Justin Currie, the former lead singer of the Scottish pop-rock group, Del Amitri, concludes his American tour promoting his solo album, “The Great War,” tonight at Jammin’ Java Music Club and Cafe.
If you go
Justin Currie U.S. tour
Where: Jammin’ Java Music Club and Cafe, 227 Maple Ave. E., Vienna
When: 8 p.m. Sunday
Info: $18; 703-255-1566; jamminjava.com
Following his 2007 solo debut album, “What is Love For,” Currie has enjoyed promoting his new album of original songs in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Philadelphia. “I like working in the United States,” he said. “It’s so enormously and bizarrely different from anything you come across in Europe. I find it endlessly amusing.”
Still in his teens when he co-founded the group Del Amitri in his native Glasgow, Currie was at once the band’s lead singer, bassist and main songwriter. That was in 1982. The group would go on to release six hit albums by 2002 that included “Waking Hours,” in 1989, “Change Everything,” in 1992, “Twisted,” in 1995 and “Can You Do Me Good?” in 2002. Soon after this last release, Justin, desiring a solo career, amicably parted ways with Del Amitri.
“It’s quite odd when you step out of the collective identity of a band and do solo shows under your own name,” Currie said. “There’s something very personal about that and quite frightening.”
Currie has been touring with a piano player and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar which, he realistically concedes, he only strums at, noting “the focus is on the songs when you are your own accompanist.”
Indeed, his album “The Great War” garnered back-to-back, four-star reviews in recently published issues of Mojo and Q. Currie is described as the “songwriter’s songwriter” in Mojo, who noted “… ‘The Great War’ also finds the former Del Amitri frontman tailoring the kind of middle-eights lesser writers can’t … craft, and he does so with invisible thread,” while Q observed that with Currie’s second solo offering “… the follow-up sees him back on pleasingly familiar territory, delivering business-class pop-rock.”
Fans have little doubt that Currie is a master tunesmith, crafting haunting vocals set against lyrics that are boldly self-revealing. This is especially illustrated in the current album’s offerings such as “At Home Inside of Me” and the epic, “The Fight to Be Human.”
“I couldn’t tell Americans anything about myself that they couldn’t figure from the songs,” he concluded. “The songs do the work and I hope people get it.”
