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"Real life is love": Inside Kris Drever's Thoughtful Return With 'Doing This For Love'

The celebrated Scottish songwriter reflects on timeless songs, creative longevity, intimate live performance, and the deeply human heart of Doing This For Love.

By Chris RoditisMusicngear Lead Editor

Few artists in contemporary folk music balance technical brilliance and emotional clarity as naturally as Kris Drever. Across his solo work and his years with Lau, the Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist has built a body of work rooted in nuance, humanity, and an instinctive understanding of what makes songs endure long after trends disappear.

His latest album, Doing This For Love, his first solo record in six years, continues that evolution. Built around stories of quiet devotion, unseen labour, and the fragile mechanics of everyday life, the record finds Drever exploring what he calls the idea that "real life is love". At the centre of it all is his unmistakable guitar work: thoughtful, expressive, and deeply connected to the emotional architecture of each song.

In our conversation, we spoke about the timeless thread between traditional and modern folk music, the physical intimacy of small live venues, collaborating with extraordinary musicians, the realities of sustaining a creative life, and why he's determined never to make the same album twice. We also went deep into guitars, Leslie cabinets, floating-neck archtops, and the peculiar moment when a song is finally finished: "when I make myself cry".

Chris Roditis, Musicngear: 'Doing This For Love' pays close attention to the unnoticed labour that keeps people and relationships afloat. Was there a particular moment or person that made you realise these “ordinary” stories were actually the emotional centre of the record? 

When I wrote the title track, it was a standalone idea, but the longer I thought about it, the more connections I saw with the other songs. Indeed, it’s one of those ideas that once you see it, you see it everywhere you look. It made sense to me that everything in the songs, everything on the songs and everything I did on the way to the studio was part of the same idea. Real life is love.

Musicngear: Your guitar playing balances detail with restraint in a way that feels deeply connected to the song itself. When you sit down with an acoustic guitar, what tells you a part is “finished”? Is it instinct, arrangement, or something harder to explain? 

It’s a mixture. Some songs don't need intricate guitar parts and some can't exist without them. Because I spend a lot of time playing the guitar, I think I naturally create parts that are a couple of steps removed from the most basic arrangements and that’s often my starting point.

It might tell me what the melody is, for instance, or I might workshop the same idea with a few different harmony options. Finished is either when it works live, or when recording is complete or when I make myself cry.

Musicngear: Since Musicngear is full of guitar obsessives, we have to ask: what guitars or pieces of gear became especially important while making and touring Doing This For Love? 

The Cranmer Guitars KPL5 Archtop has been huge for me. It has a floating bridge, a floating tailpiece and a floating neck. It’s absolutely bonkers and completely brilliant. The strings are about 5 inches off the body and for some reason, that totally works for me; I adore it. 

There were so many great bits of kit that we used for the record, though. We had a couple of reamp chains up specifically for sending different sources through some very varied pedal boards. 

There was also a lot of Leslie cabinet action, Euan's Harmony Bass through the Leslie was a highlight, as were Matthew Herd’s Mellotron passes. Really excellent stuff.

Musicngear: Folk music often carries a long memory, but this album feels rooted very much in present-day emotional realities. Do you ever feel tension between tradition and contemporaneity, or have those worlds become inseparable for you now? 

I think the old songs that ring true are those which contain recognisably human experiences and emotion and that’s the same for the modern songs too. One of the reasons that a lot of old songs survive into modernity is that they contain timeless information. That longevity will only be true of a small percentage of the music that’s being made right now and we won't get to know which songs make it into the canon, but I suspect it will be the ones that speak to the human condition. Recorded music has obviously changed that landscape to an extent, but it’s still happening. Hey Jude, being sung at football matches would be a point in case.

I don't know if I ever separated those things. I’m very aware that I exist outside of the mainstream, but that’s ok, my tastes are not mainstream tastes, and my interests are not mainstream interests. I’m fascinated by the subtle similarities between what we look at as historical pieces and what we see as fresh and/or modern. They’re both part of the same big patchwork and I like to explore the ties that bind them.

Musicngear: You’ve spent years moving between solo work and the very collaborative dynamic of Lau. When returning to a solo album after that environment, what changes most in the way you hear yourself creatively? 

