Karine Polwart

An award-winning Scottish folk singer drawing on jazz, country, pop, and traditional Scots sources, Karine Polwart first rose to notice as Malinky’s lead vocalist and as a Battlefield Band member before launching her solo path in 2004. Since that time she has issued several highly regarded solo albums: Scribbled in Chalk (2006), Traces (2012), and Laws of Motion (2018). She also belongs to the eight-piece Scottish-Canadian folk supergroup The Burns Unit.

Born in Banknock, Stirlingshire, Scotland, Polwart matured late as a musician and was nearly thirty when she turned professional, initially building her reputation on traditional Scots material that revealed an instinctive gift. She soon placed greater trust in her own compositions and gradually recast herself as a singer/songwriter. Many of those later songs reflected her years as a social worker handling domestic and child-abuse cases for the Scottish Aid women’s movement. Earlier she had completed a politics and philosophy degree at Dundee University, taught in a primary school, and performed with assorted semi-professional groups before attracting wider notice through Malinky and the duo MacAlias.

Malinky especially gathered a loyal audience after two well-received albums, Last Leaves (2000)—which contains her first recorded original, the trad-styled “The Dreadful End of Marianna for Sorcery”—and “Three Ravens” (2002), where her subtly emotive vocals formed a central element. The MacAlias partnership with Gill Bowman likewise displayed her range across a wider musical spectrum, mixing original material by both artists with songs by Robbie Burns and the Scottish tradition; their album High Wired (2000), featuring one of Polwart’s signature country-flavored pieces, “John C Clarke,” remains much underrated. She also spent eighteen months touring with the legendary Battlefield Band after the illness and death of Davy Steele and appeared on their 2001 album Happy Daze.

After six years as Malinky’s lead singer she left the group in 2004, following the release of her debut solo album Faultlines, to focus on her singer/songwriter career. Uncertainty accompanied the move, since she wondered whether audiences accustomed to her traditional repertoire would accept the new contemporary direction. “It was mad to give in my notice to Malinky because I didn’t know if the solo thing would work and I had nothing else to fall back on but I just felt I had to give it a go,” she says. Early indications proved discouraging, yet a cluster of 2005 BBC Folk Award nominations provided strong encouragement; ultimately she claimed three prizes—best new act, best album, and, most valued by her, best song—for the moving portrait of a woman shattered by her partner’s alcoholism, “The Sun’s Comin’ Over the Hill.” From that moment her trajectory accelerated sharply: mainstream radio play increased, concert audiences grew larger, and she performed with a band comprising Inge Thomson on accordion, Kevin McGuire on bass, brother Steve Polwart on guitars, and Canadian husband Mattie Foulds on drums.

Her second album, Scribbled in Chalk (2006), continued the pattern of narrative songs confronting difficult subjects such as sex trafficking and the Holocaust while remaining anchored in sturdy melodies and precise structures. She again received the best-song award (for “Daisy”) at the 2007 BBC Folk Awards and spent much of the year on maternity leave following the birth of her son Arlo; nonetheless, that December she released the sparsely arranged, predominantly traditional collection Fairest Floo’er. Its sole original track, the closing “Can’t Weld a Body,” had first been heard in the BBC’s 2006 revival of the radio ballads series. “Firethief,” another reflective song from the same broadcast, later surfaced on her well-received fourth album, 2008’s This Earthly Spell. Her second child, Rosa, arrived in mid-2010, the same year she joined the Edinburgh-formed contemporary folk trio Lau for the Evergreen EP. After a recording hiatus she returned in 2012 with Traces, a further assured collection of original songs shaped by the inventive production of The Unwinding Hours’ Iain Cook. In 2017 Polwart issued A Pocket of Wind Resistance, created with sound designer Pippa Murphy as a studio rendering of her acclaimed theatre piece Wind Resistance. The following year she collaborated once more with sibling Steve Polwart and Inge Thomson on the stylistically varied Laws of Motion, and again in 2019 on Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook.