This month Roddy Woomble will release his seventeenth record. It might as well be his first.

“How the hell can I have made 17 records?” asks the Idlewild frontman, speaking on the eve of his eighth solo record. “I’m always surprised this is the 17th record I’ve made. I think of every record I make as the first time I’ve done it. Then when you go through old diaries and look at old photographs you see there’s been a long process in making them all.

“I sometimes can’t believe that I’ve got to the age of 48 but then when you speak to someone at 78 they say the same thing. It’s all relative. I guess it’s just that feeling we all have.” It’s a feeling that floats in the ether on Sometime During The Night We Fell Off The Map, or perhaps in the church eves, where this new collection of songs was recorded in what was once a Hebridean holy place in Bunessan on the Isle of Mull. Written in winter, recorded in spring, it is, he says, “a fireside record, even though most people don’t have a fireside now”.

Woomble is typically resistant to expose the meanings behind his new songs, instead referencing the use of words as textures and the mystical nature of the songwriting process. “You’re accessing something that doesn’t really make much sense. You can analyse two chords together, yes, but suddenly a melody and a lyric with those two chords can make you feel something that’s difficult to explain. That’s why I’m not so sure about these courses that teach you about songwriting.” That said, there is one obvious overarching vibe on his new record.

“I suppose what I mean with the lyrics and maybe the title, is the idea that there is a moment in your life when you step aside and you can almost view your life like a film. Then you step back into it and carry on with it,” he says. “I think as you get older you reflect more on things, your accumulated memories. I’ve noticed how ownership of memories can get mixed up, my memories and my friends’ memories. Sometimes when  you talk about them to your friends it’s almost like you’re swapping who owns the memory as you get older.” The record is home to another mortal reminder for its creator.

Woomble was 19 when he formed Idlewild in 1995 after spending his formative years and shaping his music taste in the US, just one of four countries he lived in during an itinerant 10-school adolescence shaped by his father’s job with Michelin. That’s three years older than the son, Uist, with whom he’s now recording albums. How does that feel? “He’s a really good musician,” says Woomble, nodding over his shoulder at the guddle of instruments behind him on the call from his home on Iona. “We play together a lot here. He’s my son but he’s also a great musician. I’ve performed with him a few times. We don’t make a big thing about it. I’m always wondering if it’s embarrassing for him, but he’s fine with it at the moment. I don’t think I’m an embarrassing dad. We’re just playing some music together.”

Idlewild released their ninth album in 2019. Woomble has now made eight of his own. Although less prolific, his band are not a thing of the past.“Idlewild records are so infrequent now. Everyone is living their own life and doing their own thing,” he says. “This room is where I work, where I do whatever I want. Friends come and visit and we write songs together. So the music that comes from that is more a representation of me. “Whereas with the band it’s different personalities coming with different musical ideas. I think the last Idlewild record had some of our best songs on it, and we will make a new record at some point, but we’re off that conveyor belt. 

“It’s a different thing now but it’s a lovely thing. The band and the records mean a lot to people, especially in Scotland, and that’s not something we take for granted.  It’s a very cool thing to have done with your life – make this thing together.” Devotees of Woomble’s solo output will notice a step change from the synth-style of 2023’s Almost Nothing on the new LP. There’s an air of stripped back Springsteen beneath the old rafters.

“There’s a lot of the feeling of it being recorded in an old room in the Hebrides on it I think,” he says. We recorded it in this old Baptist church in Bunessan, on the south of Mull, which has been bought by Ross Wilson (of Celtic rock band Tide Lines)  who is planning to turn it into a studio. Originally a lot of the songs were going to be acoustic guitar and vocal. It was envisaged as an acoustic record. But when we got into the songs we realised some of them would sound good with a bit more on it, even though it was essentially three or four musicians making it. But there’s a lot of ambient space there.”

There’s even the subtlest hint of saxophone, the instrument banned from being played in churches by some wings of Christianity. Woomble registered no lightning bolts during the sessions, when Mark Carmichael played the instrument once described by men of the cloth as the ‘Devil’s horn’.

It’s most effective on one of the album’s standouts, Old Negatives,  a fluttering reverie that perhaps best illustrates Woomble’s assertion that he writes “in patterns more than words”. He says: “I have albums of ideas more than songs about particular things like failed relationships or growing older. 

“I used to paint and I’d put colours together to make a feeling and that’s the way I think of song lyrics. The music gives the words their meaning. My mum has lovely handwriting and I asked her to write the title for the cover of the record, and she said it didn’t make any sense. But that’s not the point. I’m not trying to be purposely oblique. I’m just using words differently in that space.” Woomble will release a journal alongside the record: a compendium of sketches, photos and ephemera from the time it was created. “I did that on the last record and enjoyed it. I think fans like to see these things, glimpses into the process. 

“It’s harder to see physical records but people still like to buy something, even if they just stream the record,” he says. “And most people who like my music like to read, so I thought I’d give them something to read.” In the coming weeks they’ll have something to see, too. And the man on the stage is looking forward to that as much as they are. “I’m not an extrovert. I don’t do concerts for the applause. But I do like playing live as an art form,” he says. “It’s always weird when you finish a record and wonder how you did it. Then when you step back into those songs and start playing them live, I really like that.”