What Happens When The Highland
Pipes Call a Poet Home...
A Collection of Poems, Paintings & Music
Born In A Scottish heart
INDEX
Performed by:
The Band of Golden Light
Most songs the artist E Laurence Bake (ELB) writes begins as a poem. This album was sparked by the rugged beauty of Scotland, the ancient echoes of its history, and the spirit of a people whose stories have travelled through generations. But when a poet's words meets music of the soul, something else happens.
Word by word, they find their voice in the haunting call of the pipes, the pulse of a fiddle, and the timeless melodies carried across lochs (lakes) mountains, and seas. When the essence of a poem remains true as it meets the soul of a nation magic happens. In that moment, a laughing, crying, longing Scottish heart is awakened.
Scotland Forever - the album doesn't simply celebrate a place. It invites you into a living heritage of courage, longing, love, and belonging, where the land remembers, the music speaks, and the stories of a people become a song of us all.
Produced by E Laurence Bake
The Poet's Studio USA/Canada
Volume 1
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Guest Co-Songwriter: Duncan McGill
Celtic music is at the root of American Country Music.
This song brings them back together in this new modern age.
In this song the poet brings the rich history of American Texas Blues to meet the magic of the Scottish highlands
Made as theme song for a modern movie inspired by the great Scottish ballad songs of old
Instrumental Gospel / Rock Anthem song inspired bythe story of the Battle Of Sterling, Sept. 11, 1297
BONUS TRACK BELOW
ELB in the Highlands
Bonus Track
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Inspired by the poet's artistic years in Edinburgh, with
The Burns Agency For Scottish Arts
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A Son Called Home
The Scotland Forever Story
by Ann Anderson
Some places let you go. Scotland never quite does.
E. Laurence Bake (ELB) was a boy raised in the poverty stricken Gorbals neighbourhood of Glasgow, before life carried him across the Atlantic to Canada and the USA. He grew up to be a life-long poet, a painter and a composer, but beneath everything he made, the old country kept its quiet claim on him.
Then in the 1980s Scotland called him back. Invited by the Burns Agency for Scottish Arts, Laurence returned to Edinburgh as a young artist: a city of grey stone and steep, narrow closes, of castle rock and sea mist. There he wrote and composed.
He walked the Royal Mile late at night and found his way into the corners of old pubs, where a fiddle and some pipes might appear from nowhere and a room full of strangers would fall silent for a song older than any of them.
He was not a visitor there. He was a son, home again.
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The Long Road Back
In time, Laurence returned to Canada and to the American art scene, where his work would carry him for decades. But the music never stopped calling. In every season of his life he heard it: the lift of a pipe tune on the wind, the hush of a Gaelic lament, the memory of the land and the people who shaped him before he ever knew he was an artist.
Scotland Forever, The collection of poems / painting and music album is his answer to that call. It is a tribute to the boy he was, to the young artist who found his voice in Edinburgh, and to the people and the land that never once left his heart.
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A Nation That Honours Its Poets
Perhaps no nation on earth honours its poets as Scotland does.
Every year on the 25th of January, the birthday of Robert Burns, people gather around the world for Burns Suppers. The haggis is piped in and addressed in Burns’s own words, and a guest rises to give the Immortal Memory, a toast to the poet himself. And every New Year, millions who have never set foot in Scotland link arms and sing “Auld Lang Syne.”
In Edinburgh, the Scott Monument towers over Princes Street, among the largest monuments ever raised to a writer. In 2004 the city became the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature, and that same year Scotland named its first modern national poet, the Makar. Here, a poet is not a curiosity. A poet is part of the nation’s memory.
It was in this country, among people who still recite their poets by heart, that Laurence learned what poetry can mean to a nation. Every poem on this album was written in that spirit, and in quiet gratitude to every poet come before, whose voice still echoes through all Scottish verse.
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The Ancient Music Of A Proud People
Long before “Celtic Music” was a label on a record-shop shelf, it was simply the sound of life in the Highlands and Islands. Today the word stretches across Ireland, Wales, Britain and beyond, but in Scotland its oldest heart is Gaelic song.
That music was carried by the clàrsach (the Gaelic harp) one of Scotland’s most ancient instruments, played in the halls of clan chiefs. It was carried by the bards, who held places of honour in those same halls, keeping the history, lineage and pride of their people alive in verse.
It was carried by the pipes, whose great classical form:(the slow, elaborate “big music” of the bagpipe), was handed down through hereditary piping families such as the MacCrimmons of Skye. And by the 1700s, fiddlers like Niel Gow had turned the reel (Scottish dances) into national treasures.
Above all, it was carried by ordinary voices: women singing walking songs as they worked, puirt à beul (mouth music, sung for dancing when no instrument was near), and lullabies passed from mother to child. Much of it was never written down. It travelled mouth to ear, family to family, and when hard times scattered the Scots across the sea, the music went with them, to Cape Breton, to Nova Scotia, to Ontario, where it lives still.
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The Band of Golden Light
Scotland Forever does not try to recreate the past. It carries it forward.
The Band of Golden Light brings a thoroughly modern sound to these songs. The harps, the fiddle and the pipes are all here, woven together with warm, sweeping synthesizers and the grandeur of a film score. Then Lawrence makes a leap forward.
He notes that at the heart of a modern American country music, you find a source that is much more ancient. You hear the fiddles of Ireland and Scotland. Even the heartbreak in a voice at times.
Laurence he also reveals that if you studied the actual notes and musical structures that gave America the Blues, Soul and Gospel, and the great Rock Anthems, you will find a brotherhood in structures of traditional Scottish music.
It is the music of old meeting the wide-open imagination of a new world, with deep respect for the tradition that came first.
Listen closely. Somewhere in these songs, the mist is lifting over the hills, and Scotland is calling one of her children home.
That's because Scotland is Forever.
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Contact Laurence Today!
Comments & Questions Welcome
CREDITS.
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ELB and the Band of Golden Light
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Words and Music E. Laurence Bake
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Produced by ELB at The Poet's Studio
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Copyright 2025-26 The Poets Foundation
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Ann Anderson, Executive Director
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Works from the E. Laurence Bake Archive
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