I OPEN my singer’s mouth, and America comes out. That’s been the case since my earliest memories, warbling Sinatra songs as a toddler during Xmas parties, at the behest of my super-crooning father.

It’ll be the case tonight, as we (Hue And Cry) conclude our 40th anniversary UK tour in London, all our Broadway-esque horns blasting away behind me.

But in these post-Trump victory days – where disbelief reigns that such an appalling man, with such a vile record, could win the popular vote and the presidency – I am having a little personal reckoning.

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What do I think about the America in me? Has its legacy and presence just become toxic, where it was once inspiring?

The American who shapes me most constitutively zooms us straight to the present: Frank Sinatra. Wannabe gangster, sublime sentimentalist, leader of his gang, sharp-suited macho icon.

Sound familiar?

Years ago, I had to wrestle down the horribleness of Sinatra’s personal behaviour (both of the James Kaplan biographies are unsparing), so that I could continue to draw creative energy from his amazing music.

So, truth be told, I know what it’s like to decide to endorse an American monster – so that I can enjoy the unavoidable benefits he brings me. Otherwise, I’d have to unravel and uproot myself from this deeply shaping past – and I’m not sure in what state I’d be after that.

The approval of my stern father is woven into my Sinatra-wiring, too. In my later years, I can look back and see how much a state of “being Sinatra” was vital to his dignity.

Dad slaved away in central belt railway wages offices, doing endless overtime for his family. He nursed fantasies about singing, football and erudition that he never really got anywhere near realising.

Again, map that to Trump – his artful comb-overs, his commitment to the suit and tie, his braggadocio – and it’s something I recognise. The need to have a glowing, charismatic male figure at the centre of one’s grind of a life, holding all the dull fragments together. Do I understand this? Of course I do.

“Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars …” Indeed, Trump goes one better than Sinatra: Elon Musk aims to really play among the stars.

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Well there’s my earliest psychodrama, explained by “the Chairman of the Board”. But I’ve more America in me than just Frank. Giant torrents of American music have poured through my life. They haven’t hedged me in, but blown my doors off.

The first time you hear Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life or Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, you can’t imagine sounds any more powerful, sensuous – and relevant.

Relevant, not necessarily because they’re waving a protest banner (though sometimes they are). It’s because they express a generosity and creativity about life, by virtue of their very exploration of musical boundaries. They are the noblest, most surpassing response to the bloodbath of black American history.

The other presidential candidate, jazz philosopher Cornel West, came to Edinburgh this summer, to preach exactly this gospel. Black American art shows that there can be “wounded healers, as well as wounded haters”.

The Harris campaign dipped their cups deep into this river. All that “Freedom” and “Joy” they proclaimed; the syncretic Beyonce, growling and trilling away as the soundtrack to everything; the sisterly conviviality of Harris’s rallies and set-pieces.

Yet, as West would be the first to point out, invoking this emancipatory tradition is fine. But how does it sit with Harris’s military support for the Israeli state’s obliteration of the Gazans? Or her parading of Liz Cheney and other Gulf-War-era Republicans? Or her targeting of a “middle-class” future, while the actual working class, comprised of many races, was toiling under a growingly expensive world?

I couldn’t help but react to Harris’s campaign, given the notes it played. Yet the Harris “vibe shift”, or mood music, wasn’t enough to glue a willing (and winning) coalition together. Did the parade of celebrities framing Harris reinforce the point – brutishly pointed out by Trump – that there’s something too performative about all this political soulfulness? Fake blues, never mind fake news?

As I re-examine the America in me after this shock result, I’ve come to realise that I draw my information from institutions run by those infernal coastal and big-city elites – subscribing to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books … Notice a theme?

There’s another particular America, rattling around inside me. My experiences of music recording in late 1980s Manhattan – cool players (of all kinds), cavernous museums and bookshops, those dizzying skylines – imprinted America on me as “Europe plus capitalist excess”.

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Yet my 1990s radio work with BBC Scotland also took me into the heartlands, beyond the east and west coasts. It landed me in Oklahoma, the “buckle on the bible belt” (and which was a wall of solid Republican red this Tuesday).

We talked to welfare recipients, grandmothers and granddaughters at the National Rifle Association (NRA) shooting range, a florid historian from Tulsa, a family farm with a satellite dish, a saturnine official in the Oklahoma State Building (six months before it was bombed by white nationalists).

“The point is, this is a place where I can fire a bullet”, said a beefy NRA rep with a rifle across his thighs. “And it will hit nothing before it falls to the ground”.

So it’s not as if I can’t imagine, or haven’t experienced, the gulfs between rural and urban, between agriculture/rustbelt and campus town/city, that the US election maps so dramatically indicate.

But I don’t feel it. For example, I have such a tin ear for most US country music. It sounds to me as if it’s endlessly circling around a “folk” core that is, in essence, a therapeutic soundtrack for the white European settler.

There are a few exceptions to the rule, of course, beginning with Ray Charles (although Beyonce’s startling deconstructed country album got short shrift from the playlist managers of Nashville last year).

But I can’t get on the inside of that particular American cultural tradition. To me, it is the very sound of mournful, stoic conservatism.

So is the America in me really specific – a diverse, cosmopolitan, urban and urbane America? Indeed, the America that’s been driven to its boltholes in this election, and seems about to endure raids and privations as the “enemies from within”?

I guess the reason why America occupies us so is that its cultures are the definition of unsettled dynamism.

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“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself”, wrote Walt Whitman, their national poet. “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

So, predictably, I detect an early fissure in the new Trump coalition. All those tech merchants who now support Trump, those “move-fast-and-break-things” digital and crypto moguls. Or Musk making androids to replace workers, who also wants to implant wires in your brain so you can fuse with AI ...

Aren’t these exactly the wrong people to bring the security and stability that the MAGA majority has voted for? Or maybe a non-democratic techno-oligarchy is what the new Trump elites are really planning for?

And then the powerful science-fiction imagination of American culture that I’ve read and watched over the years rises up in me.

Imaginative resistance is not futile. Surely the new versions of shows like Star Trek, or novelists like Ursula K Le Guin can arise, showing us how we can use technology and ingenuity differently, to live lightly and fruitfully on the planet?

Raising these visions will at least be something for US creatives to do, before the censors against “un-American activity” descend.

I see my bedrock faith in American creativity is slowly returning. I’m as reeling as anyone is at this week’s events. But I’m evidently not prepared to purge myself of a civilisation that seems to want to eat itself alive for the next four years.

I expect new Americas to come out of my mouth in the future. Maybe a crazy hope. No crazier than what’s to come.