Tone Glow 204: Quinie
An interview with the Scottish folk singer about the quietude of horses, the role of forgetting in tradition, and her 2025 LP 'Forefowk, Mind Me'
Quinie
Quinie is the solo project of Josie Vallely (b. 1990), an Edinburgh-born, Glasgow-based artist inspired by the folk music of the Scottish Traveller singers. In her music, she explores tradition, language, and history through singing Scots song. Her first two albums were Quinie (2017) and Buckie Prins (2018), both released on Glaswegian tape label GLARC. Forefowk, Mind Me (2025) is her newest LP and first for Upset the Rhythm, and was developed through a pilgrimage across Argyll in Western Scotland with her horse Maisie. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Quinie via Zoom on May 20th, 2025 to discuss her upbringing in a cooperative youth movement, her distaste for folk horror, and her personal relationship with tradition.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What’s the earliest memory you have where you recognized the importance of singing?
Quinie: I can’t remember a time with no singing (laughter). I’m thinking about a school assembly, shuffling in and sitting on the floor with your legs crossed. We were guided through songs that we came to know really well. I definitely do remember this feeling of importance in the act, like I’m needed here—we all had to do our bit. There’s one song that comes to mind that was like, (singing) “Cauliflower is fluffy and cabbage is red.” (laughter). Yup, this is important stuff, this is God’s work (laughter).
I grew up in a cooperative youth movement. We used to sit around the fire and sing, and I guess it’s a similar role that hymns play in a religious setting, where the songs are the voicing of the moral structure that you’re all signed up to. But it makes it a very felt experience rather than somebody telling you how you should think; they teach you the song, and before you know it, you’re an 8 year old standing around a fire singing about nuclear war (laughter). And then it’s in your system!
Can you talk about this cooperative youth movement? What did it look like?
It’s called the Woodcraft Folk. It was actually by the guy who set up the Scouts, but he wanted to create a gender-inclusive youth movement that was based on working together and building worlds instead of competition and colonial narratives.
What sort of stuff did you do that pointed towards that goal?
We would meet on a Friday evening at a school hall and play games where some of us had more points than others, and we’d all get annoyed with each other. Then the adults would say, “Look children, that’s why we need fair trade!” (laughter).
Wow, and you’re also singing about nuclear war. Do you remember how the song goes?
One moment while I retrieve it from my body (pauses to think). It was like, (singing) “Can you hear the H-bomb’s thunder / Echo like the crack of doom? / As it sets the sky asunder / Fallout makes the Earth a tomb.” (laughter).
Wow.
Yeah, it’s heavy shit!
Where specifically in Scotland were you born?
I was born in Edinburgh, and my mom and dad were from the North of England. My mom and dad moved from Ireland when they were 19. Edinburgh is where my cultural identity is from, I guess, and now I live in Glasgow. It’s a mismatch of a few things, but I’m an Edinburgh girl.
What makes you feel like you’re an Edinburgh girl? Are there specific qualities?
I think that’s where some of the language comes in. There’s a particular dialect of Scots that’s a Glaswegian type of speaking and the East Coast has a different vocabulary. It’s more influenced by the Roma languages, so there’s some of that. And because Edinburgh and Glasgow are two nearby cities, they have a rivalry. Edinburgh’s the posh bit while Glasgow is the earthy, cool place. When you grow up in Edinburgh, you spend all your time going to Glasgow to go to the cool gigs (laughter). As I get older, I feel more rooted in my own life; I feel less like I need to pick and choose a label of who I am. Like, I’m just Josie.
I’m curious about your upbringing. Were your parents into the arts too?
Neither of them sang or played instruments. They certainly valued the arts, but they weren’t part of any tradition. They were both brought up in big Catholic families—they grew up singing hymns—but they both denounced their faith so we weren’t part of a religious group. My mom was a neuroscientist and she was really connected with nature. I think that was the thing I took most from my growing up—I’m a nature girl. There’s dirt under my nails every day, there’s always straw somewhere in the house, there’s always an animal that requires some attention.
