Still As Your Sleeping is the stunning new album from singer Karine Polwart and pianist Dave Milligan (read our album review here); the pair are neighbours in the Midlothian village of Pathhead, a location brimming with musical talent. Shortly before the record’s release, Folk Radio UK sat down with the duo to chat about their new release, babysitting each other’s children and the hunt for patrons with pianos. First of all, though, we talked about how the collaboration came about.
“Well, in the autumn of last year,” opens Karine, “we were both involved in a project for Illuminate, which is the creative ageing organisation. They were putting together a dementia singing pack for their dementia singing network where the whole idea was to create resources for people so they could sing at home or for singing in care home settings. Dave was the musical director or project arranger for that project, and I was asked to write two new pieces of music.
“One of them was ‘Travel These Ways’, which is on the album, so we ended up in the studio recording together for that. Then just shortly after that, Radio 4 got in touch. They had a request via Margaret Atwood. She was curating an edition of the Radio 4 Today programme between Christmas and New Year last year, and she had asked specifically for a new version of ‘The Parting Glass’. So, Radio 4 got in touch to ask would I fancy recording a version of that in my house for them?
“‘The Parting Glass’ was one of her husband’s favourite songs, I think it may have been played at his funeral, and he died just at the tail end of the year before. So, she wanted to have a version of that song in the programme. It was a complete honour. She’s a total legend. But I said, no, I don’t want to do that, because I was really, really tired of being a home recording engineer, and really, really tired of performing on my own, and anyway, I simply thought Margaret Atwood was worth better than me in my spare room! So, I got back to them, quite brazenly, and said I would be totally honoured to offer a version of ‘The Parting Glass’, but would they have the budget to hire, for example, Dave Milligan on the piano, and have it recorded properly in a studio.
“I think by that point the BBC had got quite dependent on people recording from home. As musicians, and I’m sure Dave will vouch for this as well, we very quickly become sound engineers, and videographers, and all manner of other things other than musicians. I was also really conscious that a whole class of people were getting cut out of their jobs; recording engineers, for example. Anyway, they came back and said, yes. So, we went into the studio and recorded ‘The Parting Glass’, and I think it was during that process that we both thought, you know what? This is quite nice! I think, your exact quote Dave was ‘maybe we should do more of this!’”
“Yeah, that’s how I remember it!” adds Dave. “That was a lovely process. It sort of felt like the first proper thing, or those two were like, the first proper couple of things, that we’d done, since the ‘apocalypse.’ That maybe fed into a little bit, you know, the sense of being nourished so fully after a drought.”
“It helped,” says Karine, “that we don’t live very far away from each other. The whole idea of doing more was actually relatively easy, once we decided that we were up for that. In a way that probably wouldn’t have happened, in the absence of Covid, because we both have our own independent things that we’re doing. We probably would have been busy in our own separate ways with our projects. Because of Covid though, there was this point of stillness, and we were forced to be much more focused on what was immediate. It was just a really happy coincidence that we were asked to be involved in these projects and as we live close by it was technically possible.”
Covid, of course, has been the major challenge for all of us over the last 18 months, but it had some positives for the pair.
“I think that one of the things that did happen, for all musicians,” says Dave, “is it sort of hit the reset button. One of the things that I’ve been really struck by, having conversations with other musicians, is that how a lot of them have completely changed their thinking in terms of what they do and how they are defined. That’s very true of touring musicians. Particularly those busy players who spend the majority of the year on the road, that just don’t want to do that anymore. They were forced into this reset and having to consider a quieter life; at home, being more connected to friends and family. A lot of them went, ‘well this is better than travelling all the time’, so, that’s been interesting.”
“I think that’s very true,” agrees Karine, “that’s certainly true of me. I’m not a tour road rat, but it has accounted for the income that has sustained me over the past 20 years. I guess I have felt very fortunate that I’ve been diversifying in recent years towards commissioned work and writing jobs; I think that’s been really helpful in riding out this period. I’ve been fortunate compared to others whose entire systems have really been shocked to the core by the whole situation.
“I’ve personally been heading in the direction of more localised activity.” Karine continues, “For a number of years, I’ve been writing about the places that I live in, and that I love, so I feel like, over the past four or five years, I’ve been moving towards this point.
