Sarah Jane Scouten writes songs that sound like they’ve always existed
The B.C.-raised tunesmith returns to her roots as part of the CREATE! Eastside Arts Festival
Sarah Jane Scouten.
As part of CREATE! Eastside Arts Festival, Sarah Jane Scouten performs at Strathcona Park on July 27
WHEN STIR CONNECTS with Sarah Jane Scouten via Zoom, she’s in Toronto. Canada’s most populous urban centre seems a world away from where the singer and songwriter spends most of her time; Scouten lives in a small village in the Scottish region of Dumfries and Galloway.
It’s hard not to think of Scouten as a West Coast performer, though. After all, she grew up on Bowen Island, and Vancouver label Light Organ Records has released all of her albums to date. So, how did the well-travelled musician come to be living in the Southern Uplands?
“I was living in Luxembourg City at the time, with my husband,” she says. “He’s Belgian, but he was living in Luxembourg. I didn’t really gravitate to it. I couldn’t really make Luxembourg work for me, so I was trying to finagle a way out. I got into a masters program in Scotland, so we decided to move to Scotland. We were gonna go to Glasgow, but my husband said, ‘Why don’t we move into the countryside instead, and see what that might be like?’ And so we tried that, on a whim, and it’s been five years. So it’s working pretty well.”
To amphibian-spotters, the Dumfries and Galloway region is known as a stronghold for several rare and protected species, including the Natterjack toad and the great crested newt. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) There are, however, other notable residents in the area.
“We are known to have one very famous rock star living in our village, who happens to be just like everybody else in the village, just famous,” says Scouten, who—frustratingly—declines the opportunity to be a name-dropper.
“His house would be way too easy to find,” she insists. (Wikipedia was no help with this one.)
Whatever influence proximity to the great crested newt or unnamed rock stars might have on her music is not immediately apparent when listening to Scouten’s most recent album, last year’s Turned to Gold. That could be because she recorded it in Vancouver with producer Johnny Payne (formerly of the Shilohs) and an all-Canadian cast of instrumentalists: guitarist-keyboardist Matt Kelly, drummer Leon Power, and bassist James McEleney.
Turned to Gold is something of a return to Scouten’s folk and country roots after she took a left turn with 2019’s Confessions, which featured sonic excursions into Beale Street soul (“Ballad of a Southern Midwife”) and grungy river-bottom blues (“I’m a Rattlesnake”), among other styles.
“Confessions felt like something of a departure,” Scouten admits, while praising the “very, very talented” producer, Andre Wahl. “But he did have a heavy hand, and sometimes I felt like we were playing arrangements of these songs that didn’t enormously reflect me. They were cool, and I learned things—and that’s when I grow the most as an artist, in that concentrated period when I’m making a record with other musicians. But I learned enough making Confessions that it’s probably not enormously me to be that loud or that bass-heavy.”
Payne, Scouten says, helped her pare things back to the essentials: “There aren’t a hell of a lot of guitar solos, the songs are usually quite short. He said in the studio, ‘“Eleanor Rigby” is less than three minutes long; your song doesn’t need to be more than three minutes.’”
It was a philosophy she took to heart, noting that the process of making Turned to Gold was one of “editing, slimming down, getting back to the roots of how and why I want to make music”.
Scouten cites the likes of Tom Petty and John Prine as inspirations; like them, she aims to write the kind of songs that sound as if they already existed in some parallel reality. The resolutely old-school Nashville vibe of “Is it Just the Whisky Talking?” is a prime example.
“For the longest time I swore it was a Willie Nelson song, like it wasn’t my song,” she says. “It was like, ‘No, no, no, I’ve heard this before. I’m pretty sure it’s a Willie Nelson song.’ I had to go looking through his catalogue, and I found that this song didn’t exist—and therefore it was my song.”
Scouten will be playing plenty of her songs live this summer. In fact, she’s spending the last half of July and the first few days of August back here in British Columbia, performing everywhere from Bowen Island (naturally) and Fort St. John to Victoria and Duncan.
If Scouten’s songs aren’t enough to get you out to Vancouver’s own Strathcona Park when she plays there as part of CREATE! Eastside Arts Festival—and they really ought to be—there’s an added bonus.
“I’m playing with Paul Pigat, and he’s obviously a total shredder,” she reveals. “I always really, really enjoy the way he plays my music.”
Pigat is also playing his own solo show at the Firehall Arts Centre on July 25 as part of the same festival. He might not be a Scottish rock star or a rare amphibian, but he is one of the city’s finest guitarists, so that’s arguably even better. 
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