The Scotsman Sessions #209: Louise Quinn

Welcome to the award-winning 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 home in Glasgow, Louise Quinn performs her new song Next To Me

There is a lullaby softness to Louise Quinn’s Scotsman Session rendition of new song Next To Me, and with good reason – she was trying not to wake her one year old twins after they had settled down for the night.

Quinn and her partner Bal Cooke, the creative nucleus of A Band Called Quinn, are well used to working by baby-friendly stealth in the back bedroom of their Glasgow home. In the past year, they have recorded a lockdown album collaboration, The Gates of Light, with DJs/producers Scott Fraser in London and Kid Loco in Paris plus film/art director Tim Saccenti in New York, with Next To Me as one of the first songs written for the project.

“This song was inspired by the euphoric feelings I experienced during lockdown,” says Quinn, “walking around in the sun with our twins but having to contend with the grief of losing their sister Freya who was born sleeping a few years before. I believe she came back to us in Astrid and Oscar and this song reinforces that idea that we are all made up of energy taking different forms for our time here on earth.”

The album is a similarly self-comforting experience featuring a collection of elegant electro pop topped with Quinn’s torch song vocals.

“This collaboration gave us all something to focus on and made us feel connected,” she says. “We'd share musical influences and our experiences of lockdown – Tim had to contend with the whole Trump fiasco, Jean-Yves was living under a curfew at times and Scott had lost all of his DJing work.

“I'm really proud of what we've created,” she adds. “I think we mined a bit of gold from the darkness of the pandemic and I hope people get the same feeling listening to it as we had creating it.”

Gates Of Light is out now on Shimmy-Disc, see https://louise-quinn.com/

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