Where You’re Meant to Be

Why do we tell sto­ries? For his debut doc­u­men­tary fea­ture, Where You’re Meant to Be, direc­tor Paul Fegan embarks on a quest to crack this peren­ni­al conun­drum with the help of for­mer Arab Strap front­man Aidan Mof­fat. But what starts out as a ram­shackle whis­tle-stop tour of Scot­land grad­u­al­ly evolves into a dis­arm­ing­ly tran­scen­dent spir­i­tu­al odyssey, as the pair dis­til a thou­sand years of Celtic lore into a sim­ple, soul­ful ballad.

The­mat­i­cal­ly speak­ing, there are obvi­ous com­par­isons with Welsh musi­cian Gruff Rhys’ sim­i­lar­ly charm­ing and enlight­en­ing 2014 road trip, Amer­i­can Inte­ri­or. Like Rhys, Mof­fat is a sea­soned racon­teur and a lyri­cist of great can­dour and wit, and there’s an irre­sistible romance to the way he sets about trac­ing his cul­tur­al her­itage. Scot­land may be known around the world for its whisky and curi­ous pro­cliv­i­ty for deep-fried con­fec­tionary, but the true essence of Scot­tish­ness, Mof­fat rea­sons, lies in his homeland’s rich tra­di­tion of pass­ing down sto­ries through the medi­um song.

As he trav­els around con­vers­ing with a mis­cel­lany of eccen­tric char­ac­ters, from High­land bat­tle re-enac­tors to Loch Ness myth-stir­rers, the real star of the show emerges. Enter stage right, Sheila Stew­art: a 79-year-old singer who, as the last in a long line of trav­el­ling folk roy­al­ty, is intro­duced as a proud bas­tion of a bygone era. Ear­ly on in their meet­ing, she clash­es with Mof­fat over his insis­tence that the tra­di­tion­al folk songs she so dear­ly cher­ish­es are ripe for a mod­ern update, telling him in no uncer­tain terms that his pro­pos­al is tan­ta­mount to sacrilege.

Rather than allow­ing this unfore­seen turn of events to derail pro­ceed­ings, how­ev­er, Mof­fat sim­ply hits the reset but­ton on his route plan­ner and sol­diers on, Stewart’s scathing rebuke still ring­ing in his ears but no less stead­fast in his deter­mi­na­tion to bridge the gap between the past and the present. ​“Folk music needs a good edi­tor,” he quips at one point, and you get the sense that he’s on to some­thing. In the end, it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter whether the jaun­ty, salty tunes that Mof­fat strums out are more faith­ful to Stewart’s sto­ries or his own. They could just as eas­i­ly be about yours.