What I took from that was the experience of being in the world, which the music helped me share when I started to sing. I was always encouraged to consume music, and I did go to recorder class or whatever, but I am terrible at reading music—I’ve never been able to do it—and I don’t have rhythm (laughs). I have a very short attention span, too, so all of these things really stacked against me in terms of pursuing music in any formal route. I remember in high school, I was allowed to go on the guitar group’s away trip as long as I only played chords in the back (laughter).
So there was the youth group, which is where I started to sing. Every night you’d be singing around the fire. Then I started to do my own covers of, mainly, Tracy Chapman songs. I love her. She was a really big role model for me because she was singing in her own voice. I remember I’d play her songs and people would say, “She sings like a man.” There was this thing of not being used to voices that were different from yours, but also this idea that you didn’t need to have this perfect feminine voice to create this really amazing world. That’s what I loved about her. She’s almost like a contemporary gospel singer—the world she creates is totally infused with her political and moral worldview.
People have this idea of what it means to be a traditional musician. I was into Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading, these women who were unapologetically themselves despite the world being potentially hostile to that. I’ve always loved solo female vocalists. That’s the music I go to when I’m in turmoil or I need support. I guess it’s no surprise that this is what I ended up doing.
Are people surprised when you bring up Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading?
Nobody’s ever asked me before so I’ve never had a chance to articulate that. There’s this singer Lizzie Higgins who I’m really influenced by, and not many people go beyond that, so kudos to you (laughter).
I love Lizzie’s work. I remember checking out What a Voice (1985) when I first heard your GLARC tapes [Quinie (2017) and Buckie Prins (2018)]. Incredible album. Your press release mentions that you weren’t the most comfortable singing traditional songs at first. But before we get to that, I’m curious if there was anything else after the youth movement and before you released music that was important for you and your singing.
What started to happen was that as I became a teenager, there were a few people who would come when we were camping. There was one woman in particular, who was about my age now, and she had sung some of these traditional songs. We also had these songs we sang in school that were in Scots, and I always loved them because they’re so rich—the wordplay, the way they described things. I was always drawn to that way of expressing myself in Scots. The first ones I heard were Burns songs or songs that were part of storytelling.
There’s one that I’ve been working on in collaboration with Yara Asmar, who’s an accordion player. There’s a story where a kid gets killed by his mother and then fed to his father, and he comes back as a pigeon. He sings this little song to collect things off people to ultimately get revenge. It’s a great, classic folk story. And I don’t normally go for the folk horror vibe. In fact, I’m anti-folk horror. But that’s not horror—that’s just the mundane reality of being a pigeon boy (laughter). But that little refrain… I’ve heard it since I was young, and it’s been bugging me. It was integrated into what I felt was my day to day.
In terms of actually performing, my first band was me, a guitarist, and a banjo player. We exclusively did O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) soundtrack covers (laughter). I look back at that and cringe. We’d be performing and we were lefty students and people would be like, “Oh, you religious nutters!” That was quite a confusing time. Again, the natural thing with music is that you form a band, you play with other people, you find your community, but that’s just never worked for me. I get so stressed performing with other people. I really need to let the songs just come out, which means that I can’t think at the same time. If I’m having to align with other musicians, particularly ones who don’t know me very well, it just totally destroys it for me and I don’t enjoy it. So I’ve never lasted in a group music setting. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like performing, but there’s another part of me that really wants to be on the stage, that wants to tell my story and have this gaze on me and celebrate that. It’s a bit of a conflict—those two parts of me need to work something out between them (laughter).
What happens when you perform in front of people? Do you just go with the flow?
I just go on stage and I’m 100% myself, and then it doesn’t feel like I’m performing. It’s a funny thing where having an attentive audience of 300 people is much more relaxing to me than singing in a small group with people who aren’t really paying attention. The scale—the number of people—doesn’t matter. If I feel like people aren’t connecting with it, I get quite stressed, like, “Oh god, I want to stop.” But that doesn’t happen often. I think people appreciate the vulnerability involved with unaccompanied singing, and they do pay attention.
