Yesterday I returned home from more than three weeks spent on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. It's where my husband Mattie grew up in three hundred acres of pine forest on the banks of the St Andrew's Channel at Big Bras D'Or and where his folks still live.

It's also home to a fantastic annual folk festival called Celtic Colours, which happens at schools, churches, libraries, clubs and theatres scattered right across the island just as the trees are turning to dozens of shades of amber and gold.

There are a LOT of trees.

This year it was all framed by icy clear skies and still near-Atlantic waters and sprinkled with red squirrels and bluejays. I saw moose prints on the dirt road outside my in-laws house (the moose have been up to their garage door). A moose in Scotland and a moose in Canada operate on rather different scales, if you understand me?

There are no coyotes in Midlothian. Or black bears. Or racoons.

And pumpkins are not eaten in pies. Not eaten in much if anything, in fact. That's what turnips are for. Though I can see the appeal of making a Halloween lamp out of a pumpkin rather than a neep.

My son Arlo loved the cheeky wee squirrels. And the chickadees. And his grampa. And his grampa's tractor. And his grandma. And his grandma's oatcakes with the sugar and shortening in them.

He woke last night, here at home, pretty bewildered after traveling for 22 hours, to find himself in a different room and a different bed and blankets than the ones he'd woken in the day before. And though he's only 17 months old and can say few things other than "daad" and "mam" and "aaat" (which means, variously, "hot", "hat" and "cat") he appears to understand everything. So I held him and just told him one part of the story of his nearly a month away on Boularderie Island, Cape Breton: the paper he crumpled and the kindling he fetched to build a fire in the stove every morning with grampa; the waterbowl he slurped from just like Declan and Oban, the rangey big chocolate Labs he couldn't stop chasing and smooching; and the grandma "bye-o-bye" lullaby in which papa goes to the mailboat and the stars shine number, number one.

He calmed right down, and even laughed to remember some of those things. I'm amazed how little goes past him. I don't quite know why anyone would think a thing wasn't worth explaining because a kid wouldn't understand it anyway. He seems to get it all. And the telling of it is like a spell.

At the start of my Cape Breton trip, I spent a week in a former convent in the pretty wee harbour town of Baddeck, writing songs with fellow Scot, singer-fiddler Lori Watson and Canadian songwriters David Francey, who spent his childhood in Scotland and sings in a beautifully soft Scots-Canadian burr, the cerebral James Keelaghan, a seemingly bottomless well of quirky tales and trivia, Nova Scotia's Dave Gunning, possibly the nicest man in the world and a mean storyteller, and the honey voiced (why isn't she famous?) Prince Edward Islander Rose Cousins.

We're brought together for a collaborative project called "Coming Home", which was commissioned by Celtic Colours Festival (and based on a Scottish writers project called Burnsong, which I was involved in a couple of years ago).

My experience of working on the BBC Radio Ballads back in 2006 convinced me that I write best within a thematic framework, and so I enjoy the focus of turning the idea of "home" inside and out. Indeed, as nominal project co-ordinator, I set a wee bit of "Coming Home-work" leading up to the project to help focus our ideas.

And the ideas that emerge are just beautiful.

Rose brings a newspaper clipping about a barely remembered school colleague who was murdered in her hometown in the summer. She takes it to Dave Gunning and they write a soaring elegy to people left behind, and people forgotten, which starts and ends -

You only travelled on the wind as far as this town goes
and how your story ever went no-one really knows …

It has the most moving duet "ooh" chorus I've ever heard (why is it that sometimes not using words packs more emotional punch?) and just about finishes me off on live on stage.

David joins Rose to finish a song he's been carrying round in his head for 20 years and writes another from scratch that vividly recalls, like an old postcard, the day he shipped out of the Clyde for Canada with his parents more than thirty-five years ago.

David also polishes off my favourite song to emerge from the whole week, the half-written psalm-like "Ashen Town", which Dave Gunning brought ot the house -

Here lies the village church
No cross, no hymn no verse
The colours congregate in shades of grey

Dave proves himself a masterful storyteller in his joint work with Mr Keelaghan too, creating a Texas Border style hangman's tale, which hinges on the murder of the local banker (an image that resonates strongly in the current climate!).

