Question for you: which Edinburgh artist has worked with this extraordinary roll-call of music talent - Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Slam, Hal David, Andrew Weatherall, Death in Vegas, Pete Doherty, Scott Walker, Mick Harvey of the Bad Seeds and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields?

Top of the class if you know it’s Dot Allison.

It’s an incredibly impressive and wonderfully eclectic list of collaborators, which reflects the wide-ranging music journey Dot has been on since she first made an impression in the early 90s with One Dove, whose one and only album Morning Dove White* was a sublime piece of Weatherall-vibed work.

After taking time out of the music industry to raise a family, Dot is back with Heart-Shaped Scars, her first album in 12 years.

Recorded in part at Castlesound Studios in Edinburgh, it’s a deeply delicate album which floats along on a gentle pastoral folk sound influenced by Dot’s interests in nature, literature and science.

Here Dot, who describes Heart-Shaped Scars as “a pure kind of album that musically imbues a return to nature” reveals how the album came together and reflects on her career.

The roots of the album

We threw a Christmas party at our house in Edinburgh in 2018 and my old school friend Sarah Campbell’s son, Tom Campbell, who is in an absolutely brilliant trad folk trio (The Tom Campbell Trio), played live music at our party.

They blew everyone’s minds. They were also joined by a musician, artist and all-round lovely and very gifted person called Amy Bowman who sang some songs. Amy had spent time as a work-away with Sarah while she built her own house on the Hebridean island where we also have a cottage.

When I heard Amy’s voice and songs, I was so moved that I suggested to her that we might write a song together. I had a poem I had written a while ago as a sister poem to ‘Buzzing Round The Honey Pots’ [from 2009’s Room 7 ½ album] called ‘The Haunted’ about adultery and a death resulting in an unconsummated love.

I met up with Amy and I had two chords I wanted to write round - Dm and G - as I think they are so emotive. Amy played them on ukulele and literally sang the melody to the poem kind of on the spot to the chords I had given just and reading the poem off my computer. I voice-noted it on my phone and loved it immediately and that was song number one in a demo sense. Once that was down, I knew I would make an album. So that session was the opening of the door in me to make a project and collection of songs.

Exploring ideas and facing fears

In 2018, I also got a new manager, Maggie Rodford at Air Edel, and I had been composing rough motifs and ideas at the piano. So along with The Haunted I had a few ideas and I then mined from my bank of ideas that went back as far as 2003, and the project began.

I felt tentative and nervous about making an album as I like hiding away really, but I decided to feel the fear and do it anyway, so I began to conceptualise a body of work and it slowly began to coalesce in my mind. I went on to make the music for the album between Edinburgh, The Hebrides and a tiny bit in London for old times’ sake.

The influence of nature

I am interested in nature, physics and our imperfect understanding of the marriage between the nature of reality and how that relates to humanity and the interconnective patterns that recur throughout nature - like the sonar pattern of a dolphin song being identical to the form of a flower, and the recurrence of fractal patterns in sound and even can be seen in certain vegetables … I’m interested in the interconnectivity and quantum entanglement and for me music is just nature’s vibrations on those fields.

Female collaborators

I worked with many ladies on this album as I wanted it to sound like an embrace and a font of nurture and love, as I believe love and forgiveness and attachment are the only true important things in the human life experience.

With Hannah [Peel, who adds string arrangements to four songs], Paul Weller recommended I connect with her as I had mentioned to Paul that I planned on adding strings to my tunes. I absolutely love his True Meanings album [which Peel provided string arrangements on], so I had been listening to her gorgeous arrangements on there already before he recommended her.

With Paul, he had sung a few lines to give her an idea of what he might be looking for before she arranged and so she asked me to do the exact same thing. I sang One Love on my phone and sent it to Hannah, then she contacted me to say she absolutely loved it and she began to create the arrangements.

I produced the album alongside Fiona Cruickshank who is an engineer at Air Studios in London. She just has a brilliant ear and I wanted to share the production role with someone I trusted and respected.

On connection

I hope the album helps others feel a sense of connectedness. I am fascinated by quantum entanglement, inter connectivity and wave particle duality, so I see everything as connected anyway. I think the more we integrate with ourselves the better. I believe the love and the bonds between people in this life experience are the most important aspect of life - without attachment and empathy, we may as well be androids and I believe art would suffer too.

Reflections on the album & career journey

I feel proud of the music. I feel it’s honest and this album is much more unaffected by the outside musical world and scene. I have been talked out of my ideas I have felt passionately about before and I’ve learnt to listen to my gut. It’s internally true in a way that only comes with the various potholes you fall in, hopefully gaining experience when you climb out of them.

I think I’ve spent a lot of my artistic life possibly slightly afraid of success and visibility to be honest, so I’ve looked at it with one eye shut in some ways. I’m trying to realise my actual artistic potential these days by looking at it properly and mining far deeper than I have before and I intend to continue to develop my creative process in this way.

Dot Allison’s new album Heart-Shaped Scars is released on July 30th on SA Recordings

Buy the album on Bandcamp

Listen to the album on Spotify

*If you haven’t listened to Morning Dove White before, it really is worth it – for fans of dubby, post clubby, spacey Screamadelica-tinged sounds – have a listen here

Dot Allison shares her thoughts on first album in 12 years