You said that you were anti-folk horror. Why is that?
For me and my music and the way I sing, it’s an expression of my day to day. It’s about how it feels to be going to some place that you know very well, or working with an animal, or doing some specific activity that feeds back into your daily life. It’s not separate from me. When I see people performing folk horror-style stuff, or this thing of “alternative folk,” which is quite a big thing in the UK right now, especially England, it’s this idea that folk music needs to change, it needs to be queered, it needs to be in this new context. I don’t necessarily identify with that. A lot of traditional music is a product of its time and it’s outdated, but I don’t see it being changed as a proactive thing that you proclaim because folk music is always produced from its context. I feel really comfortable just selecting the music I want to work with, rather than going into material that I see as being challenging or difficult and then changing it. I have a bit of an aversion to the theater of folk horror, too; it erodes the value of it for me. It doesn’t need to be theater; it can be straightforward.
So you’re saying that people are compensating for the fact that folk music may not feel as relevant to people today? Like, people are dressing it up so it’s more palatable?
I guess what they’re doing is finding ways to make it relevant for themselves, and it’s just that I don’t connect with that very much. For me, with my lifestyle and the things I value, it’s actually not so different from many of the things that are in these songs already. Singing a lament to a horse—I don’t need to put on a funny hat to do that because I have a really old horse that I am grieving. That’s a bit dramatic, but there have been moments where I’ve been really distressed and upset by the health of my old horse. So singing to an old horse is not something that is weird for me.
Do you mind talking about your horse?
No, I don’t mind. I have two horses. Maisie is the older horse, who I did the journey with in the development of this record. And then I have Foggy Toddler, which is a Scots word for a type of bumblebee, and she’s 4. She’s like a new baby horse and doesn’t know anything yet. Maisie is 24, so she’s strong of opinion and ailing of body (laughter).
What year were you born? I’m trying to get context here.
I’m a 1990 baby. My mom was obsessed with horses. She never had her own horse, and she used to either look after other people’s horses when they were off at boarding school or away. She often spent time with her grandparents and there was a traveller sight near there and they had horses, so she’d spend time with them. I grew up with my mom’s stories of these horses around her, and I have all these scrapbooks that she made that have cuttings from newspapers and bits of horsehair that’s gone crispy (laughter). The thing that me and my mom have in common is that we’re both a bit weird and we struggle with social aspects when we’re not with the right crowd. With our people, we’re fine, but I think we both find this escape in nature and with horses. I never had access to horses in the same way, which I guess is the product of changing childhoods and the culture around risk. My mom would just disappear for the whole day, but there’s no way I could do that because I was watched like a hawk. Eventually I was able to go for some riding lessons.
Girls are drawn to horses for different reasons, and this is something I’ve thought about a lot as it’s hard to distill what it is that you’re looking for in your relationship with a horse. There’s something about a horse being a quiet being, for me, because it teaches you to companion yourself. They’re so sensitive to your vibe. If you go up, they go up, so the only way to go down is to come down in your energy. When you’re young, you really pick up on that, that there is this energy you can attune with. They’re so tuned into each other, too. One of them will think they’ve seen a predator and then instantaneously, the whole herd will run. There’s no, “Hey guys, let’s go”—everyone just knows immediately. That level of awareness is really cool to be around, because if you’re in tune with it, you start to experience places in a totally different way. It’s like, “I’m a human and going along, my WhatsApp is gone,” and then the horse will stop. There’s a herd of deer in a bush that I would’ve just walked past and not notice, but then the deer will be like, “Hey, there’s a human there, which we don’t like, but there’s a horse too so maybe it’s okay to come out and walk beside them.”
This is so great because it’s presumptuous of us to believe that humans are really tuned into their surroundings in a way that animals aren’t. These experiences remind you of that. For this new album you were travelling across Argyll with Maisie. What do you feel like you’ve learned about Scotland that you didn’t know before? And how much of that is specifically because you travelled with Maisie—would it have been different with a different horse?