Lau has always been a largely instrumental band. The way the songs fit into that dynamic is difficult; it requires so much consideration. It’s really easy to end up sounding like two different bands; it’s a really slow process filled with circular discussions about the pros and cons of every musical decision. 

The contrast with the solo thing is that it’s incredibly light on its feet. I can change direction instantly, try something, keep it, move on. It feels more like playing than co-writing does. Even if I’m doing a ‘band' thing, I try not to get prescriptive with the other players, they’re brilliant, they’re in my band because they’re brilliant, so I just let them do their thing. It’s closer to classic songwriting, I guess, but that’s okay, it’s a pretty timeless craft.

Musicngear: Over the years, what have been the hardest things to navigate creatively or personally as an artist, and what perspective would you offer younger musicians trying to build a sustainable life in music? 

Unless you’re very lucky, very switched on or very wealthy, your initial timeline is probably going to look much slower than your peers who’ve opted for stability. It’s hard to remember to keep focus on your art and not just the precarious nature of the business.

Being good according to the standards of your own tastes is absolutely fundamental, non-negotiable if what you want is to make art. That takes work; just because you know why something is good doesn’t mean you know how to make something good. If you keep going, though, you’ll get there and there will be people whose tastes overlap with yours. They’re going to love what you do on their terms.

It’s a pretty solitary business most of the time and it’s very tricky to establish routines if you’re on the road a lot. I think acceptance is key to navigating that. If you fight it, it will make you very sad. 

Musicngear: Audience responses often mention the warmth and connection of your live shows, especially in intimate rooms. What do smaller venues allow you to do emotionally or musically that larger stages sometimes can’t?

I think it’s a matter of scale. It’s more of an audience thing than a performer thing, if I walk into a concert hall to see a solo act or a duo and I’m not within ten rows of them, then it’s going to be a more remote experience. All the musical responsibility falls to one or two people and the act of making music like that relies on small physical gestures. When there are larger ensembles, there’s more to look at, but also the focal performer/s have less responsibility for the undersong and so can be more physically expressive.

The beauty of small solo shows is that people can actually see you actually squeezing the notes out of a plank of wood, you can make small hand movements important to the listener, and they can see you laugh at yourself when you go off piste. It’s much more of a communal thing. I often think of it as sharing air; it’s so immediate. 

Musicngear: What do you look for in another musician before inviting them into one of your songs? Is it technical ability, emotional sensitivity, unpredictability, or something else entirely? 

All of the above. I have quite a collection of extraordinary friends. I think I’ve always had a really good radar for brilliant musicians and fortunately, the truly excellent ones are usually lovely people. The two main factors would be, do I want to hang out with them? And, do they blow my mind when they play?

If it’s two yeses, then we’re good.

Musicngear: If you could design an ideal future collaboration completely outside expectations with any artist, from any genre or era, who do you think would challenge or surprise you the most creatively? 

Hell's bells, that’s a really tough question. There are so many, but truthfully, I get such a lot from collaborating with the folk I work with, not to mention the fact that songwriting is a kind of self-collaboration. It’s a multimedia art form where you take pieces of your heart and give them to other people to react to. That's quite the challenge.

Musicngear: After six years between solo records, do you feel 'Doing This For Love' opens a new creative chapter for you, or does it feel more like a continuation of a longer journey you’ve been on for years?

I’m pretty much always working on things; six years is just how long it took me to write the next album while making sure to do enough work to feed my family.

There is always a creative progression for me. I move at a glacial pace, but I haven’t stalled yet, definitely a continuation. I am very particular about never making the same record twice. I go through a great deal of thinking and strategising to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

That’s not a great answer, is it? Yes and No.

Connect with Kris Drever
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About Chris Roditis

Chris Roditis has been an active musician since 1995 in various bands and projects across a variety of genres ranging from acoustic, electronic to nu metal, british rock and trip hop. He has extensive experience as a mixing engineer and producer and has built recording studios for most of the projects he has been involved with. His passion for music steered his entrepreneurial skills into founding MusicNGear in 2012.

Contact Chris Roditis at chrisroditis@musicngear.com

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