The Existential Cadence of Runrig Songs
While most of Troon stayed tucked inside their warm homes as the temperature slipped toward two degrees last night, the Town Hall was slowly filling. Coats were shrugged off, wool scarves hung on the backs of chairs. On stage, the soundcheck trembled through the floorboards as Beat the Drum tuned up for The Runrig Experience.
I’ve been circling the same question since I was twenty, listening to Runrig’s music and lyrics: what draws people from so far to hear this music? Why do Germans, Danes, Americans, Highlanders, Lowlanders, urban Scots and homesick expats all arrange winter drives, ferries, flights—just to gather under these songs?
Tonight, in Troon, with my breath still thawing in the hall’s warm air, the question returned with its familiar ache.
Perhaps it begins with awe; the sweep of geese over the glens, the unspoiled landscapes, the tactile pull of refrains like “S na horo eile, horo bho” in Skye. It may be the call to the wild, to a time when life felt simpler, or at least more spacious. For me as a Christian, there is something more: the glimpse of another believer writing of hope, of dawn breaking again, of faith’s quiet mystery in Every River. Some hear only the theme of homecoming, and that is there, unmistakably. But I also sense a deeper return—something spiritual, a home approached with the heart rather than the body.
In Life Is Hard, the lyrics brush against the idea of deliverance, of being washed clean. Yet as with any good poem, once a song enters open territory it becomes shared property. Each listener carries away their own meaning, even when those meanings diverge, or falter, or contradict the writer’s intent. That is part of the intimacy of it.
In an age when so much popular music leans on familiar tropes—desire, breakups, the small mechanics of daily life—Runrig’s songs feel like crafted stories in miniature. They hold the existential pull of being caught between worlds, like in The Cutter, where a cultural border becomes an emotional one. Even the Gaelic itself, opaque to many of us, doesn’t exclude; it deepens the experience. We don’t always understand the words, but we feel the cadence, the gravity.
So why are we drawn to these songs of longing? Perhaps because they reach into questions of identity, because they name our hunger for a better life, or for a place that seems half-remembered even when we have never stood there. The Germans call it Fernweh: a longing for a place we have not yet known.
And so, I sit there, returning to the same existential questions that haunted me at twenty: Where is home now that life has moved on? Who am I when the old certainties have shifted? Is there still room for my language, my memories, my faith, my people? Am I the only one who feels both lost and hopeful, suspended somewhere in-between? Some answers come; others recede. But that’s the way it is meant to be.