It’s a hard thing to say “I learnt this specific thing.” The way I framed it for funding was, “I’m gonna travel around, gather songs, and be inspired by what I come across.” Whereas actually, it’s more like… I want to share my songs, and in order to share my songs effectively, I want people to know me, and the only way you can know me is if you know about Maisie (laughs). Maisie is part of me! She’s part of the band! But nobody creates space for Maisie to come to gigs (laughter).
What would people not know about Josie if they didn’t know Maisie? What is missing about my understanding of you if I don’t know your horse?
Maybe it goes back to that thing I talked about, where these songs are from my day to day. They’re not separate from me. It’s not just Maisie I connect in; in my songs, I’ll often include references to willow and the baskets I make. The work I’m doing with Yara Asmar, we’re framing that all around pigeons, and I don’t know if they’re gonna be outside for you to see (turns laptop to show her surroundings). Oh, they’re not here, they’ve flown away!
I am a knot of all of these threads, and the songs are just one of them. What is important to me is the whole knot. I don’t want people to pull that thread out and untie it from the knot; I want it all to tie together, to stay together, because that’s what is important to me about the music—it’s expressing my sense of self, and that can only be if the songs are kept in the knot. If I feel like someone’s pulling that thread out of the knot, I get anxious, like, “No, no, no, put it back in.” Otherwise they’ll take it and it’ll be like, “Oh there was this horse involved, but we’ve only taken this string so we can’t remember why the horse was involved. Maybe it’s because she sings traveller songs and travellers have horses.” No! Put the thread back in the knot!
You’ve talked a bit about Joan Armatrading and Tracy Chapman. I’m now curious to know about your interest in Lizzie Higgins and what it was like to encounter her work.
I had Tracy Chapman, I had Joan Armatrading, I had these people that I loved. And Leonard Cohen as well. It was initially this woman, Sheila Stewart, who I had heard. She’s a ballad singer—Child Ballad singer. It was like finding a version of those storytellers in my world, that I could aspire to. I just never felt like I could be a Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading or Leonard Cohen, but suddenly there was a role model whose voice I could fit with. It was also about the simplicity of hearing unaccompanied singing, like, “Oh, I can just do this on my own, I can develop it at my own pace.” I also felt like it was a private space because it’s not a really well known genre. There’s something about the Scots that feels quite safe because I know a lot of people don’t understand it. If I try to write words in English, it’s like, “Oh, it’s all so cheesy!” But Scots keeps you safe from that cheese.
Scots is a funny language in terms of how it lives in Scotland. Hamish Henderson, who was an important song collector during the folk revival, said that Scots songs include and go beyond English. Most people who speak Scots intersperse it with their English; it’s like an additional layer. In Aberdeenshire they say “foos yer doos?” which means “how are your pigeons?” which means “how are you doing?” So there’s turns of phrase that are fully Scots, and there are local areas where people will speak like that more of the time, but as a product of it being actively squashed and closely linked to English, it means that it can live in this integration with English that makes people think it’s not a language. At the same time, languages are so fluid. Is English not a language because we use the word “restaurant”? No, of course it is.
There was a trend in the ’60s and ’70s to stop using English at all. They called this literary Scots, and academics tried to write fully in Scots, but I’m quite comfortable with the gray area—mainly Scots words, some English words. As long as I know what I’m saying, it’s fine (laughter) because it’s the sounds of the words that are important.
Are you determining whether you’re using Scots or English by how the language sounds and the pleasure of their phonology?
The thing about Lizzie Higgins is that she sings in an Aberdeenshire dialect of Scots, and she’s got quite a broad Scots. When I heard her voice, I set about learning her repertoire—there was something about her voice that was like, right, I’ll start here. But… I’ve never found a reason to leave! (laughter). I just keep going back, like, “How did she sing that?” I guess that’s how I learnt to sing in the style, just by mimicking her over and over again until I was satisfied. For example, the number of people who’ve recorded “What a Voice”—why? (laughter). I’ve tried to record it so many times and every time I listen back I’m like, “No, it’s not as good, it’s not the same.” So there’s something about having her as this quality control. Like, is it passable compared to Lizzie?
