First Was Lost and Now It's Found

Edwyn Collins and Grace Maxwell on His New Song "Knowledge"

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like, in the glut of the Digital Age, we are all being asked to know way too many things. It’s a fresh flood each day, all the swindles, cash grabs, unaware mockeries, casual cruelty, culture warring, and roaming masses of cranks, prophets, and clueless bystanders offering their every thought in a near constant stream. How can you hear your own voice in the madness? And for that matter how can you hear others reaching out when your attention is pulled in a thousand different directions?

I found myself thinking about the difference between “being vaguely aware of things happening” and “wisdom” listening to one-time Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins’ “Knowledge,” from his forthcoming 10th solo album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation. Recorded with guitarist James Walbourne (The Pogues, The Pretenders, Pernice Brothers), bassist William Collins, guitarist Carwyn Ellis, and vocalists Lena Wright and Bianca White, the song shuffles with an easy Stax-inspired warmth, impossibly lovely, as Collins reflects on mortality.

In the video, director Delbert Anthonio Wright pairs those lines over footage of the 65-year-old Collins in his youth, performing hits like 1994’s cheeky “A Girl Like You.” In 2005, Collins experienced two cerebral hemorrhages resulting in aphasia. Nevertheless, he went on to craft a series of comeback albums, including Home Again (2007), Losing Sleep (2010), Understated (2013), and Badbea (2019), and Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation.

Ahead of the new LP’s release on Collins’ own AED Records on March 14th, he and his wife and manager Grace Maxwell joined me to talk about the song.

Listen to “Knowledge”

Jason P. Woodbury: “Knowledge” is such a tremendous song.

Edwyn Collins: I know! I'm proud of the song and the lyric.

Jason P. Woodbury: It stopped me in my tracks. The best songs talk about the personal in a way that opens up the whole of the universal human story. And I think it does that in such an impossibly lovely way.

Let’s talk a little bit about the difference between knowing things and wisdom or knowledge. Right now, maybe always, but right now for sure, it’s easy to mix those two up.

Edwyn Collins: Yeah, well, I'm young at heart.

Grace Maxwell: But you're quite old in reality.

Edwyn Collins: Yeah, exactly. Grace helped me with the lyrics.

Grace Maxwell: So when he says I help him, Jason, I don't write them. What I tend to do is I'll say things to Ed as he's working on songs. Sometimes, something comes in a moment easily, other times he struggles a lot because of his aphasia. Essentially, I'm a horrible, harsh critic. I'll go, “Ed, this isn't good enough.” Sometimes I want you to go, ‘“God, get the fucking hell out of here and get it right.” [Laughs]

Edwyn Collins: [Laughs]

Grace Maxwell: No, I'm not terribly gentle about it. But then there's nobody else in his life is going to talk to him like this. He's always been such a great lyricist, and I'm not ready to accept anything less from him. Now, it's quite a different style he has now, but if you send him back to the drawing board—quite often, almost always—he will come up with something like you’re talking about, just great.

Edwyn Collins: The chorus, that tends to be easy for me. But the verses are hard to get right. To express what you want to visualize.

Grace Maxwell: To get the language going. The fact that he has these language challenges now has made him more direct.

Jason P. Woodbury: I think about some of my favorite writers, Amy Hempel or Raymond Carver, and they have that terse but very direct style. You boil the language down to just the barest essentials and whatever's left, you turn that into poetry. The poetry comes through in the plainness.

Edwyn Collins: That’s what you aim for.

Grace Maxwell: Another weird thing, Jason, is that Ed finds the flow of the lyrics come to him when he's singing more than they do than when he's talking. It's weird.

Edwyn Collins: It's been a fascinating process to go from somebody who is very literate to possibly a moron.

Grace Maxwell: He’s joking, but it's been a huge thing, such a challenge to have to be robbed of language.

Edwyn Collins: Six months in hospital, I could only say yes, no, Grace, and "the possibilities are endless,” over and over again.

Grace Maxwell: But despite any difficulties, Ed's emotional intelligence was demonstrated in those early dark days.

Edwyn Collins: I was so frightened.

