Behind the Song: Karine Polwart’s Reflection on “Travel These Ways” at This Year’s Show

We are honoured that Karine Polwart, took the time to share her thoughts on what it was like to hear her song “Travel These Ways” ring out at our Heroes Who Made Us Show. Read her reflection and feel the passion in every word. 

Hearing the massed cast of The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo sing one of my songs into the city night as the chorus lyrics unfurl in huge cursive script across the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle is something I could never have imagined as a songwriter - and something I’ll never forget.      

The sense of collective unity that it evoked is particularly resonant for me, because the song - Travel These Ways - began its life at a time of profound societal disconnection and isolation.   

In 2020, I was approached by Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing organisation, to write two new songs for its Dementia Singing Inclusion Network. During the earliest COVID lockdown, Luminate identified a need amongst people living at home with dementia to continue singing, and to not feel alone with this, at a time of public health emergency when singing itself was deemed one of the riskiest of all shared human activities.  

My writing brief was simple. The songs should be hooky. They should include concrete, visual imagery, which is easier to hang onto if you live with cognitive limitations. And they should be uplifting to sing. Beyond this, it felt important to me as a writer to foster an explicit sense of connection through the lyrics, and to intimate, in the mire of pandemic loneliness, anxiety and grief, that “this too shall pass”.    

The chorus came quickly:  

Wherever we go  

Wherever we bide   

Whatever the wind and weather  

Wherever we go  

Wherever we bide  

We’ll travel these ways together  

A sense of travelling together, and being alongside one another, is bone deep important to me. And the songs I’ve learned and written and sung over decades as a musician from within Scotland’s folk tradition are a huge part of this. Scottish folk music is essentially collaborative and communal. It involves shared repertoire, generous listening, and an invitation to be part of something bigger than yourself. I’ve experienced the network of folk clubs and festivals, archives and ceilidhs, teaching projects and pub sessions, as places that foster the kind of understanding and love of our own place, music and cultural history that makes room for others, that welcomes in rather than excludes.  

Our folk tunes and songs have long had work to do. They are lullabies and wedding dances, remembrances and laments, stories of oppression and resistance, comfort and love. This year’s 75th anniversary Tattoo The Heroes Who Made Us, had its own work to do too. It was an enormous labour of gratitude and dignification, a celebration of both those who’ve gone before and those whose ongoing work on our collective behalf is rendered invisible. To have Travel These Ways incorporated into that narrative is an honour, because there’s no more meaningful job for any one of my songs than to embody a spirit of community and care.  

I first recorded Travel These Ways in November 2020, in a wee studio just outside Edinburgh. It was the first time that pandemic year, that I’d been permitted to make music in a room with another musician, in this case my friend and neighbour, the pianist Dave Milligan. I found it overwhelming to feel the notes of the piano bouncing off the cells of my own body in real time, because singing and music making is such a fundamental part of my life, not only as a profession, but as a way of being with friends and family, a way of offering solace and solidarity to others, a way of feeling alive.   

Travel These Ways lends its name now to a beautiful free resource, via Luminate’s Dementia Inclusive Singing Network. It exists online, as a package of guided audio and video resources to sing along with, if it’s something you or someone you love could use in your own lives.   

As a songwriter, once you let a song go into the world, you lose control over where it lands and what it means.  I’ve heard from couples who’ve walked up the aisle to Travel These Ways and families who’ve buried loved ones to it. And dozens and dozens of choirs across the UK breathe life into every week. Huge thanks to Sing in the City community choirs and the singers of Edinburgh’s Ukrainian Choir for giving my song voice each night alongside the pipers, drummers and dancers. I’ll never forget the sound of a thousand massed voices offering it up like a prayer to the Edinburgh sky, a prayer that we all travel these ways together, not alone. Goodness, I really hope so. 

Travel These Ways is available on Karine Polwart and Dave Milligan’s 2021 album Still As Your Sleeping (Hudson Records). Follow Karine on:   

Facebook - karinepolwart  

Instagram - @karinepolwart  

Substack - Pockets of Wind Resistance