With the folk horror and alternative folk music, you were saying they were removed from this tradition to the extent that you didn’t feel connected to them. When you’re singing these traditional songs, do you feel like you’re singing and presenting them in a manner that’s still—
It’s still constructed. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. I wouldn’t turn around to someone else and say they’re “doing it wrong,” but what I am constantly in search of is what is “doing it right” for me. The way I frame it is that it’s not in the object that’s produced, it’s in the process of creating. In order to create, you have to learn skills. You can’t make a basket without learning from somebody to teach you how to make a basket, or through a long process of iteration with your materials. So for me, “the process of iteration with your materials” is the experimentation with the language. The process of learning the skill is in the imitation of those who’ve come before, and the actual tradition-building part is in continuing the same question that they asked. Lizzie, the reason I’m really influenced by her, is that she asked, “What does it mean to have my own tradition?” She didn’t say that expressedly, but her mum was a famous ballad singer, and she didn’t want to be in her mom’s shadow.
And I thought it was so interesting that she didn’t wanna perform for so long because her mother was a singer herself. She didn’t want to steal her shine.
It’s always framed as her not wanting to steal her shine, but I wonder what was really going on there. When you listen to interviews, she has this really clear idea of how she’s framing her work. She’s like, my songs are piping songs, I learnt this style from my father, this song’s about piping, and this song’s emerged from that. There was this trend in the ’60s and ’70s to extract the tradition from the people in order to save it or share it. Lizzie was a nuanced character like, “I’m gonna be the agent of the songs I sing. I’m not gonna share a song with you unless I feel like it’s my song to share, and I’m gonna construct this new world by bringing together these two worlds.”
The question that she posed was, “What does it mean to bring a new world to fruition out of these old parts?” That’s the thing I’m interested in. Like, I’ll bring in my interest in piping, my interest in women’s voices and narratives. I don’t like ballads, so I’ll leave them out. I don’t need to do them just because they’re part of the tradition, and it’s because they’re not part of the answer to my question.
I’m really interested in the role of forgetting in tradition. Everybody is so obsessed with remembering, and capturing, and keeping safe, and holding the objects of tradition, and then you can’t deviate from those—you’ve gotta be true to the object of the tradition, which is held in an archive. This is the first time in human history where we’ve had access to objects in that way, but before, songs would have just been a memory that you later reconstruct in your own context. And I really like this idea, that by going about your day and living your life, you create the conditions to construct your own songs.
For many of these songs, you’re learning from different people, from old recordings. What’s it like to learn songs from an actual person you know versus a recording?
I have actually never learnt from someone I knew. Now that I think about it, I’ve literally never learnt a song from a person.
Wow, how do you think that impacts the way you approach your own interpretations?
Well, I’ve maybe heard songs for the first time from a person. As a kid, I remember learning a Scots song just from hearing it, and maybe there’s some silly ones I’ve heard and learnt from a person. The way my brain works… the first time I encounter something, I’m always resistant. I don’t know why I’m like that; I always go in with a tightness, and it takes a while for me to feel comfortable to learn. I do sometimes go to the traditional singing festivals where everyone’s singing, but it’s so rare for me to hear something I like enough to go off and investigate. It’s more like I need the privacy of my safe artists to springboard me into learning a song. I also need to sit with the songs for ages. I’ve never done well with choirs or group singing because I don’t learn by hearing it; I have to have it written down. I have to go through this process of hearing something and writing it down. I would’ve been quite stuck before there were recordings (laughter).
I do think it’s interesting that you’re learning these songs in a way that is not typical of how people would learn songs for centuries.
But that has also always been true. Lizzie Higgins, for example, learned a lot of songs from written text. Written ballads, from the 1600s, have been a thing in Scotland. And people were really stressed about how writing them down was gonna fuck everything up (laughter). And then before that, you had people who had really sophisticated, internal memory supports for how they remembered those long ballads, and these were people who dedicated their life to constructing these worlds. It meant that they could tap into these longform ballads. These weren’t just average people; they were performers or people who practiced these things professionally.
