The Oak

I was about three quarters of the way through writing and recording 'Time In The Trees', when a scrap of paper fell out of a notebook I was leafing through. There were scribbled notes from a conversation with my friend Jamie Macrae, who is from the Highlands of Scotland.

I realised that this note was before I had decided to spend a year writing about being in the trees, but had completely forgotten this starting point. It was an archaeological artefact, showing what I’d wanted to do all along. I remembered being hugely impressed at the time by the way that Jamie felt connected to the stones in his land, and it showed in his music. I wanted to do something similar, but with trees.

Once I’d found the notes, the whole song took about an hour, including having a cup of tea with Carla, my co-singer and neighbour. We just started chatting about the notes and the song wrote itself. 

It also helped that I walked past a lonely old oak most days, wondering how it got there, which found its way into the song. And when we came to make the video, we went back to film that tree, and as luck would have it, it was a beautifully atmospheric morning in the mist.