Grace Maxwell: You were still a good judge of character, in all the people that were in your orbit at that time. Ed knew who all the good guys were and who all the rubbish guys were. When he had practically no speech, one busy day in the hospital, Edwyn had come back exhausted, and was getting into bed.

And the hospital chaplain woman turned up, she was very polite, but he was knackered. She says, “Edwyn, can I ask you: are you a man of faith?”

And he sat there for a while, trying to find the words, struggling and taking a big pause. And then his finger shot out like this. [Raises index finger] And he looked at her and he went, “Never you mind.” Three words said it all. So that's been really moving on all these years. That's the way that we've approached it, isn't it? Trying to distill it.

Jason P. Woodbury: One of things I took from “Knowledge” is how wisdom is slippery, it eludes. Or we have it for one second—you get it, and you're like, “Now I know.” And then what do you know? You're relearning that same lesson once again.

Edwyn Collins: That’s right, you’ve got it but it’s hard to pin down.

Grace Maxwell: But think of what passes for “knowledge,” you know? I’ve become so much more aware of the knowledge you can communicate even in a semi-coherent state now. It’s about real communication, which isn’t about words, it’s about understanding people, isn't it? It's about what people understand, and how well you get your message across. And that's not really in the volume of words always.

Jason P. Woodbury: It’s a wonderfully warm sounding recording too. It has such an easy bounce to it. Do you still play guitar?

Edwyn Collins: I can still show you the chords on the guitar. It all started with those Memphis chords.

Jason P. Woodbury: A good way to start.

Edwyn Collins: Yeah, those Steve Cropper-style chords on the Telecaster. That’s James Walbourne, who plays with The Pretenders.

Grace Maxwell: He doesn’t have any problem communicating with musicians. We're talking about communication and when you see them in the studio, the telepathy, that gives you faith. In the studio, Edwyn is the benign dictator.

Edwyn Collins: That’s a good word for it.

Grace Maxwell: I'm not in there very often, but when I occasionally drop in, the way that musicians who've known each other for a long time communicate really amazes me, that shorthand.

Edwyn Collins: Before my stroke, I played with words no problem. Now I ask, “What exactly is my vision? What is my vision saying to me?”

Grace Maxwell: You make a virtue of the problems that you have now.

Jason P. Woodbury: That must be the trick. That’s the other thing in the song that gets me, you sing “just keep going.” it’s not a false kind of optimism, it’s the real thing. You get marked by the world, but you just keep going.

Grace Maxwell: That's the point. Keep on going. We have to keep going, it’s the same for everyone.

Jason P. Woodbury: The first song of yours that I loved, like so many people, was “A Girl Like You.” But as I got older and got more into records and started really digging down, I worked my way back to Orange Juice. You can almost hear this new song in conversation with “Rip It Up,” it’s a similar preoccupation.

Edwyn Collins: The Roland TB-303!

Grace Maxwell: Now you’ve got him going, he’s going to get going about the “acid house bassline” that they made on the 303 [bass synthesizer]. He found that when it just arrived here.

But about that idea of positivity, and not in a cloying way: recently I was having a big moan, a big whine about how things were going and he turns around and goes, “Oh shut up woman, you’ve got a great life.”

Jason P. Woodbury: OK so the positivity can be hard edged. [Laughs]

Grace Maxwell: I asked, “Have you ever thought about going into the therapy business, Ed?” He doesn’t mess about.

Edwyn Collins: I think, of course it's good to be nostalgic, but my new record, I'm proud of it. It’s not nostalgia, now wallowing in its own importance. The past carries on to me.

Grace Maxwell: I've been talking to Ed relentlessly, “Don’t you think it’s time you retired?” He goes, “Shush. I want to keep going.”

Edwyn Collins: Well, my grandfather, he was born in this house. He was the director of education for Glasgow in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Grace Maxwell: When I first met him, he said to us, “I've been looking into this pop music malarkey. Would I be right in thinking that the general idea is that one takes a refrain and repeats ad nauseam?”

Jason P. Woodbury: Talk about to the point. But that is a good summation of a lot of great pop music.

Grace Maxwell: Well, you can see where he gets it from.