So that’s a bit of fallacy, where there was a time in the past where it was just the common man who knew all this stuff. No, it’d be like… Davy was the guy, and if you wanted to hear the songs you went to Davy. And I think there can be a tendency in young folk singers to look for these people who they deem to be authentic tradition bearers. They’ll tag on to them and say, “I was taught this music by this particular person, so therefore I’ve absorbed this authenticity.” My approach to authenticity is that there are two ways you can look at it. You can be true to what’s come before, or you can be true to yourself and not pretend to be something you’re not, and I opt for that one (laughter).
But with the way you’ve talked about your songs, there isn’t necessarily a complete divide between those two things. You said the songs you sing are still relevant to your life today.
To be true to myself is to accept that, for some reason, I am really drawn to these older songs. I also work a lot with poetry. A lot of my songs are tunes I’ve heard that I’ve put other people’s poems to. That’s how I create new work, by either translating folk songs from English to Scots, or working with Scots poems.
Can you share what that process is like given that having a poem in its own isolated context is very different from when you translate it and put it into a song?
What I do is find a tune, and often the tune will come from a pipe tune or a Gaelic song that I don’t understand. I like melodies that are quite… when you can’t tell when they start or end. I like melodies that are a bit jarring. So I’ll find something I like and often they’ll be too complex to sing, so I’ll put the file in GarageBand and slow it down. And then I’ll try to sing the slowed-down parts, and I’ll translate the tune into my own voice through that process, then I listen back to the tune in my voice, and then I’ll sing it. Often, the parts of the piping that I like are (sings really quick, fluctuating melodies). So in order to do that, I have to slow it down. And once it’s in my voice, I can get my mouth around it and feel it inside me and the shape it takes. And then I can start to put words to it.
One of the songs on the album, “Sallow Buckthorn,” actually has three poems in the lyrics. The title of the album, Forefowk, Mind Me—“Mind Me” is really nice in Scots because it means look after me, but also like, “Would you mind the kids?” It means “caring for” and “watching over.” So the title is like, I’m going to take the time to look for evidence of the past in my day to day, and I also am gonna ask that my theoretical ancestors, whoever they are, take care to show me or teach me. I wanted that song to sum that idea up.
The last verse is from a poem that I translated. I spent some time in Western Australia for a residency, and it was a very challenging and stressful experience. But there was a woman there, an Indigenous Tasmanian, who’s been working to revitalize her language, which was completely wiped out apart from written records from colonial settlers who had written it down. She was reforming it from that, and she had this poem that was about this request to elders to care for her family and community. We did a group task where we all translated it into our own languages, and that poem was the basis for the final verse.
Then I found another poem which was kind of about the same thing. Buckthorn is a bright orange berry, and the plant is incredibly spiky. The poem’s all about how you would look at the plant and assume it’s not worth collecting the harvest because it’s so uncomfortable to do so, but if you take the time to do so, you’ll reap the rewards. The buckthorn berries come out around my dad’s birthday, and we went on this cycle and there were loads of them. What I should have done was stay there and carefully take all the berries like in the poem, but instead I was like, “I’m gonna hack the system!” I cut loads of branches off and brought this huge bag back to my house, and when I opened it, it was full of ladybirds and they were flying everywhere. I was like, “Damn, I should’ve read this poem before I did that and had my whole house infested with ladybirds.” I carefully choose the parts of poems that speak to me. It takes me ages to make songs, and that’s why this album took me six years to make. And it’s like, no one’s waiting for it!
I was waiting for it! I was wondering if you were making music anymore. I was wondering if it was because COVID happened and you kind of just decided to stop doing this.
Life happened. I had two breakups, my mom died, and then I was like, okay, I’m ready again. A lot of the things on the album are things I’ve done for shorter commissions. I’ve been singing some of these for a long time, like the pipe tune ones. I never want to start recording unless I have a majority of songs that I really, really know.
