The Scotsman Sessions #109: Martha Healy

Welcome to The Scotsman Sessions. With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman.com, with introductions from our critics. Here, from her fireside in Stirlingshire, country singer Martha Healy performs No Place Like Home from her 2018 album, Keep The Flame Alight

As the autumn nights draw in, country singer Martha Healy has the right idea: stoke up the fire, get cosy and celebrate finding – and staying – home, with her hearth-side performance of No Place Like Home from her 2018 album, Keep The Flame Alight.

The Glasgow-born musician now lives in Stirlingshire but the song was written in her previous home of Nashville as the clock was running down on her visa.

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“I wasn't ready to come home and the only way I could cope with that was to write about all the positive and beautiful things about Scotland,” she says. “The song is really special to me because it reminds me of such a vivid stage in my life - where I was faced with two paths, and it just so happens that the one I took has been the right one. My husband and I bought our first house and I feel settled for the first time ever in my life.”

Healy’s domestic scene will be familiar to anyone who has tuned into her lockdown gigs on Facebook Live. In recent months, she has also embraced online songwriting collaborations with Nashville-based Ben Glover and Austin-based BettySoo and started presenting her own Americana-flavoured digital radio show The Max.

Next on the agenda is the 2020 Glasgow Americana Festival, a fully online edition of the brilliant, bijou country festival, featuring an international line-up including Laura Cantrell, Robert Vincent, Boo Hewerdine and Darden Smith and a virtual song circle comprising Healy, Colorado’s David Starr and Edinburgh-based Al Shields.

“It will be great to have some musical connection again,” says Healy. “So much about what we do as musicians is about connection. We aren't meant to disconnect and not see people. I will never take that for granted ever again.”

Tickets for Glasgow Americana Festival are available from http://www.glasgowamericana.com Healy presents Max Country, Saturdays, 8pm, www.maxradio.co.uk

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