From K T Tunstall to Karine Polwart and Eddi Reader to Julie Fowlis, Scotland has been a veritable hotbed for female singing talent over the years. Well, hang on to your thistles, Emily Smith is coming up fast to join them.
Slim as a pencil with a sumptuous voice that sneaks into your heart and dashes off with it when you’re not looking, Emily’s distinctive style makes nonsense of musical categories as she seamlessly mixes Scottish traditional song with her own evocative songwriting…with a few curve balls thrown in for good measure. Still only 20-something, she’s an accomplished accordion player and pianist who already has a clutch of awards decorating her mantelpiece, a classy little band, two well-received solo albums and a third – ‘Too Long Away’ – already being talked of in hushed terms as the one to launch her as the next folk act to burst into the mainstream.
“It took me a wee bit of time and it required quite a leap of faith, but it feel it has come together at the right time,” says the softly-spoken Emily, after breaking loose from the preconceptions that followed her around after winning BBC Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year in 2002. “I don’t think I’ll ever ditch traditional songs but this time I knew I didn’t want to make an album purely of traditional material. In the end I put on five traditional tracks and five of my own compositions and I think they blend well. After all, it’s still my voice and that’s what ties it all together.”
Apart from being a line from one of her songs (‘Come Home Pretty Bird’) the album title ‘Too Long Away’ signifies the album is a homecoming of sorts - home being the noble county of Dumfries in the south west of Scotland, scene of many Border skirmishes and where Robert Burns had a farm. There is even a Burns song included - ‘As I Was A Wand’ring’ - though it’s deliberately one of the Bard’s more obscure efforts. “Growing up you get Burns rammed down your throat, but you suddenly realise there’s a reason for that. I’m quite into his work but I veer away from the songs everybody knows.”
After several years in Glasgow, Emily was energised and inspired by returning to live in Dumfriesshire, which she describes as Scotland’s “forgotten county”. She actively sought out traditional material with a local connection and her own songs are infused with the character of the countryside around her, be it the graveyard that inspired ‘Audience Of Souls’ or the dark walk back through the snow after her hen night that resulted in ‘Winter Song.’
“I’ve always been a country person and a lot of the traditional songs I sing are sourced from home. They mean a lot more to me if I can go and see the places where they’re set. So the songs are inspired by the surroundings.”
Emily herself didn’t get into traditional music until her teens. Her physics teacher Kevin Bailey ran a ceilidh band and with a bunch of accordion lessons under her belt, Emily was invited to join. At 16 she found herself touring Ireland with them, attending accordion workshops and festivals and absorbing the music of classic bands like Dervish and Boys of the Lough.
She also joined the youth accordion orchestra Koda. “It sounds very stuffy but Keith (Dickson) who ran it was quite a rebel. As well as 15 accordions we had fiddle and drums and really cranked up the sound.” When Koda decided they needed a singer, nobody was more surprised than Emily to find herself marched in front of the microphone. She was even more surprised to discover she loved it. “I was pushed out of my comfort zone,” she says, recalling the odd Shania Twain song she was asked to sing between the Gaelic and trad material. “I was into Oasis and Blur at the time but it never moved me as much as traditional music did.”
She planned to go to art college but a last minute change of heart saw her applying for a Scottish music degree at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. She emerged four years later with an honours degree, the Young Tradition Award and a conviction that she wanted to put a band together and sing for her supper. The award gave her the confidence to do it. “I was completely gobsmacked. I’d never given a moment’s thought that I might actually win. I didn’t come from a family with generations and generations of musicians and I felt a bit of an outsider. A lot of people on the course had so much more knowledge than me so it meant a lot to win the award and know other people liked what I did.”
It also launched her into the festival and gigging circuit and paved the way for her debut album ‘A Day Like Today’ in 2002, which also saw her writing her own material for the first time. One of her collaborators was a New Zealand born fiddle player/multi-instrumentalist by the name of Jamie McClennan, still an integral part of her touring band and now also her husband.
Things moved fast as the music grew more sophisticated and the gigs piled in. “We didn’t really know what we were doing, we were just learning how the industry worked as we went along. It’s funny. I always felt quite confident on the singing side and I was used to talking to audiences but I’d get very nervous playing solo accordion so it was very important to put a proper band together.”
A self-released second album ‘A Different Life’ – produced with Joe Rusby – was released at Celtic Connections festival in 2005 won instantly acclaim…and caused a lot of headaches. “We had no clue about bar codes or all the rest of it. You spend a lot of money making a good quality record and then find the money you need for promotion and marketing isn’t there. I was turning into an office worker, sitting in front of a computer all day booking travel and my head was constantly buzzing.”
Big decisions were taken. Emily moved out of Glasgow back to Dumfriesshire, signed to the Spit & Polish label and put together a top notch band (McClennan; jazz guitarist Ross Milligan doubling on banjo; Duncan Lyall on double bass) and set about writing and recording the big one – ‘Too Long Away’.
It’s an album that will surprise a lot of people – not least Emily herself - because of the diversity of the material and the adventurous nature of some of the arrangements. ‘May Colven’, an ancient ballad about the tribulations of a king’s daughter, is unexpectedly rocky, with drums and everything; ‘Caledonia’ is an epic version of Tony Cuffe’s arrangement of a relatively little known traditional morality tale; and Emily proves yet again the devastating potency of that voice on the seriously gorgeous ‘Bleacher Lassie O Kelvinhaugh’.
Emily Smith has arrived. And she’s here to stay.