The collective nod to current politics and the notion of "coming home to roost" finds it most explicit form in "House of Cards and a Pack of Lies", a bluesy six-way co-write with a satisfyingly tidy rhyme scheme –

We bought the dream and sold it on
And it ain't worth nothing now the money's gone
For the only shelter that credit buys
Is a house of cards and a pack of lies

I bring a simple song structure that rest on the image of an elderly woman with dementia being cared for by her husband, whom she can't recall. And Lori, whose mum turns out to work in a care home, refashions the husband as the woman's son:

"When's Billy gonna come home?", she asks
Soon now, soon now
"When's Billy gonna come home?", she asks
There's care in the old man's eyes
He says "Billy's at the park for a kick around
and he won't be back til the sun goes down"

And on our final afternoon of co-writing, the three fellas write a hilarious barber shop style ode to our chief cook and "house mom", Flo Sampson (whose son Gordie is himself a Gramy Award winning songwriter), whilst the three lassies write what you might call a "concept piece". Or just a really weird three part harmony thing in several time signatures ...

Anyway, it was an amazing week and nearly twenty new songs arrive in the world as a result, none of them duds either.

Now that I've come home myself I can't wait to see where it all goes next!

On the south western tip of The Isle of Colonsay, just on the edge of the tidal flat of The Strand which separates it from its tiny neighbour Oronsay, lives a ruddy faced beardy man called Andrew. Andrew tells me that his house, which he shares with Esme, who grows and sells tomatoes and paints upon silk, is only accessible at low tide, which, at five in the morning, after a good deal of complimentary Bruichladdich, in a kitchen on the north eastern side of the island, is a factor for him to bear in mind in deciding whether or not to keep on drinking ...

Andrew keeps bees. Rare black bees which feed upon the hardiest of heathers on rocky ground down by an Atlantic Ocean that, this past glorious weekend, gave only the faintest indication of how unbridled it can be. But, he says, his honey has the intensity of the place that yields it (moorland heathers, he says, leach their flavours into deep peat bogs. Sea-drenched heathers hang onto every drop).

It's not only bees that Andrew tends. He turns oysters too, with great care and attention and awareness of how well they're all keeping. I confess I cannae face down an oyster myself but Inge, who's sampled the wares, assures me that they're keeping very well indeed for the time being.

Bees and oysters. My goodness. "Two of the most fragile creatures upon the Earth", I observe. "A proper litmus test of environmental good health."

"Indeed" says Andrew. "You know people are not nearly frightened enough. In China, he says, there are places with no bees at all. And small armies of people are sent out to pollinate pear and apple orchards by hand with a paintbrush and a ladder."

"It's madness."

Meantime, he knows that just across the water on the mainland, closer to home, whole populations are being wiped out by mite infestations and haywire weather patterns.

"You know the end of my colony might arrive one day on the boots of some visiting tourist."

I can see it's as well that his house is hard to reach.

Anyway it's well beyond your average 5 o'clock in the morning conversation. Bruichladdich or no Bruichladdich.

I see Andrew the next day as I'm lining up to get the ferry back to Oban. And I pick up a pot of dark amber honey from his pier-side stall, fetching out my purse.

"Oh no", he says, "here's the deal. We're trying to get reserve status for the Colonsay black bee population. We're getting the scientists on side. But people have to care. There will be publicity, you know ..." He pauses.

"Of course", I say, " a song."

And he hands me the honey, smiling.

The National Theatre of Scotland's powerful production of "Black Watch" currently showing at The Barbican, has, threaded through it, perhaps the most moving creative use of traditional music and song that I've ever seen. MD Davey Anderson gives "Twa Recruiting Sergeants", a raw urgency and savage humour and transforms "The Gallant Forty Twa", named after the regiment itself, into an elegy for modern day Iraqi warfare.

I confess these are songs I'd heard a hundred times before belted out of some smoky pub corner and I'd never connected with them in any meaningful way. But they breathe through this play. And anyone who ever thought old songs have nothing to say to new ears should see it.

I felt the same jolt when I first heard Gordeanna McCulloch sing "The Laird of Warriston", a seventeenth century ballad of domestic abuse and come-uppance, whilst working for national domestic abuse charity Scottish Women's Aid. The essence of the story, four hundred years old, could have been lifted from one of our late twentieth century files.

I love traditional ballads because of their ability to connect human experiences across the details of time and place, and to take on new resonances for new circumstances. The rich local references and language might vary but the core human emotions and experiences are just the same. They're not museum pieces. And they're not parochial.

