Glasgow singer-songwriter Michael Cassidy releases his third album, The Nurse's Son, on Friday 13th November through Vertical Records. Just ahead of it he's shared a final single from the record, Pile Up, which joins What a Perfect Way for the World to End and the title track.
Pile Up was written during a stretch when everything that could go wrong seemed to be doing exactly that. Michael set the darker lyric against an upbeat melody and an energetic arrangement on purpose – he's naturally an optimist, so he wanted the music to push back against the weight of the subject instead of just mirroring it. The press release describes it as a bittersweet push and pull between frustration and resilience.
There's a nerdy guitar detail too (my favourite kind). The song is in the same tuning Paul Brady used for his version of Arthur McBride, and Michael took particular inspiration from Brady's rhythmic delivery and phrasing. A melancholic clarinet and piano section from Tom Gibbs and Tommy Reilly pulls against the brighter momentum.
A songwriter who writes a song about everything going wrong and then refuses to let it sound miserable is exactly the sort of thing I like to back, and I'm happy to put this album on the Audio Addicts radar. Add the Paul Brady tuning and a record written largely over four years about family, heartbreak and growing older, and it's an easy one to get behind.
Michael has been releasing music since he was 17 and won the Gerry Rafferty Songwriting Prize for The Men Who Stood Beside Me In The War. The albums so far are My Electric Heart (2015) and Wandering as Water (2022), followed by the EP A Love Like Ours in 2025. He has also toured a lot, with support slots for Ben Howard, John Grant, Martha Wainwright, Nathaniel Rateliff and Sam Fender.
The Nurse's Son is described as his most musically ambitious work to date, and it draws on his upbringing in Paisley and the west of Scotland as well as reflections on the rapidly changing world around him.
Michael celebrates the release with an album launch show at Cottiers in Glasgow on Friday 27th November.