“We also live in a very unusual community, Dave and I, in the village of Pathhead, which does hold a disproportionate number of musicians! I’ve worked a lot with Dave’s partner Corinna Hewitt, the great harper, singer and composer; I collaborate regularly with Inge Thomson, who also lives in this village, and her partner is Martin Green, who is another co-writer that I’ve worked with in recent years. We’ve also been working with Jenni Douglas, an illustrator and printmaker who also lives in Pathhead and designed the album’s artwork. We were looking for a title that she felt most able to respond to as a visual artist. It was clear Still As Your Sleeping was the one that conjured images for her. So, it was a happy marriage of all of that.
“I feel like there’s all little points of intersection which are personal, professional, and environmental, you know, in terms of just where we live. We also just look after each other’s children just to be clear! Sometimes we’re just babysitting for each other’s bairns and making the dinner!”
The songs on Still As Your Sleeping certainly have a deep-rooted personal connection for both. For Karine, the opener and closer are particularly important.
“The two songs that start and finish the album,” she notes, “‘Craigie Hill’ and ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, have a personal family connection for me. I’m a massive Dick Gaughan fan, Handful of Earth is one of my all-time favourite records. The first time I heard ‘Craigie Hill’ was the day before my grandfather’s funeral back in 1992. I was gifted that album on cassette because that’s how old I am, by my soon to be boyfriend at the time. It really struck a chord because my grandfather, like Dick Gaughan, was born in Leith and from Irish stock, and he lived and died in Hayhill, in Craigie in Ayr.
“So, there was an uncanny coincidence about the song, which is an Irish immigrant song, about saying goodbye, about reflecting on your childhood and your death. It was shockingly relevant to the fact that my grandfather was getting buried the next day, so it was bound up with that. On the album, I dedicate it to my grandfather, Peter Quinn. It’s my favourite of all the arrangements on that album; what Dave has done with the piano is just beautiful. I know we’re not supposed to talk about how much we love our own work, but I find it genuinely beautiful; it’s very moving and has captured the feeling that I wanted. ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, at the other end of the album, was a song that was actually played at my grandfather’s funeral and also played at my Granny’s funeral and at my younger cousins funeral. So, every song on the album does have a very particular reason.
“I think once you’ve got the bones of an album, things begin to adhere around it”, continues Karine, “Things also begin to fall away. There were other songs on our list that we tried out arrangements for, that just didn’t fit. There was this winnowing process of finding where the images, and themes, and feel had a resonance. There was a lot to do with parting, and shorelines, and harbours and all those places where people come and go. Where the tide ebbs and flows. There is a recuring image of the tide and the shoreline throughout the album.”
“It wasn’t really until after we’d recorded it,” notes Dave, “that I remembered this, but the piano motif that opens and closes ‘Craigie Hill’ was a thing that I found in a kind of a virtual drawer in my brain where things get just kind of put away. I remember coming up with this little piano motif several years ago and it was just a thing. It was such a simple idea. I was so sure that it was going to be something but I was suddenly struck by this sense that I’d stolen it, or it wasn’t mine and I hadn’t come up with it. I sat for ages and played it over and over and I came to the conclusion that it was probably a Karine Polwart song so I never touched it! Then, when we came to do the recording, it just came out again and it was like, ‘ah, it is a Karine Polwart song!’”
Dick Gaughan is not the only Scottish singer-songwriter who prove an influence on the album; there are also interpretations of songs by Alasdair Roberts, ‘The Old Men of the Shells’ and the much-missed Michael Marra with ‘Heaven’s Hound’.
“I literally discovered Dick Gaughan and Michael Marra on the same mixtape in 1992,” recalls Karine, “before I was given the copy of Handful of Earth I was engaged in a courtship process by means of walking and mixtapes! The mixtape had songs from John Martyn, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Dory Previn, Dick Gaughan and Michael Marra, and it was the first time that I’d ever encountered their music.”
The link between Karine and Gaughan and Marra goes further than a love of their work, though, as Karine explains.
“I first took the plunge from being in a salary job, I used to work for Scottish Women’s Aid as a children’s rights worker, and I gave up my job in January 2000. The thing that allowed me to give up my job was that I was always been offered little bits and pieces of work, not enough to make a living, not enough to pay the rent, but I was offered some office work by Dr John Barrow at Stoneyport Agency who represented Dick Gaughan and Michael Marra, so I was literally on the phones and booking gigs and helping to organise tours for these guys!
“It was just a very bizarre situation to be in. Not quite as bizarre as then sharing the stage with them, four or five years later; that was even more mental, but there’s something about them that is really bound up with my own journey into becoming a musician. I was really glad to have them both back-to-back on the album.”
