Sunday Sessions: Find Hope

Advent is a season of preparation. It is also a season of contrast.

Maybe Advent is not a season on your calendar.

Still, this time in December leading up to the turning of the year holds looking forward and looking back, community and solitude, excitement of the new and cherishing of the well known.

Emily Smith brings in all these aspects of the winter season to her song Find Hope.

There’s humor, respect, and friendship in the song alongside longing, trust, and as the title would suggest, hope.

Quite a lot going on in one short and memorable song -- well worth listening more than once and perhaps learning to sing along.

If you’ve been listening without watching the video, have a watch, too. Emily is joined by her husband and musical partner Jamie McClennan and their friend Anna Massie. along with a cameo from a baby who would not sleep (and by the way is now thriving in primary school...).

Emily wrote the song, which is recorded on he album Songs for Christmas.

Emily Smith comes from Dumfries and Galloway in the southwest of Scotland. She won Scotland’s Young Tradtional Musician of the Year not long after graduatiing from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now known as the Royal Conservatoire) in Glasgow.

Since then she has torued across Scotland and many other places with her music. When she’s not doing that she works in community music education projects back in Dumfries and Galloway, where she and Jamie are raising their family.

Another song from Emily’s Songs for Christmas album, a lively one this, is Little Raod to Bethlehem. It is often named as one of the best loved Christmas songs in the UK, Margaret Rose wrote the words and Michael Head wrote the music in the 1940s.

You may also wish to see

Emily Smith’s web site

Echoes, another one of my favorite albums from Emily Smith

An album from Emily and Jamie in which they explore the songs of Robert Burns

Sunday Sessions: Walk the Road

Sunday Sessions: Evergreen

If you’d like to make a one off gift of support, you can do that through Ko-Fi