she continues. “And also you realise how quickly time moved. All of a sudden, I blinked and I was 23. So, Good in Goodbye is taking all the negative things that happened to me and turning them into positive.”
Meanwhile, she belatedly fell hard for Noah Kahan, specifically the Vermont native’s third album Stick Season. “Hearing the way he described his hometown, how he’d grown up with all these troubles, it helped make that song fall out of me.”
So much so that the ideas for lyrics woke her with a start at two in the morning, then poured out – a reflection, she now realises, of more emotional turmoil. “I was going through another loss: losing my gran to dementia. I tend to write when everything’s up in the air.”
With ideas and passion and songs like that? No chance.
Rianne Downey might have been raised in Bellshill, the Glasgow satellite town that gave the world BMX Bandits, Soup Dragons and Teenage Fanclub. But that was a generation ago. When she was growing up, she was the only one of her peers who was into music. Like, really into music. So much so that elements of Teenage Fanclub’s iconic, chiming guitars are sprinkled across The Consequence of Love.
“All my life, all I’ve wanted to do is perform,” she says, grinning, the bright, positive disposition that’s baked into her songs – even the darker, more reflective compositions about lost loved ones – radiating from her like a sunburst. “That’s my happy place. Before lockdown, I was a busker, and then I played the pubs. And even before I was old enough to busk, since I was about 10, I was trying to do charity gigs everywhere that I could. That was my way to express myself. I even used to sell homemade CD’s from the local Ice Cream Van.”
Then came the pandemic. Robbed of pavements and platforms and punters, Downey started posting covers online. Not, again, with any masterplan – her initial spur was a family request.
“My granny asked me to upload a song to Facebook so she could hear me sing, because she was missing me. And it was so much fun. I loved getting dressed up, setting my room up and filming it. That’s when I thought: ‘I’m going to see what happens when I put things up on social media.’ And it really worked. But it’s funny,” she continues with a grin, “because I had no idea what I was actually doing!”
Musically, though, she did. The first cover Downey posted on Twitter, on 9th April 2020, was of Liam Gallagher’s ‘Once’. Much to her surprise, it went off like a rocket. She was only 20.
“I just remember that being, for me at that time, at that age, a monumental point. It made me feel like: ‘Oh, wait, I could be a legit musician. Maybe I’m a wee bit better than I thought it was.’”
Plenty more covers followed, including Downey’s take on Rotterdam by The Beautiful South. That video was liked and commented on by the song’s writer Paul Heaton. “Being a fan of Paul’s and following him on Twitter, I know how pernickety he was.” By which this student of Heaton’s lyrical craft means: “He can’t write songs like he does without being a harsh critic. So when I got his approval, it meant the world.”
Her lockdown-era social media fandom eventually led to a connection with Coral man James Skelly (another fan of her covers), a record deal, a move to Liverpool and her first releases. Those EP’s also served to help keep Downey in the mind of one of her earliest champions. Or, as she puts it: “Unbeknownst to me I’d been on Paul’s radar since the cover of Rotterdam. Because three years later, on a random afternoon, walking back from the pub, I got the phone call.”
To cut a tall (but true) story short: on that spring day in 2023, Downey was asked, out of the blue, if she’d be available to sing with Heaton that summer.
“I was stood on the spot, flapping my hands, just shouting ‘oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!’ I’d love to say it was a dream come true, but it was bigger than my dreams. I never, ever had any thought that that would ever be a possibility.”
To be clear, it wasn’t a gimme: she had to go home, record voice notes of the verse and chorus of Perfect 10, Don’t Marry Her, Song for Whoever and Keep It All In. “I was downloading all the best karaoke versions I could get of all these Beautiful South tunes. Then I recorded them, sent them away. It was the longest night of my life waiting to hear.”
She needn’t have worried, as the then unknown newcomer got the gig. Rianne Downey went from playing to 300 people in Glasgow’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut to headlining in front of 30,000 people at Warrington’s Neighbourhood festival. And the rest, as they say, is hysteria, with Downey continuing to perform with Heaton across 2023, into 2024 to his slot opening the main stage at last year’s Glastonbury and through 2025 including a landmark gig at Paul’s beloved Bramall Lane – the home of Sheffield United.
In the midst of all this… Last spring Rianne Downey spent a month in Seattle, recording The Consequence of Love. It’s an album in which she gloriously leans into her love of folk and country, notably Townes Van Zandt, her parallel passion for Scottish and Irish culture, and into her ability to craft an instantly hummable melody.
One immediate standout is Lost in Blue, a freewheeling slice of California pop whose sound, again, belies its subject matter. It was the first song written for the album, but also one of the most difficult. Struck by a lyrical idea, but also struck by writer’s block, Downey reached out to Nathaniel Laurence, her guitarist and frequent co-writer. The summery sounding but painfully honest Lost in Blue, was built around an initial musical idea from Laurence and the result is stunning.
The Song of Old Glencoe, again written with Laurence, is a fresh-sounding folk song that could have been written in 1950 or, even, 1850.
“I’m a whimsical person in my brain!” she cheerfully admits. “And when I picture life it’s all woodland creatures and fairies and old paintings. Growing up, my family were always telling me folklore and different stories about Scotland – and I was also learning all the famous Scottish and Irish tunes.
“I knew that going fully down that route was never for me,” she acknowledges, “but I wanted to write a love song to Scotland and to my childhood. I wanted to take all this gorgeous music that I’d learned growing up and turn it into Rianne Downey music, basically!”
There is, already, no mistaking that, as fans who’ve seen this time-served “newcomer” on tour this summer with Texas will attest. There are, too, more shows with Paul Heaton. Fundamentally, though, for all she’s learned from her support slots and stellar co-vocalist moments, she’s more than ready to take centre-stage.
“I’m excited to play my album, and I’m excited to get to play again as Rianne Downey, as a solo artist. Because it’s been a while. I’ve done the big shows, and I’ve done the smaller shows. I understand that it’s about you, about the person in the crowd that you have eye contact with, about the wee girl on her dad’s shoulders.”
And the result of all of that?
“All of that made me realise that it’s all about the music.”