“‘Heaven’s Hound’ is particularly poignant because it’s the last song on the last EP that Michael ever released, not long before he died. He never really got a chance to tour the songs that were on that album. I think it’s one of those songs that, had he lived, would be one of Michael Marra’s classic songs, and it would have been taken into people’s hearts, but it feels like it never quite got the life that it deserves. I’m really happy to get a chance to play it with Dave.”
One point about the album, which has foxed a few online commentators, is its title, Still As Your Sleeping. It’s something Karine is very much aware of.
“I’ve clearly missed out an apostrophe in the title of the album!” jokes Karine. “There’s been some online debate about whether or not in fact I know how to spell which, of course, has made me chuckle seeing as I’m a full-time writer!”
“The title comes from ‘Travel These Ways’. There’s a line in that, and I am using the word ‘sleeping’ as a noun rather than as a verb, so it’s pinched from that. Naming an album is a funny process. Every time you’re trying to come up with something that speaks to some of the themes or captures the mood. So, there was quite a few things in the offing.
“I guess, because it’s quite a stark album; there’s just these two sounds on it the piano and the voice, there is a reflective quality to it. The idea of stillness made a degree of sense.”
A particular favourite on the album is Alasdair Roberts’ ‘The Old Men of the Shells’. For the track, Dave added some touches from the tradition of the piobaireachd, or pipe music, a potential challenge for a pianist.
“I wasn’t aware of the song before Karine brought it to the table,” notes Dave, “but Karine told me about the connection with the tune. One of the rabbit holes that I found myself going down recently is pipe music and a distant fascination with piobaireachd itself. It’s one of these things I’ve been meaning to explore on the piano, which is a little bit strange in itself, but I’ve been doing it slowly.
“When Karine brought this song, I went and found the piobaireachd of the same name. It’s actually in a book which was sitting on my piano at the time, the Kilberry Book of Ceol Mor, a well-known book amongst pipers. I managed to play something like one bar of it in the song! If you play that Piobaireachd in its entirety, it’s about 11 minutes long!”
“The deluxe version of the album is going to have that extra extended prog version of that on it!” jokes Karine.
“It was lovely to kind of delve into that,” adds Dave, “but I must have done hours of dissecting just to come up with, literally, a couple of bars that would fit within the song, but there’s another project coming along anytime in the next decade, so just watch out for that!”
One of the most beautiful songs on the album, an album rich with gorgeous melodies and rhythms, is ‘Travel These Ways’, which, as previously noted, Karine wrote for Luminate.
“I was commissioned to write two pieces of music,” says Karine, “and I was failing to be frank with you. I’d written one, and I’d written another that was rubbish. I knew it was rubbish, and I couldn’t quite fix it. I went for a drive along the East Lothian coast and came home and had the image of driving along from Belhaven and seeing this tiny little bit of moon. It was the clearest night. There’s a phrase in that song, ‘I’ll pluck out the skelf of the moon from the sky and give it to you for safekeeping’. I can picture that, the skelf of the moon over Edinburgh, as I’m driving back from Belhaven in the dark.
“One other nice connection about that song is that the backing vocals are by Stephen Deazley who is the musical director of the of the dementia sing and network project for Illuminate. He also directs Love Music Choir. Dave is the piano arranger for Love Music Choir that performed at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. It’s nice to have him on the on the track in connection with that project.”
In terms of the duo working together, their long friendship certainly helped the pair gel, but the fact they live so close to each other was also hugely beneficial.
“It just all felt very easy,” says Karine, “just the geographical proximity meant that it was really quite easy. I mean, it’s literally five minutes. It couldn’t be simpler to get to and from each other’s houses. We come at music from quite different places; Dave has an incredible formal training in music, his architectural understanding of harmony comes from a deep, deep place, and straddles both folk and jazz and really having a sense of how it works in a formal sense. I come from a totally different place; I can name maybe a dozen chords and not play them very well!
“I communicate about music like a writer, rather than like a musician,” adds Karine, “so I communicate in pictures. A lot of it is in visual imagery, and a lot of it is about drawing attention to what the lyrics are doing and the feeling that I want to convey, so I’m talking about it like a storyteller rather than a technician. But actually, it worked really great, because we never misunderstood each other. Despite the fact that we were using these different kinds of languages to describe what was going on. There were some delightful occasions where I’d be like faffing around, saying ‘I want to see curlews’, and Dave would play something and I would go, ‘oh my god, that’s it! It’s like you’ve plucked it out of my head!’”
