Emily Scott – The Garden (Video Premiere)

Blackford Hill's stunning compilation album Transmissions / Volume One (which you can read more about in our April releases round-up here) is set for release on Friday 16 April, with all profits from the release set to be donated to Shelter. Featuring a huge cast of talented musicians from Andrew Wasylyk and Hanna Tuulikki to King Creosote and Liz Lochhead, it also features contributions from two members of the super-prolific Modern Studies – Rob St. John and Emily Scott.

Scott's gorgeous and understated The Garden serenely opens Transmissions / Volume One, perfectly setting the scene for further delights to be found within the record. Today, The Skinny are delighted to be premiering the song along with its accompanying video, created by Jonny Hannah, which you can watch in the above YouTube player (click here if it's not displaying correctly). 

Transmissions / Volume One curator Simon Lewin tells us: "When Tommy [Perman] and I were swapping early thoughts about the musicians we'd approach to see if they might contribute to this fundraising compilation, Emily [Scott] was an obvious choice for us both. And we couldn't have been happier when Emily offered to write this new song for us. When it came to thinking about a video, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to approach our friend, illustrator, painter and printmaker Jonny Hannah. Jonny had previously created the animation for King Creosote's Stopping Out (part of the Concrete Antenna project I had worked on with Tommy, Simon Kirby and Rob St. John) and we felt his hand-drawn rendering of Emily's lyrics would sit perfectly with the film footage that Tommy had created during lockdown."

Telling us more about how The Garden came about, Scott tells us: "I wrote this when I was feeling really stuck, as I think a lot of people are through this time. I saw lots of people pushing through and being massively creative, exploiting all their positives and possibilities, and felt like I was just getting nowhere, just surviving. The song was just born of that really, thinking about the garden was just a way of getting something started. It's funny looking back at the song now and realising it’s about writer's block. The nice thing about gardens is that often the best things just happen by themselves when you’re not looking."

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Transmissions / Volume One is released on 16 Apr; available to pre-order via Bandcamp now

blackfordhill.bandcamp.com/album/transmissions-volume-one