Stuart Adamson, lead singer of the Scottish rock band Big Country, committed suicide in Hawaii this past Sunday. The reason I hadn’t heard until now is that Big Country has always been, in many people’s minds, a one-hit wonder in America. The band is famous for “In a Big Country”, the lead track off of their 1983 album The Crossing (it made the top 20 in the US, even). After their initial success in the US, they remained successful in the UK, but were relegated to a footnote (an “eighties band”) in American music history.

They made their rock music sound like it came out of the hillsides of Scotland; the trick was to use an EBow to make their guitars sound like a chorus of bagpipers. They made albums well into the late 1990s… and then Adamson just disappeared for several weeks from his home.

glenn mcdonald pays tribute to Stuart Adamson.