So it delights me that "Poor Man's Heaven", Seth Lakeman's third album length exploration of his native Devon history and mythology finds itself nestled between Amy Winehouse and Neil Diamond in the Top Ten album charts this week. And whilst tedious column inches and web space discuss whether or not Seth is folk enough for folk, to me what betrays his sensibility more than a fiddle ever could is what he chooses to write about. "Solomon Browne", for example, commemorates the 1981 Penlee Lifeboat disaster, an event in his own lifetime that's still as raw on that coastline as memories of Piper Alpha are in Aberdeen.

Whether it's around in a few hundred years time is anyone's guess and scarcely matters. But what drew me to folk music in the first place, and to all of my desert island songs and artists in other musical genres is its humanity. And when English folk music finally falls out of fashion and favour with the English cultural intelligentsia, as it surely will, mercifully the songs will still be there and they'll still mean something.

My second blog as guest blogger on the BBC Folk and Acoustic website this week. A few of you will have heard about my football exploits before, sorry!

If you've never tried to pick up a matchbox from the floor with your teeth, no hands down allowed, then let me tell you from cruel experience that it's near impossible! But at three in the morning in The Stromness Hotel during this year's Orkney Folk Festival, Greg Liszt did just that, and to riotous applause. It was proof, not that proof was needed, that the Crooked Still banjo player is a deceptively understated character.

But then he's in a deceptively understated band.

Sidestepping the usual flashness, Crooked Still has crafted a distinctively elegant and spacious sound on the US bluegrass scene. And to those who thought the band would crumble with last year's departure of extraordinary cellist Rushad Eggleston, I can vouch that his replacements Tristan Clarridge and fiddler Natalie Haas hardly sound like reserves.

Lead singer Aoife O'Donovan was easily a match for her colleague in the small hours craic stakes. A one-woman session steam engine, she was to be found in hallways duetting with Kris Drever, Solas fiddler Seamus Egan in support (a wee bird says this combination might make it into a studio soon).

If my late night match play was embarassing, I redeemed myself with a couple of heroic saves at the annual Orkney versus Folk Festival All-Comers football challenge. Joint Man Of The Match went to nimble accordionists Mairearad Green (Anna Massie Trio/The Poozies) and Kathleen Boyle (Dochas/Cherish The Ladies). But I heard a whisper it might have been a three way split if I hadn't had to leave my goals for my soundcheck ...

But then as Mairearad put it:

"Ronaldo never left before the final whistle".

Hear a track from Crooked Still's new album "Still Crooked" on this week's BBC Radio 2 Mike Harding Show.

I decided just to post up the blogs I've been writing as guest blogger for the BBC Folk and Acoustic website this week rather than ask you to visit the board there. Each of the blogs had to connect with the weekly Mike Harding Show playlist in someway so I've done my best! Most of it's new to myspace too (though a few of you will have heard about some football antics before!)

Anyway here's no.1 - two more to follow ...

I'm chuffed to find that the vivid vernacular poetry and fag soaked vocals of Dundonian songwriter Michael Marra made it onto the Mike Harding playlist this week. Michael inhabits an idiosyncratic musical world in which tortured Mexican artist Frida Kahlo visits his local Taybridge Bar for a pint and some counselling from the regulars and a terrified fox relives the moment it ran onto the pitch at Hampden during an Old Firm Cup Final.

An exceptional wordsmith and pianist, somewhere in the nether region between Randy Newman, Tom Waits and Ivor Cutler his witty, poignant, and elegiac songs have the city of Dundee in their bones. And it's for the richness in a sense of place and native turn of phrase that Michael jacked in a career as a songwriter for an international publishing house that demanded songs for global audiences. Whilst he speaks to fewer folk now, he speaks to and for his own folk. And loads of them love him for it.

Last month, I helped to host an event called Nos-Ur, a celebration of new songwriting in Scots and Celtic languages, which culminates in Liet Lavlut, a pan-European minority language final in Sweden. None of the writers of Gaelic punk, Welsh indie rock or Breton folk-pop that I heard that night had an eye on a global market. But their commitment to making vibrant new music in their own tongues was immensely cheering.

So whilst the whole world, and even vast swathes of Britain, might never hear or fail to understand the subtleties of Michael Marra, I reckon the whole world needs mair fowk like him.

