Biography

“You put your whole being into your music, don’t you?
I felt your passion, I understood you!”

These simple words were spoken to me after performing at an Open Mic Night in a pub on the outskirts of Ipswich in the autumn of 2005. I had just graduated from Durham University and had returned to my home town. My plan, some may say idealistic, was to work for a year, earn some money and head to London (where everybody knows the streets are paved with gold) because all I wanted to do with my life was to move people I had never met. Just like the lady at the bar.

Music has always been a part of my life but my songwriting really began to take shape when I spent a year abroad as part of my degree. I still can’t quite believe that at the age of 19 I jumped on a plane to Pisa to spend the next six months of my life in a Tuscan village in the middle of nowhere. I ended up staying for nine. I encountered so many new and changing emotions there, from loneliness to a feeling of belonging, from incomprehension to understanding, from falling in love to the pain of having to leave it behind, and for the first time I felt an innate need to translate them into music. Ever since, everything that has moved me has found its way into song.

Back in late 2005, I began to play more seriously at local acoustic nights, in particular at ‘Suffolk Songwriters’ where I met BBC Radio Suffolk’s Stephen Foster. He invited me into the studio to play on his Drivetime show and shortly after, introduced me to Pat Grueber at Gemini Studios in Ipswich. In March 2006, we began working on my debut album, ‘Till Angels Fall’. I released it at a packed out Ipswich Town Hall in July 2007. Working on the production of the album with Stephen and Pat, along with some great musicians including Mark Flanagan, guitarist with Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, taught me such a lot.

Since the album’s release I have moved to London to continue learning my trade, now out of the studio and on the stage. I have performed over a hundred solo gigs in locations ranging from back rooms of pubs, to festival stages, to world-renowned music venues. Although the dream of making a living from my music remains elusive for now, I have found nothing but gold here; in the friendships I have made with musicians I have met along the way, in the opportunities given to me to play my music to appreciative audiences and in those people I have never met who I have moved. The fleeting pull of a ‘proper’ job and a ‘proper’ salary will never be enough to tempt me away from life as a musician and, for as long as it is fulfilling, this is where you will find me.

Contact: info@hannahscott.co.uk