Hannah Scott “Absence Of Doubt”

Forget genre and just listen to a songwriter who is working at the peak of her power.

Fifteen years and a dozen releases into her career you might expect Hannah Scott to have settled into a niche. But ‘Absence of Doubt’ moves her firmly away from the “contemporary folk” label that has covered her work so far. The names she has collaborated with to produce tell their own story. Engineer/producer Adrian Hall (known for his work with Tori Amos and Anna Calvi), Geoff Holroyde (Feeder) on drums, Matt Aston (Lucy Spraggan) on bass and guitarist George Boomsma (Katherine Priddy).

There is also a new assertiveness to her singing (vocals were recorded in her wardrobe it seems). The first single from the album ‘Bigger Than My Body’ talks about the start of a relationship. “It tries to encapsulate the feeling of a love that is so big you can’t keep it within you. There is a nod to Glennon Doyle’s beautiful memoir, ‘Untamed’, in the lyric, which I was reading around the time my relationship started and had a deep impact on my thinking.”

The lyrics: “This love will not be restrained. This is love and it grows untamed. This is love, damn I’m not ashamed. That it’s bigger than my body” evoke that beautifully. It would have been so easy to fill them with complex metaphors, but Scott goes straight for the heart of the matter and produces a song which fills up wither sense of excitement and anticipation. Latest single ‘Love Like I Did’ moves the story on several steps. “I wrote this song about how much I love my stepchildren, despite not having given birth to them. I’d had the idea for the song for a while but my eldest stepson breaking his arm on my watch was what made me start writing it” And she conveys that feeling over a string filled tune quite wonderfully.

This is still recognisable from her earlier work, but there is also a transatlantic feel creeping into her music. ‘Lines’ celebrates aging and the maturity and knowledge that comes with it over a tune which owes a debt to singers like Jewel or Sarah McLachlan. ‘Broken Homes’ has a definite Judy Collins feel to it.  It’s theme, “sometimes you have to break a home to mend a family” will resonate for many people, I’m sure.

This may actually be a concept album about building and sustaining relationships in the second quarter of the 21st Century. De-facto title track ‘Stone In My Mouth’ is full of big guitars and drums, while ‘San Francisco’ is a piano ballad, which talks of loss, using a clever end of tour metaphor for losing someone. ‘Carry You Out’ will be familiar to anyone with aging parents, and is the most emotive song here by far.

“The album encapsulates the very best and very worst of human emotions, including love, parenthood, and grief. Despite everything, the songs embody a yearning for life, even in its darkest moments.”

Is it Folk, Country or Pop? Yes, to all of those as Scott and producer Adrian Hall use aspects of each as they need them to express a mood to reflect her words. Rather than being held in the folk world, Hannah Scott has shifted her emphasis to sit beside some of the other excellent female singer songwriters, people like Nerina Pallot, Hannah White and Roxanne de Bastion, whose music is beyond pigeonholing into a genre, but just write and perform great modern music.