Since we reviewed her Ancient Lights EP just over a year ago (“a delightful short collection”), the busy life of Hannah Scott has seen her shoot into the spotlight where we’ve watched her progress via the English Folk Expo mentoring programme and her appearance at the West Coast Folk Festival in January.
She’s set to release a new album in the Autumn, with a tour planned for October and November which will see Hannah take to the road for a selection of solo and expanded lineup gigs. The new record will be her third studio album, and the first she will self-produce alongside acclaimed engineer/producer Adrian Hall (Tori Amos, Anna Calvi). It promises songs inspired by the greatest of human emotions – love, parenthood, grief – and an unwavering yearning for life, even during its darkest moments.
Hannah joins us for a Why I Love on Italian singer-songwriter, Elissa.
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard an Elisa song, not something I can say about any other artist I’ve come to love. It was the summer of 2003 and I’d just moved to Tuscany for the third year of my French and Italian degree. I was visiting Siena when her song Broken came on in a shop. I didn’t know who the singer was (these were the days before Shazam) but the chorus was so catchy I was humming it until I heard it on the radio again a few days later and finally found out.
Elisa’s album Lotus followed in autumn 2003 and I fell in love with her melody, lyric and the fact that she sings in a mixture of English and Italian – to a language geek like me I was so impressed by her almost total lack of accent in English. The album was the soundtrack to what was, for me, a pivotal year. It accompanied moments of deep loneliness in the early part of the year (I was 19 and living alone for the first time in a foreign country), moments of growth as I slowly but surely built a life, making friends by joining a local football team, moments of joy as I fell in love for the first time and moments of despair as my work placement came to an end and I had to move on.
I spent 9 months in Tuscany and in the spring of 2004 I left for a placement in Monaco where I would be able to perfect my French. To many, Monaco sounds idyllic but I was there to work and I had just left the life I had built and the woman I had fallen in love with behind. The first month was a challenge to say the least. I spent it living in a hostel in Nice and 20 years later, I still remember lying in bed, looking up at the exposed pipes in the ceiling, crying as I listened to Elisa sing.
For a long time I found it really difficult to listen to the record because of the painful memories it stirred in me. It forever amazes me that music has the power to transport us in time.
Back home in the UK after finishing my degree, part of me longed to be back in Italy but deep down I knew that this was the right place for me to start taking my own music more seriously. At this point I started listening to some of Elisa’s previous releases (early Spotify helping out as buying Italian CDs in the UK wasn’t easy) and I began to notice her influence in my own writing. It had taken a good few years to trickle through.
I didn’t manage to see Elisa in concert while living in Italy so I was really excited to go and see her play in Rome in April 2010 for the first time. It wasn’t to be: the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull grounded European flights and my trip was cancelled. I finally saw her perform at KOKO in London in 2014. She was very good but I think I’d put her on such a pedestal over so many years that it would have been hard even for her to live up to it.
I haven’t worked with Elisa but there have been a couple of close calls! In 2018 my Italian collaborator Stefano Della Casa signed a co-publishing deal with Sugar Music. It was Sugar’s stalwart Caterina Caselli who ‘discovered’, signed and developed Elisa in the mid-late 90s, though by this point she had retired. Stefano managed to get a contact for her manager and I was considered to open for her in London on a couple of occasions, being pipped to the post by Jack Savoretti, who Elisa helped in his rise to fame. Stefano also worked closely with another writer, Giovanni Caccamo, who had written a song with an English lyricist but wasn’t happy with the outcome. I was asked to write an alternative lyric. I got the shock of my life when the song came on my Release Radar last year, sung by Elisa, but sadly with the original lyric. Third time lucky, perhaps…
I listened to Lotus from start to finish for the first time in a long while ahead of writing this piece. It doesn’t hurt anymore. I feel a sense of gratitude now for all the emotions Elisa has given me and a warmth, a nostalgia for the moments passed, which she so beautifully accompanied.
Here’s Hannah with an uplifting Hallalu:
Our thanks to Hannah for taking time to share her personal insight into an influential and inspirational force.
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