From the Nos-Ur final have a listen to these folks in particular:

Breton folk-roots artist Gwenyyn
Welsh alt-folkie The Gentle Good

Hello - just a wee note to say I'm guest blogger on the BBC's Folk and Acoustic website this week. So if you want to know more about Frida Kahlo's Visit To The Taybridge Bar in Dundee and how to win friends and influence people in the small hours at Orkney Folk Festival, then have a wee look at the BBC website.

Hello folks

Hope the sun is shining for you wherever you are!

SPECIAL GUESTS AND SPECIAL TICKET OFFERS AT LONDON ROUNDHOUSE, 20th AUGUST

I bring news of some promised "musical surprises" for a unique show I'm playing on August 20th at London's Roundhouse, a gorgeous swanky cabaret style venue that doesn't often host folkies like me, as well as details of how mailing list members can get hold of bargain price tickets for a limited period.

I'm delighted that Fife's alt folk Fence Collective maestro, King Creosote, will join me and the boys in my band for some brand new duets, in a line up that will also feature elegant Edinburgh chanteuse and pianist Kim Edgar, and maybe, just maybe, something else ...

Kenny, Kim and myself first met at a 2006 songwriters retreat by a beach in southern Scotland, which was a bit like Big Brother for songwriters, except a wee bit less scandalous. In early May this year, the three of us and the songs created in the song house week hit the road for a run of Scottish dates alongside fellow housemates Emma Pollock, Future Pilot AKA, Michael Johnston and MC Soom T, as well as my fella Mattie Foulds on drums. The campfire-folk-pop-indie-dub-step fusion which ensued was such a buzz for all of us that we're already making plans to launch a new band collective early next year. Meantime, I'm chuffed to bits to get a chance to bring some of the new songs south for this one-off show.

King Creosote is a bit of a legend here in Scotland and I'm a big fan of his hooky one liner riffs. His "KC Rules OK?" is one of my desert island albums. What's more, our voices just work really well together, probably because we both sound like we actually come from somewhere in the middle of Scotland instead of the middle of the ocean, and because neither of us could ever be accused of overstatement! It's been a rare treat to get a chance to sing with him.

Following the Songhouse tour in May, I made a sneaky appearance with KC at a Fence Collective club show in Edinburgh, which was my first on stage sweaty rock n roll gig experience. I confess I got so carried away playing along with the band that I ended up with a massive tambourine shaped bruise on my leg!

My Roundhouse show also features our fellow song house collaborator Kim Edgar with songs from her beautiful debut solo album "Butterflies and Broken Glass". Kim will also accompany me on piano for rare live performances of tracks from last year's intimate trad album "Fairest Floo'er", as well as spacious new settings of songs from my debut album "Faultlines".

It's definitely not just a regular solo show. The Roundhouse is such a quirky venue that I wanted to make it something really special. So I'm totally looking forward to it.

£5 OFF TICKET PRICES FOR MAILING LIST MEMBERS

Tickets are on sale for £15 but I'm offering a limited number of tickets in the stalls at a £5 per person discount. Just £10. To take up the offer, please visit Ticket Web. The promotional discount code is "spell".

If you've already purchased tickets at full price, and are wondering if you've been penalised for getting your tickets early, please don't worry! Email me directly at info@karinepolwart.com with ROUNDHOUSE in the subject line of your email and I'll make you a compensation offer to cheer your night out!

And if London is a wee bit too far for you, I'll also be visiting Stornoway in Lewis for HebCelt Festival (Saturday July 19th), the fantastic Cambridge Folk Festival (Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd August), Sidmouth Festival by the beach (Wednesday 6th August) and Edmonton Festival in Canada (Friday 8th to Sunday 10th August). And check out my gigs page http://www.karinepolwart.com/gigs/ for news of special Scottish shows with my friends Annie Grace and Corrina Hewat and with several of my Song House compadres.

I hope to see some of you in London and elsewhere.

Meantime enjoy your summer!

Karine x

PS Check out
KIng Creosote
Kim Edgar

Just back yesterday from the gorgeous Orkney Islands with my pals Corrina Hewat and Annie Grace, where the lassies danced up an Eva 3 Step storm with Edwin from the pier on the wee island of Rousay and I stayed up too late drinking Highland Park and singing the Simon and Garfunkel songbook with guitar ace and human jukebox Anna Massie. Delighted to have seen the young bluegrass, old timers Crooked Still for the first time and heard again the splendid Martin Simpson. Do yourselves a favour and head to Orkney Folk Festival next year!

