“He reached out and said, ‘do you want to come on tour with me?’ And I’m thinking: ‘When else is a thirty-something, white, baldy Irishman single father who lives up in the mountains gonna get to on a bona fide pop tour?’ So I said, ‘yeah, I’ll go and do it.’ “He only told me this after we’d done a couple of gigs together, but he’d been to something like 48 gigs of mine before we’d ever met.”Īs an up-and-coming artist always keen to honour his formative influences, as soon as he started to have some success, Sheeran sought to pay it back.
“Ed’s dad used to bring him to my gigs when he was 13,” begins Vance, a born hobo-raconteur (and he has the storyteller’s hat and showman’s moustache to prove it). But in fact, Vance and Sheeran’s relationship goes back way further than that. Sheeran has signed Vance to Gingerbread Man Records, the label he launched in 2015 with Jamie Lawson and his self-titled, chart-topping debut album. Now, with the impassioned, rootsy, rousing The Wild Swan – an album that makes nods to, and takes cues from, proper heroes ranging from Noam Chomsky to Ziggy Stardust to WB Yeats – the pair’s relationship moves to another level. Working with Ed made me a better writer.” “He would always go places lyrically that I wouldn’t go myself, so he makes me think about the lyrical choices I make. “Ed’s like a wee song machine,” Vance notes approvingly.
Vance co-wrote “Tenerife Sea” and “Afire Love” from 2014’s multi-million- selling X, and he wrote “Make It Rain”, which Sheeran sang over the final episode of cult biker drama Sons Of Anarchy. But when good people come up, I give it a go.” One of those good people is Sheeran. “Every wrong path is a way to the right path. And then I realised that even when it goes shit, it’s still a learning curve,” Vance notes with a smile. “And I used to steer clear of writing with other people altogether until I started doing it just by chance. That feels like it’s my own private joy,” adds a man who crafted The Wild Swan entirely to his own vision, in Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, aided by Jacquire King, who recorded and mixed one of his favourite albums, Tom Waits’ Mule Variations. For one thing, he’s already completed his new album, and with songs of the calibre and single-minded brilliance of the dozen that comprise The Wild Swan, there’s no need for any outside assistance.īut for another, “I’m not snobby about it, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing with other people for myself. Not, Vance clarifies, for himself or his own material. But for an inveterate songwriter, Music City is an irresistible draw, a place where Vance can work with the best of the best. It’s a long way from home for the Irishman, both from the place of his birth (Bangor, Northern Ireland) and the place of his residence (Aberfeldy, Scotland). So it is that in the run-up to the release of his new album, Vance travelled to Nashville.
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It’s a naturally-born but dedicatedly-finessed skill that has led him to collaborate with artists as diverse as Plan B, Sheryl Crow and Rudimental, synced his music on multiple TV shows ranging from Grey’s Anatomy to the finale of Sons Of Anarchy, and caught the ears of some of the biggest players (in every sense) in music, from Elton John to Ed Sheeran.
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