“Find me a lawyer, find me a friend,” pleads Jake Bugg on the galloping ‘Never Can Tell’, the launch

single of seventh album ‘Alamo’. “Are they in it for the money? I guess I’ll find out in the end…” It’s

got the direct from-the-heart simplicity of his earliest material that found him fame on his huge-

selling self-titled debut back when he was 18, but now howling back from a more world-weary soul.

At 32, now’s the time for some real and long-delayed self-reckoning. The siege is on. This is his

Alamo.

“It’s really hard to know who to trust in this day and age, especially growing up how I did and having

to be vigilant and observant of the people around you,” he admits. “‘Never Can Tell’ is about that.

Life throws so many parallels at you and it’s hard to know which way to go. You’ve just got to go

with what your gut tells you.”

Bugg’s instincts this time took him to the roots of his original country music muse and back to face

his troubled childhood. After the rock-leaning political charge of last album ‘A Modern Day

Distraction’ laid a crossfire on society’s ills and how they tore apart the people he grew up with, now

the Nottingham-born-and-raised troubadour needed to take a look in the mirror.

“I’ve been doing this for quite a while now,” he says, thinking about first getting out of Clifton (the

biggest council estate in Europe) to pursue his dream. “After all the years of touring and making

records, it just felt like the right time to look inward. The last couple of years have been tough for me

and I’ve had a lot of struggles. I’m trying to navigate those and figure out where they stem from.

He goes on: “This record was only going to work if I was going to be honest and be as vulnerable as

possible. I’ve always had a lot of defenses and barriers around me. I thought it was time to bring

those down.”

After what he calls “the toughest year of his adult life”, Bugg needed to square up to the demons

and dark times from his youth that he’d either “ignored or defended” over the years, and the cast of

characters who had come, gone, and stuck around in his personal life. “The type of upbringing I had

forced me to grow up quickly and get on with it,” he said of his accelerated development and

maturity at the hands of hard times long before he was signed to a major label at just 17. “I missed

out on parts of my childhood and then my teens, but I’ve also had experiences and opportunities

that people would bite your hand off for. Still, it’s only later you realise you haven’t processed

things.”

For every great opportunity was an unknown consequence, and now it’s all caught up with him. “I

didn’t really think about it at the time, because it had always been my dream since I was 13-years-

old,” he admits. “When my career started kicking off, it was what I wished for. “Then the lifestyle of

being a touring musician, being on stage every night, the hits of adrenaline, it’s a recipe for disaster

for anyone. It could be neglecting yourself as a human being, or realising that you just really have to

live life. When you’re constantly on the go, it just feels like a cycle.”

Now away from a major label and on Thirty Tigers, Bugg was more free than ever before. With the

multi-Grammy winning duo of longtime friend and producer Jimmy Hogarth (Anohni, Amy

Winehouse, Paolo Nutini, Duffy) and “great player and writer” Steve McKewan (Chris Stapleton,

Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, Eminem, Keith Urban), Bugg found the “inspiring and forgiving”

team required to help him slam the brakes on and create his most personal work. ‘Alamo’ is an 11

track testament to his matured craft as a songwriter and an open-hearted revelation of his journey

as a man through love and loneliness and back again. It’s an album that rolls along with pure but lush

and authentic country music arrangements that get straight to the heart of the matter with nothing

to hide behind.

“I find myself wishing I was someone else,” he pines on the tender and yearning opener ‘When The

Night’, asking the album’s core question, as Bugg puts it, of “what does isolation really feel like and

lead you to do?” Like us all, Bugg “still struggles with those days where you can’t escape yourself”.

You hear it on ‘The Life’: a devastating rumination on the bottle and those late nights that turn to

late mornings and that “one more regret that I can’t defend, living the life will kill me in the end”.

“Life out there goes on without you,” says Bugg. “Are you going to be part of it, or stay inside and

blame the world? These are moments that I’ve faced recently and I know a lot of people have as

well. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s something I feel obligated to write about so that people

know they’re not alone.”

Fittingly, there’s a battle-born that runs through ‘Alamo’. The finger pickin’ good Dylan and Cohen-

inspired rootsy roadsong of ‘Day By Day’ as Bugg offers that “I’d like to make a difference, I’d like to

make some sense, but everything is closing in” – an ode to just waking up every day and trying to

leave the world a better place than you found it, despite what it throws in your face. ‘Tall Poppies’

bows down to to how “life always has the most interesting ways to humble you” when you’re feeling

on top of the world, while ‘Ten Stories High’ traces the rift of a relationship not built on love for one

another but a hollow love for something else they have in common. The bittersweet sunset closer of

‘Everywhere I Go’ breathes with a sigh of the inevitable that no matter where you may roam, you

still have to carry your trauma with you: “It’s every place I leave, it made me who I am”.

When Bugg wrote the title track, he knew nothing of the history of the 19th Century Battle Of The

Alamo or how it could relate to a lad from Nottingham done good, but he sure does now. “It just

worked with this concept of constantly having to navigate these barrages of hurt, the things we

suffer in a relationship, fighting a war to make this person care about you, fighting for yourself,” he

says.

He’s not decided if all this is still a losing battle, but he’s certainly found a whole lot of healing

through creating his seventh album. “It’s healthy to write about things: the escapism, the venting, it

all helps,” he ends. “I’d encourage everyone at some point in their lives to write a song, whether it’s

terrible or not! It’s a great way of exuding all that hurt.”

You meet the real, raw and unguarded Jake Bugg on ‘Alamo’. After nearly 15 years of dominating the

charts and smashing festivals while standing up outside of trends with his unique and authentic

singer-songwriter approach, he’s done a lot of growing since his first album went platinum three

times and hit Number One in the UK alongside NME covers and praise from (and a US tour with)

Oasis icon Noel Gallagher. Just as with his debut, the album artwork was shot by the legendary Kevin

Westenberg. Sure, Jake’s older, wiser, and comfortably in Memphis in this picture, but it’s another

pure image with no trickery. What you see is what you get: a man still here to take on the world.