Napier was born in
Glasgow, Scotland, in November 1978 and grew up in
Grantown on Spey. In 1996 he moved to
Glasgow to join the BA (Scottish Music) course at the
RSAMD (now the
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). He graduated from the RSAMD in 1999 playing with a series of Scottish traditional music bands in Glasgow. In 2000 he had been working as
Margaret Bennett's accompanist and had toured with her in Scotland and France. After working on "In the Sunny Long Ago" with producer
Martyn Bennett he was invited by
Gillian Frame,
Hamish Napier and
Simon McKerrell to join
Back of the Moon. That year Back of the Moon recorded their debut album "Gillian Frame and Back of the Moon". Back of the Moon toured from 2000 till 2007 releasing three albums and finishing with a final gig in the
Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C., on 21 November 2007. Napier was approached by producer and engineer
Nick Turner to begin a songwriting project which they later named "Queen Anne's Revenge". They began writing on the evening of 14 December 2003 and had written four songs by the next morning including "Ship in a Bottle" and "Out All Night". Before the demise of Back of the Moon, Napier began working on a project called Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers. As the project developed it moved further from traditional material towards a contemporary
Indie Folk sound. With help from
Creative Scotland and
Hands Up for Trad Napier began a mentoring project with singer songwriter
Boo Hewerdine. The pair ended up writing seventeen new songs and recording and releasing an album called VIP: Very Interesting Persons in 2015, which reached number 2 on the
Daily Telegraph's top folk albums. Naier met and co-wrote with
Megan Henwood and
Rebecca Loebe. These collaborations led to Loebe and Napier's 2018 EP and tour "Filthy Jokes" and Henwood and Napier's 2019 Story Song Scientist EP and tour. Napier has hosted the 'Late Night Session' at
Celtic Connections from 2011 until 2022 and was the creator and musical director of
Hazy Recollections a mini festival within a festival that celebrates and connects acts whose music meets at the boundaries of the indie, folk and roots scenes. Napier has run many songwriting retreats with
Boo Hewerdine. He has also run songwriting courses with
Karine Polwart,
Reg Meuross,
Lorraine Lucas,
katie Melua,
Pete Astor,
Bella Hardyand many more. He was the director of Glasgow Songwriting Festival. He is married to Gillian Frame. He worked for many years as a lecturer on traditional music at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He has lived and worked on the Isle of Arran since 2022 while touring the UK and further afield. ==Awards and nominations==