ABOUT THIS ITEM

The Isle of Lewis: a windy outcrop of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, home to everything from Gaelic culture to golden eagles. Oh, and The Boy Who Trapped the Sun. Wry, alt-folkish and utterly idiosyncratic, his real name is the somewhat-less-mythological Colin MacLeod. ‘The Boy’ moniker, he says, “feels bigger, and less lonely”.
So far, so ‘Earnest Singer-Songwriter’. Upon inspection, however, The Boy Who Trapped the Sun is actually quite an unusual listen. His songs are strange, slightly sinister even, perhaps best evident on ‘In the Dark’. “It’s is a ghost story that really happened,” explains Colin. “The police received a 999 call, and when they rushed to the scene, it was all boarded up. There were no signs of forced entry. It was a ghost!” Elsewhere, Ed Harcourt-co-write ‘Lying to Get on Your Good Side’ is almost vaudevillian in its menace, managing to be both melancholic and quite amusing simultaneously. It also boasts the kind of classic, crackly production that makes it sound like it’s been gathering dust in the loft for ten years.
Pigeonholing MacLeod might throw up names such as Nick Drake, Bon Iver, and Fleet Foxes, yet no shape truly fits. Besides, can you really imagine Damien Rice working as salmon fisherman? “It was a good job. I wore full tweeds and everything,” MacLeod recalls. “I’m not one of those people who knew from day one that they wanted to be a musician.” The Boy now resides in South East London, and the ‘Home’ EP’s beautifully brooding title track is in fact about “getting freaked out by the city, after being used to so much space”.

Home
In The Dark
The Fox
Lying To Get On You Good Side
Change The Clocks