Karine Polwart talks ahead of Shrewsbury shows
It’s been six years since the release of Karine Polwart’s last solo album, Traces. But don’t imagine the multi-award-winning Scottish singer/songwriter has been anything but busy in the intervening years.
She created a show for Edinburgh Festival, worked on an award-winning stage work on nature and human pain – A Pocket Of Wind Resistance – that helped her to spread her creative wings and there has been much more besides.
But Karine remains a performer at heart and the six-time winner at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including 2018 Folk Singer of The Year, is back with a new album, Laws of Motion.
Karine’s seventh release, Laws of Motion is the follow-up to 2017’s much-praised A Pocket of Wind Resistance, which earned Karine & co-writer Pippa Murphy a New Music Scotland Award for its innovative blend of folk music, spoken word & sound design, alongside a nomination for the Radio 2 Folk Album of The Year.
The new album – recorded alongside long-term collaborators Inge Thomson (accordion) and brother Steven Polwart (guitars) – will arrive amidst a 13 date UK tour, including Shrewsbury’s Walker Theatre on Wednesday.
A Pocket Of Wind Resistance used the migratory habits of geese to crack open universally human societal and ecological issues. Across Laws of Motion, Polwart coalesces the familial and the familiar effortlessly alongside the foreign, the frightening and the unknown, driven as ever by her gift for empathy and accessibility. Subject matter as disparate as Trump, the Second World War and holocaust survivors are drawn together by the laws of the album’s title alongside the experiences of Japanese migrants and allegorical folk and children’s stories. Speaking about the album’s broad focus, Karine says: “I didn’t set out to write songs on a unified theme – they’ve just landed that way. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given the times we’re in.”
Laws of Motion features amongst its track-listing a clutch songs which Karine originally wrote with her friend (and Midlothian neighbour) Martin Green, of visionary folk trio Lau. Affecting Suitcase and the smouldering, stirring album title track (which Karine dedicates here to the Unesco Chair of Refugee Integration Through Language and The Arts) were both recorded in different iterations (with vocals contributed by Becky Unthank and Aidan Moffatt) for Green’s 2016 multi-media project on social migration, Flit. The quietly urgent Suitcase was written by Karine as testament to all who used – and sustained – the Kindertransport, the underground network which smuggled mostly Jewish children out of Nazi Europe.”
