Scott is the first signing to release music via Charlie Clark’s brand new label: No Big Deal Music. Putting the spotlight on some of the finest sounds currently emerging from the Scottish Highlands and Islands, the label is pleased to introduce one of the Isle of Lewis’ most inspiring voices.
Scott C. Park makes country-tinged alt-pop about what it feels like to change. Writing songs about identity, religion, and the weirdness of human behaviour with the unique perspective his island home has nurtured, Scott’s tracks veer from the angular to the breezy and are as memorably striking as the landscape that surrounds him.
Dusky, dreamy and mercurial, Scott’s new single “The Smoke” was written in 2019 as the artist found himself waving goodbye to his student days, with the clouds of an uncertain future approaching. Touching on themes of personal paranoia and self-help to finding your way in the world, Scott elaborates of the track:
“I wrote The Smoke in summer 2019 after graduating from an arts course into the big bad world of unemployment. I’d been coming down pretty hard on myself with negative self-talk, constantly expecting myself to achieve impossible or unreasonable standards. I got myself into a particular state of mind one night where I was able to perceive this more objectively, and that’s what The Smoke is about — recognising the horrible ways you can talk to yourself and figuring out whether any of that vitriol is even true. Often it’s not.”
Returning to the Isle of Lewis as the pandemic began to take hold last year, Scott fashioned a homemade studio in the laundry room of his parents’ campsite and began to lay down the blueprint of what would become “The Smoke”.
Laden with twinkling acoustic arrangements and sleepy pedal steels courtesy of Glaswegian “pedal steel wizard” Conor Smith, Scott’s melancholy-tinted vocal is accompanied with guitars by Michael McGovern and Paul Martin on the keys. “The Smoke” was then given its final mix and master in Black Bay Studio by Pete Fletcher, where drums played by DC Macmillan completed the piece.
The single is accompanied by a stunning official video which finds Scott on his native island and follows the narrative of a protagonist struggling to break free from self-destructive behaviour patterns. “I think what we’ve ended up with is a visual poem about how it feels to be constrained by one’s own choices” says Scott. It was directed by John Murdo MacAulay, with assistance from Paul Martin and Scott’s wife Danielle Macleod.
