Inside Folk Volume 1

Love folk music? Liza Mulholland invites you Inside Folk to share an insight into her experience as a contemporary Scottish musician. Drawing on more than twenty-five years in folk music, she reflects on elements of a typical year - performing, teaching, travelling, launching an album, juggling gigs and children, listening, composing - and offers a heartwarming illustration of the joys, delights and challenges of playing music for a living.

Packed with humour, anecdote and thoughtful observation, Notes from a Scottish musician's year, the first volume in the Inside Folk series, is an entertaining exploration of Scottish music. Whether ceilidhing in the hollow trunk of a giant redwood at Alasdair Fraser's fiddle camp, teaching at Fèis or playing with her band, Liza dances us through a year of her musical life and many past adventures.

With a background of a large Glasgow-Irish family of musicians and singers on her father's side and the Gaelic song tradition of her mother's Hebridean heritage, it was perhaps inevitable she would feel the strongest pull towards folk music. Learning piano from a young age and, later, accordion, playing and writing music became life-long passions, and her love of her subject sings off every page.

Having played on more than a dozen albums, had her compositions used in film and video, and collaborated with numerous artistes, Liza writes from a place of extensive knowledge and understanding. Across the Inside Folk series she uses her own wide and varied experience to shine a little light on the everyday business of making music. Her enthusiasm is infectious, so don't be surprised if you find yourself dusting off that old fiddle you've been meaning to get back to for years!