Songs from the Last Page walks the borderline between literature and music. Each track takes the final lines of a Scottish novel or story and transforms the words into verses, choruses, bridges and refrains, to create a new song.

The songs hold onto those final moments for just a few more minutes – the melancholy, the awkwardness, the joy or the chill, even the silence. Some of the stories ends with trauma, some with heartache, some end with the promise of another adventure and some end in solitude. One ends with a slushie.  Some of the characters we may know – Wendy and Peter, Captain Flint, or Sherlock Holmes for example – and others we may meet for the very first time in the music.  

By exploring last pages, from books such as Treasure Island, Lanark, How to be Both, News of the Dead, and The Valley of Fear, the album celebrates the stories, writers, places, and language of Scotland, and invites us to dwell, and maybe even wallow, in the poignancy of endings.

“Tired, enriched, unburdened for now, I follow the burn over the bealach and off the page, into where whatever has existed once, exists all the time.”

At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig (Quercus Publishing)

All tracks are written by Gareth Williams, apart from track 6 – Bà Bà Mo Leanabh – written and sung by Gaelic singer/songwriter Deirdre Graham.

The Songs from the Last Page performers are Gareth Williams, on voice and piano, with Aisling O’Dea on violin, and Justyna Jablonska on cello. The album was recorded and engineered at GloWorm studios in Glasgow by Keir Long, and mastered by Andrea Gobbi.

Gareth Williams is an Irish composer and singer-songwriter who, for the last 2O years, has lived in Scotland making music that defies categorization – ranging from music theatre, pop and chamber music to full orchestral music and opera.  The songs in this collection are written for his own voice, but more often he writes for the voices of others who can range from international opera singers and west end performers to people living with conditions like Cystic Fibrosis and Long Covid. 

His cross-genre/interdisciplinary work has been commissioned and performed by companies such as Scottish Opera, Tapestry Opera, NOISE Opera, National Theatre of Scotland, Ulster Orchestra, Young People’s Theatre, Toronto, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Music Scotland, Dundee Rep Theatre, Hebrides Ensemble, Bridge Theatre, Red Note Ensemble, and the Maxell Quartet.

Available on CD from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and Birnam CD