FM PRO Spotlight
Kris Drever’s Doing This For Love marks his first solo album in six years, turning care, work, routine, and everyday devotion into a sharply focused folk record.
Across ten guitar-led songs, the award-winning Scottish singer-songwriter keeps the setup intimate but structurally strong, using voice, guitar, bass, percussion, and trusted collaborators to build space, weight, and emotional clarity.
In this FM PRO Quickfire 5, Drever unpacks the album’s slow writing process, its focus on ordinary acts of love, and the production choices behind its clear, dynamic, vocal-forward sound.
My pals are unbelievable musicians. I trust them and I marvel at them. I do a lot of solo shows and I often write songs with that in mind, the idea has always been to sound as complete as possible on my own.
Q1. After six years away from a solo release, what shifted in your writing process going into Doing This For Love?
To be honest, I work away all the time. Those six years were spent writing this album inbetween being a family man and a professional performer and a recording artist and all the other little things that make up a day. I know some writers who like to ‘batch cook’ in terms of song writing but for me it’s a pretty constant ongoing process that is the backdrop to everything else that goes on in my life.
Q2. These songs focus on everyday work, care, and routine. What drew you to that theme over more traditional storytelling?
It started as a way to help me navigate the creeping dread that’s everywhere just now. When ordinary people start entertaining extremely right wing ideas as if they’re valid, it becomes hard to see the good in us all. The fact is though, that much of human existence for most people is a series of mundane but selfless acts. All the things we do for one another all the time. You don’t put the bins out with a rose between your teeth or pull the hair out of the bath plug by candlelight but it’s still an act of love. They’re all tiny declarations of devotion. That moved me and comforted me too.
Q3. Your sound moves between folk roots and contemporary textures. How do you decide how far to push that blend?
They’re parts of my taste and my voice. I’m always looking to develop more depth in that regard and some of that is experience. I never loved ill-considered fusions of styles, it seems really obvious to me when not enough thought has gone into something like that. A lot of the work is done in the writing, if you write a history song that demands a more contemporary rhythmic setting then you don’t have to reverse engineer a way to marry those two things and really, without that encoded instruction why would you want to?
Q4. You’ve brought in a tight circle of collaborators. How do you keep arrangements open while still adding weight?
My pals are unbelievable musicians. I trust them and I marvel at them. I do a lot of solo shows and I often write songs with that in mind, the idea has always been to sound as complete as possible on my own. That helps everyone when we’re an ensemble because they’re literally reinforcing parts that are already able to stand on their own. I love to let other musicians express themselves in my songs and would only really involve myself if there was a serious matter of taste but that’s so vanishingly rare that it doesn’t really bear talking about. So I guess the answer to that question is, have loads of friends who are preposterously good at music.
Q5. FM PRO TECH Q: With a guitar-led, vocal-forward setup, how did you keep the mix intimate and clear without flattening the dynamics?
There was a bit of thinking about this before we got into tracking. Euan Burton and I set up so that we could make anything happen as soon as an idea presented itself which meant we were able to perform in a very live way and that meant lots of stuff felt complete quite early on.
One of the ideas I had was to be minimal with actual elements in the arrangements so that we could then make those elements occupy more space rather than it getting filled with extra instrumentation. Some of the tracks are mostly guitar, Bass and Percussion. Because of that we could double or triple guitars and chase interesting tones and let that frame the vocal. I think that the fact that there’s actually a lot of space on the record allows the most dynamic parts to stay dynamic without cluttering up the vocal.
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