When I was twenty-one, the shrunken body of my lovely Grampa Peter Quinn finally gave out for good.  The evening before his funeral, a friend dropped through my letterbox a tape called “Handful of Earth” by a singer I’d never heard of before called Dick Gaughan.  Well, the emotional intensity of that album blew me away, and it remains one of my all-time favourites to this day. In particular, it includes a version of “Now Westlin Winds” that’s as moving a performance of a Burns song as I think I’ll ever hear, and indeed one of the most powerful and poignant songs in any genre that I’ve heard yet.  With its gorgeous dense natural imagery and its musing upon the myriad ways in which we human beings inhabit the landscape of this world, it manages to say something intimate and huge at the same time.  It’s a love song and a massive metaphysical statement too, and made me realise for the first time that Burns was about so much more than waspish young girls with coy voices clasping their hands in gutless, Jean Brodie-esque renditions of “Ca The Yowes” at the annual school Burns song competition.

If “Now Westlin Winds” started something for me that evening, then my Grampa’s choice of “Ae Fond Kiss” as the parting piece of ceremonial music at his funeral the following day nearly finished me off.  Even played by an indifferent undertaker on a cheesy Casio keyboard it socked me right in the belly that morning.  Though I’d sung that song to myself countless times, indeed it was one of the few songs I’d ever sung in public too, “fare thee weel, alas, forever” took on an entirely different meaning for me in that moment.  And that’s the thing about a truly great song, that it’s big enough and spacious enough to accommodate a thousand meanings and never lose its relevance.  And Burns has dozens and dozens of those songs.  It’s remarkable.

There are other personal connections: my granny chose the same song for her parting, my dad opened my own wedding ceremony with “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”, and I sang a duet of "The Learig"with my mum at my brother Steven's wedding, but as a songwriter myself, my enthusiasm is deeper and wider than that.  I’m the same age now (well I was when I wrote it!) as Burns was when he died.  To consider what he created in that short life makes me aspire for just one ounce of the empathy of “The Slave’s Lament” or “My Tocher’s The Jewel”, the earthiness of “Wee Willie Gray” or “Brose and Butter”, the wit of “Holy Willie’s Prayer” or the wisdom of “A Man’s A Man For A’ That”; and the same length of time again with which to create a single song that might speak to someone else the way so many of his songs speak to me.

I wrote this short piece for Andy Hall's beautiful book "Touched By Robert Burns", commissioned to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth in January this year. Since writing it, "Ae Fond Kiss" (and the beautiful "John Anderson My Jo") has appeared at yet another family funeral, and that one long, long before its time. And Burns will be at mine too whenever the time comes.