For her fifth album Echoes, Emily Smith returns to her first love of traditional song. Marrying what Emily calls, “A new Scottish sound” with her gorgeous voice and her ability to connect with the subjects and stories at the heart of these 10 stunning new arrangements.
Joining multi-instrumentalists Jamie McClennan and Matheu Watson, bassist Ross Hamilton and percussionist Signy Jakobsdottir is an impressive guest list of Jerry Douglas, Aoife O’Donovan, Kris Drever, Tim Edey, Natalie Haas and Rory Butler. Together they’ve created an album with one foot planted firmly in Emily’s home of Dumfries and Galloway and the other in the unspoiled heartland of Nashville. If albums can have feet, that is.
Some of those appear as a result of new bonds forged this year while Emily toured as part of the Transatlantic Sessions extended family, singing with the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter, Eric Bibb and Teddy Thompson – adding to an impressive list of onstage collaborators which also includes Richard Thompson, Eddi Reader and Beth Neilson Chapman.
Echoes has been recorded over the space of a momentous year (interrupted by the arrival of a wee bairn). But all in all, time has passed ridiculously fast since Emily was named BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year back in 2002. The accolades continued as she won the USA Songwriting Competition in 2005, Scots Singer of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards in 2008, and she received two nominations in the 2012 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
It’s impressive stuff. The album will be launched at the forthcoming Celtic Connections. We’ll bring you more closer to the February release date, so stay tuned.
On Tuesday 28th January she will perform at the Old Fruitmarket in a double bill concert with Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott. Emily will be performing material from her forthcoming new album ‘Echoes’ and will be joined by the album’s line up. Ahead of its release Emily will be launching an EP featuring selected tracks from Echoes as well as exclusive additional tracks at Celtic Connections.
In the meantime here’s some footage of Emily Smith performing The final trawl during the Transatlantic Sessions at Celtic Connections in Feb 2013.