Carnival of Soul

On Oct. 9, acclaimed Scottish rock band Travis will release a new album titled 10 Songs — and earlier this week, the band fronted by Fran Healy premiered a new single from the record.

(Click here to pre-order 10 Songs from our Rock Cellar Store).

“The Only Thing” joins the group with Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, and the all-star team-up came with a poignant music video:

Said Fran Healy of the music video, the result of some inspired creativity during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic:

“This is definitely my Covideo. One of the main prerequisites was to somehow get us all on the same stage and try to capture the spontaneity of a duet while the performers are in different locations. Leading up to the shoot, I would send Susanna a video of a great duet. Summer Wine, I Got You Babe, Islands In The Stream. I hired a small film crew and persuaded Glasgow’s Theatre Royal to open its doors to us. I directed the shoot remotely, via three phones. One in the DP’s ear, one FaceTime trained on the monitor and one iPhone with the band. There were so many moving parts. I’m amazed we got there and it turned out great.”

This collaboration happened, by the way, thanks to a chance exchange on Twitter. Said Hoffs:

“Fran and I met through a mutual appreciation on Twitter. The friendship grew from there. One day, he asked me to sing with him, and without hesitation, I burst out ‘Yes!’. He showed up at my doorstep with his recording gear and we recorded my vocals in the living room. Collaborating with Fran and the band has been a pure pleasure.”

Here’s another pre-release single from 10 Songs, “Valentine” — with a video also directed by Healy:

10 Songs will be the ninth studio album from Travis and the follow-up to 2016’s Everything At Once.

Travis earned international acclaim for both 1997’s The Man Who and 2001’s The Invisible Band, earning the band a reputation for its solid songwriting and the earnestness of its music — and, as previously mentioned, paving the way, so to speak, for future acts such as Coldplay.

More on Travis’ legacy, per a news release:

It’s been twenty-five years since the four members of Travis first set foot in a Glaswegian rehearsal room. At various points along the trajectory between then and now, the band have sold millions of albums, they’ve been the subject of the award-winning feature length documentary Almost Fashionable and Fran has elicited acclaim from Paul McCartney, Elton John and Graham Nash – all songwriters whose ability to divine a timeless melody out of thin air has sustained them through the decades.