How do you feel like you’ve grown as an artist and singer from the first two albums to this one?
I can breathe and sing at the same time now (laughter). I’m simultaneously more steadfast in what I’m doing, but also less constrained by rules about what I should or shouldn’t be doing. I have less of a sense of “Can I do this?” and more “What should I do next?” I’m not looking for permission anymore. Earlier in my career, I was waiting for people to turn around and be like, “That’s great, keep going.”
My actual performance of the songs is so much more mature. I can pitch things much more effectively live, and I can work my way around a song much more effectively. I used to really pump the songs out. I used to equate the power of the song with what I wanted the audience to experience; now I’m able to let them out without pushing them out. I’ve also gotten more sense of what I’m trying to do. I often get people who would like to sample me or have me perform on a track as part of their work. When I was younger, I would’ve liked that, but now I’ve got a rule where I want to self-determine where my voice sits and how it’s presented, so I don’t let people sample it or take it. They’ll say, “This would sound really cool!” And I’m like, “Would it? Would it really?” (laughter).
Is there anything you’d like to say about the musical scene you’re a part of? Harry Górski-Brown is on the album and I liked his album, Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats (2024). You can talk about him and the other musicians who played on Forefowk.
Seeing Gordon [Bruce] from GLARC set that label up was such an enabler for me. That’s what GLARC does: it lets people form themselves around ideas that other people would be like, “Oh, that needs more years of development.” But then you listen back and it’s like, that was great—like with Still House Plants. I was at uni in the same studio as Jess, so I got to know Jess and Fin. I was like, “Gordon, these guys have a band!” It’s funny to see everyone grow up and create this disparate scene that has its roots in Glasgow.
Oli[ver Pitt], who was in Golden Teacher and Ultimate Thrush, is one of those people who has absolutely no contemporary cultural references. He’s unaware of so many things, but he’s really aware of early Medieval choir music and how to make weird percussive noises. He’s an incredibly playful musician with a high skill level, and you can ask much more of that. I only work with people I get on with really well, otherwise life is too hard. Stevie [Jones] is the double bass player [on Forefowk] but he recorded everything as well. He’s got an eye for detail and he perseveres. I’m very much like, “That’s fine, one take,” and he’ll say, “Let’s do it again.” You’ll get maximum three takes out of me (laughter). He’s very good at steering the ship a bit when it comes to getting the refined idea on paper.
Me and Harry met because we were both on a piece of work that I took on to sing, but then I realized that it was all in notation—it was like a contemporary classical piece. I can’t read music, so I was just like, I’m totally fucked (laughter). Harry was the violin player on that and he spent hours and hours teaching me my part. I was like, who is this person? At the end of that I said to him that I needed a piper. He said that he used to play pipes but didn’t have any, so I told him to get some! And he got some and opened up this whole world for himself.
Ailbhe [Nic Oireachtaigh] plays the viola and she has this ear for sweet, weird sounds. She produces things that are really beautiful without being obvious, and there’s a lot of boldness in her own compositions. In my work, what she brings is a kind of softness, which I don’t think is her natural inclination. The viola has a warm tone, and an unaccompanied song is very intense for people. Even I struggle with a whole unaccompanied album, and there is this idea that her instrument is helping the listener along. So yeah, they’re all great.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
(laughs). My honest, immediate thought is… how do I choose one? The thing I love about myself is that over a number of years, I have learnt how to enjoy being with myself, as a companion. I’ve learnt how to accompany myself in things that I would’ve felt lonely in before. Sometimes I describe myself to my friends as all these little chicks, and then a big hen that’s like, “Come on everyone… come on.” Sometimes I’m one of the chicks, and I like that I’ve managed to access the hen, now, in my 30s.
Quinie’s latest album, Forefowk, Mind Me, is out now via Upset the Rhythm. The album can be purchased through the record label and at Bandcamp. More information about Quinie can be found at her website.
Thank you for reading the 204th issue of Tone Glow. Tone Glow is pro-horse girls, and pro-hen girls too.
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