Hamish Bell Guerrini is a Stroud, England-based singer-songwriter guided by a simple creative rule: a good melody paired with good words. His influences run from Dylan, Bowie, and Joni Mitchell to Queen, Radiohead, Rufus Wainwright, John Grant, and even the operatic grandeur of Verdi. He also founded Stroud folk-funk outfit The Mad Cows in 2000 and later spent 16 years running The Rabbit Hole, a Glastonbury Festival venue built to promote young up-and-coming artists, including an early booking for Bastille before they broke through. His new 15-track album, Significant Others, releases September 28th, following his 1999 debut, Picture In My Bag.
Significant Others
The album very nearly didn’t happen. Hamish first started collating it back in 2012, but years of work, family life, and real struggles with mental health meant the project was repeatedly lost, rediscovered, and set aside again. What finally pulled it together was chance: a stranger showed up looking to rent the cabin in Hamish’s garden, and it turned out he was Chris Oldfield, a producer who’d played in and produced Dreadzone. Neither man knew that going in. Together, using Ableton and a rotating cast of local musicians, they spent the following year digging the old tracks back out and wrestling them into final shape. Oldfield has called the year working with Hamish an honor.
The whole record was made at home, in that same garden cabin, with musicians drifting in and out over the years to rehearse around a big fire pit, occasionally testing the patience of Hamish’s neighbors in the process. The setup stayed simple and resourceful throughout, good microphones, good monitors, a genuine ear for what worked, and a shaker improvised from an empty tin filled with rice standing in for gear they didn’t have. Hamish uses his own private measure for whether a song is working: if it gives him goose-pimples, he knows he’s found something real, and that instinct runs through the whole 15-track record rather than just a couple of highlights.
The album opens on “I’d Never Make It Through” and “Bruhaha” before “Funny One” arrives as track three, ending with a knowing nod to Verdi. “The Worm Forgives The Plow,” “Gentlemen,” and “Borrowed Time” carry the record through its middle stretch before three of the album’s most personal songs land back to back: “Helpless,” written for his son Pip, sits at track seven, followed by “I’d Like To Say I’m Sorry” and “I’m Prepared To Wait,” written for his daughter Grace.
“Don’t Try And Break My Heart” follows at track ten and has become something of a family favorite, reportedly still getting Hamish’s own parents, now 90 and 80, up and dancing whenever it plays. “Love All Around,” written for his son Noah, comes right after at track eleven, rounding out the trio of songs written for each of his children in the days just after their births. The album closes out its back half with “Close The Bedroom Door,” “Struggled,” “Short Sharp Shock Of Your Love,” and finally “The End Is Always Hard,” a fitting title to send off a record that took as long and as much perseverance as this one did to finish. With so many different musicians having passed through the project over the years, getting everyone on a stage together would mean a genuinely large crowd, but Hamish hasn’t ruled out trying to make that happen down the line.
Final Thoughts
Significant Others is a patient, deeply personal record built on real perseverance, chance encounters, and the people who showed up to help finish it, and its fifteen tracks earn every bit of the sixteen years it took to bring them together. It’s available now on Spotify.
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