Music review: Rachel Sermanni, Summerhall, Edinburgh

Rachel Sermanni is a singer and songwriter with the same kind of pastoral richness and depth as Sandy Denny or Joni Mitchell, writes David Pollock

Rachel Sermanni, Summerhall, Edinburgh ****

“This is the end of the campaign because I have another campaign on the go,” Rachel Sermanni pointed out during her packed-out show, referring to the fact – although it may not have been clear to everyone,given the angle at which she was holding her guitar – that she’s eight months pregnant.

“It's probably getting to the point where it's dangerous to be doing gigs,” she joked. “I'm sure it's not… I'm sure I have at least two weeks to go.” The campaign she referred to is the one in support of her new album Dreamer Awake and it lasted all of ten days, by necessity.

Singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni. Picture: Gaelle Beri

The singer, who is from Carrbridge in Inverness-shire but now lives near Edinburgh, made the point that the lack of a band was unintentional, that the musicians she wanted were unavailable within her understandably forced timescale. Yet something about the mellow tenderness of the set-up, mostly just Sermanni and her guitar, suited the intimacy of sharing some of the last hours of her life as mother to just one child.

Cradled in her gently emotive playing and warm, hypnotic voice, her songs touched an autobiographical note. Grace of Autumn Gold, she explained, places her on the cusp of “my own personal autumn equinox”; Swallow Me recounted the last time she found out she was pregnant, in the toilets at Waverley Station; Put Me in the River reflected on recovering from a cross-European trip with a Buddhist retreat, Leonard Cohen-style.

Before Jacob, Sermanni thanked her mother for making a surprise appearance here, and she was joined by her friend Maggie Rigby on vocals for a cover of Karine Polwart’s Follow the Heron and her own signature tune Lay My Heart.

By the next morning, said Sermanni – a singer and songwriter with the same kind of pastoral richness and depth as Sandy Denny or Joni Mitchell – her musical mission would "be accomplished”. Not for long, we hope.