“There’s something about the process of recording in general,” adds Dave, “that has kind of shifted for me in recent years, and this project was a really good example of it working. What that thing is, is just allowing yourself the time and the space before you hit the record button, in immersing yourself in the soundscape that you’re trying to create, and just taking the time to deliberately put yourself in that soundscape that you want to hear when you play the record.
“One of the things that I really love about this particular album,” Dave continues, “is the level of detail in the recording. Stuart Hamilton is a phenomenal engineer and Castlesound is a great studio. Just the time that we spent, making sure that it was, as it should be, was just really valuable.”
“I think it’s totally pivotal to the record,” adds Karine, “especially because there are only these two elements; the piano and my voice. The fewer elements you have, the less place there is to hide, and the more you need to be immersed in that sound that David’s just described, because there’s nothing else to cushion you.”
The piano played on the album was also rather special and had come on a journey of its very own, as Dave explained.
“The piano is the studio’s own piano. It ended up in the studio because of Love Music Choir. There’s 300 people in this choir; by the way, it’s massive. One day, one of the choir members came up to me said, ‘I don’t suppose you’re looking for a piano at the moment, are you? I have a friend who’s selling her piano. It’s a Steinway grand; she’s had it for thirty years, she’s moving house and blah, blah, blah’. There was this backstory, and it was being sold quite cheaply. It had been sitting in her bay window for thirty years, and the sun had bleached the wood. She thought it was maybe worthless because of that, but it was still a really lovely piano.
“I went round to this lady’s house, who I’d never met and just played it all day. It wasn’t an option for me, space-wise or financially, but I said, ‘right, I can’t buy this, but I need to find somebody that I know that can!’ So, I went to Stuart at Castlesound and said you should buy this piano it is really quite nice.
“There was a point just before we recorded this,” continues Dave, “that I was trying to talk the Usher Hall into putting one of their Steinways into the studio, so we could get this kind of pristine recording. It didn’t work out for various reasons, but actually, the character that’s in that little piano is what makes part of that soundscape on this album. I love it very much.”
“I loved the fact that I don’t play anything on this album!” adds Karine, “I’m a much better singer than I am musical technician. Sometimes my singing isn’t as good as it could be because I’m concentrating too hard on doing the things that I’m not as good at. I’ve loved this process because it’s allowed me just to be a singer and an interpreter of songs. I love that place. It’s just delightful.
“And just to put in a punt,” she adds, “if anybody who happens to be reading this has fantastic pianos in their massive front room, and is looking for bespoke performances, we’re looking for beautiful pianos and beautiful spaces to get some of this music out into the world! Patrons with Steinways please, thanks very much!”
Well, time had caught up with us, but talk of patrons with pianos naturally turned the conversation round to a potential tour. Karine and Dave couldn’t say much, but there was the promise of something very special early in the new year, but until then, a live stream was certainly planned.
“We’re going to have an online gig before Christmas,” notes Karine. “I think that’s one thing that’s going to be here to stay following Covid. It makes music a lot more accessible to a lot of people. We’re probably going to do that from Castlesound Studio, on the lovely wee piano so people can even see it and hear it in its real-life self. Then hopefully next year, but what Dave said earlier, not that clockwork mouse kind of tour. And only with beautiful pianos because this is an album that’s been made with a beautiful instrument. It demands an instrument of that quality. So only gorgeous spaces! Please, please, please give us your pianos!”
Still As Your Sleeping is out now (1st October) via Hudson Records (Signed CD, Artwork Prints, Digital)
The Vinyl LP release date is currently 10/12/21; however, Hudson Records tell us that they are pushing to move this forward if possible; it will be well worth the wait!
Order Still As Your Sleeping here: http://smarturl.it/stillasyoursleeping | https://hudsonrecords.co.uk/product/karine-polwart-dave-milligan-still-as-your-sleeping
Karine Polwart: https://www.karinepolwart.com/gigs
Dave Milligan: http://davemilligan.co.uk
Signed Artwork
Hudson Records also have specially printed and signed artwork from Jenni Douglas of the cover image of ‘Still As Your Sleeping’; the print will be signed and numbered by Jenni! These are limited to 250, so grab them quick! Order here. Find all about Jenni here – https://www.jennidouglas.co.uk