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Jun 10, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Travis

Scottish rockers Travis made a splash in the late 1990s with a pair of well-received albums—1997’s Good Feeling and 1999’s Nigel Godrich-produced sophomore album, The Man Who—but they never really went away, releasing six more albums this century. Now they have announced a new one, the accurately titled 10 Songs (wouldn’t it be funny if it actually had nine songs on it), and recently shared its first single, “A Ghost,” via a video for the track created while under quarantine by frontman Fran Healy and his 14-year-old son Clay. 10 Songs is due out October 9 via BMG. Check out “A Ghost” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

10 Songs is the band’s first album in four years, the follow-up to 2016’s Everything At Once, and is also the band’s ninth studio album. Healy co-produced the album with Robin Baynton (Coldplay, Florence & The Machine) and it was recorded at RAK Studios in late 2019 and early 2020. The album features synth work from Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, lap steel from Greg Leisz (Beck, Bruce Springsteen), and guest vocals from Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles on “The Only Thing.”

A press release describes the album as such: “10 Songs is an album about the way life comes at love and what love does to weather those challenges. It’s grown-up. There’s sizzling synergy in abundance, and many of it’s songs benefit from the almost psychic sense of mutual attunement that comes from being in a band whose line-up hasn’t changed in its entire collective lifetime.”

Healy had this to say about the video for “A Ghost” in the press release: The video for ‘A Ghost’ started out as a mocked up picture of me and three ghosts playing the last chorus of the song in a deserted alleyway. It looked cool so I took that image and back engineered a story out of it. Just when everything was ready to shoot, the world went into lockdown, so we had this great song with no way to make a video. Frustrated and in an act of desperation, I decided to draw it. I did a test to calculate how long it might take me. 16 hours for each, 10 seconds of footage. It worked out that it would take around 30 days which landed exactly on the deadline date. So I drew and drew and drew and drew. 2,500 drawings later, it was done…. One day, I was watching a sequence back and when it got to the end of what I had drawn, it flashed and went into live action. It looked great. This was the moment I realized I could shoot the mock up picture of me playing with my band of ghosts in the alleyway. This helped in three ways. 1. Filming the last 47 seconds would save me 10 days of drawing. 2. I could recruit my 14-year-old son, Clay as the cameraman. He has a drone camera so could shoot it remotely and could use it as part of his school video project 3. Most importantly, we could film it socially distant. It was the most bizarre video shoot I have ever worked on. You realize how important proximity is to getting things done when it’s taken out of the equation. But we did it and it turned out great. Clay has to wait till we release the song to hand in his video project.”

The band’s full lineup is Fran Healy (guitar/vox), Andy Dunlop (guitar), Dougie Payne (bass), and Neil Primrose (drums).

10 Songs Tracklist:

1. Waving at the Window
2. The Only Thing (feat. Susanna Hoffs)
3. Valentine
4. Butterflies
5. A Million Hearts
6. A Ghost
7. All Fall Down
8. Kissing in the Wind
9. Nina’s Song
10. No Love Lost

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