And once you've gotten that far north, where it scarcely gets dark at this time of year, it's a mere hop over the water to the Shetlands where I spent six fantastic days on Fair Isle for the wedding of the best looking, but now officially unavailable, KP Bandster Inge Thomson and her fine fella Martin Green. It was a double accordion wedding and what a lovely do! And what a stunning place too, dropped right out in The North Sea and bedecked with rough and tumble tamminorries (puffins), the hardiest sheep on the planet (and oh how my wee boy Arlo loved them!) and some of the hardiest, wisest and kindest people too.

Have a listen to Inge's cousin Lise who makes beautiful music inspired by the place www.myspace.com/lisesinclair

As if all this wasn't just fine enough, a mere day before the island hopping began I finished up one of the most inspiring tours I've ever been on with a cohort of big hearted and immensely talented songwriters including indie pop queen Emma Pollock, the wry but poignant King Creosote, bass demon and quiet man Future Pilot AKA, small force of nature MC Soom T, newly discovered electric guitar ace Kim Edgar and the infectiously energetic and musically generous Canadian Michael Johnston, as well as my own fine fella Mattie Foulds kicking some ass on drums too. What could have been just a bunch of individual songwriters introspecting on stage morphed into an alt.campire supergroup with ambitions to take on the world! A truly magical musical experience that generated two brand new songs (and then some), including "Beautiful Mistakes", which we winged on stage on the final night in glorious fashion! So watch this space for plans to take on Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and The New Pornographers at their own game ... or maybe some other game that we might be better at playing instead ...

Have a look at some new dates for this month - just posted - including first dates in Ireland in a long time ...

Karine x

PS I forgot to mention my rekindled footballing prowess at the Orkney boys vs folk festival all comers game down by the shore in Stromness on Sunday evening. I can run surprisingly fast (ex-centre forward of Dundee University's ladies football team) but with nae dribbling or tackling skill up front whatsoever (in the days when simply being a woman and having two legs was enough to get in the team ...) but discovered I'm a helluva demon in the goals! Saved two, down on my knees. And I was robbed of the (wo)Man of the Match whistling kettle by fast footed accordionists Mairearad Green of The Poozies and Kathleen Boyle of Dochas only because I had a gig to go to!

Next time, next time ...

Chirpier news this time!

I’ve just posted up a free download of a new and unreleased track over at my main website.

This month’s free track is "Maid of The Loch (You and I and the Sky)", which I co-wrote with the lovely Sushil K Dade, Future Pilot AKA. He wrote the tune for his grandfather, who loved to visit Loch Lomond and sail on the boat up there (which is called The Maid of The Loch). A gorgeous instrumental version of the tune opens up the Future Pilot album "Tiny Waves Mighty Sea". Sushil asked several folks to write words for the piece, including also the Scots poet Alasdair Gray and the late Grant McLennan of The Go Betweens frontman. Hear more of Sushil’s work on "Secrets From The Clockhouse" (Creeping Bent, 2007). I sing with him on several tracks, including the spiritual "Shenandoah". I tour Scotland (and Gateshead!) with Sushil in May 2008 as part of a collaborative tour called BURNSONG.

I’ll be making an exclusive track available this way once a month, entirely cost-free. All you have to do is sign up to my email newsletter, so that I can notify you when new tracks appear.

I mentioned the new Camcorder Guerrillas film "Deadly Cargo" in my last blog. Well, I just watched a preview copy and I confess I’m astonished and rather terrified by it. I thought I knew something about the issue of Britain’s nuclear weapons convoys but witnessing on film two truckloads of missiles driving up the M6 past Birmingham and Manchester in full daytime traffic defies all sense and logic, even if you think there’s a logic in such weaponry in the first place (which I don’t). I was aware, even whilst still at school, that weapons regularly truck along the motorway between Glasgow and Stirling, a mile from my parent’s home, heading north to the Royal Naval Armament Depot at Coulport on Loch Long. That’s a scary enough thought, given that the trucks carrying these weapons have been known to skid and crash. Noting tonight that they also snake along the A68 through the Scottish Borders, a mile from my own home, and a notoriously treacherous road, sends an extra chill into my bones.

I hope the UK Government’s forthcoming "register of risks" pays as much attention to the risks they create on our behalf, and needlessly, as to the faceless foreign risks our papers are more apt to be filled with.

Jings I’ve an aversion to ranting but sometimes it’s the only appropriate response.

Anyway I’l be able to post the film online for you to see for yourselves after its formal release on the 29th March.

Safe driving ...