Scented Songs: Aislin Barraclough
Have you ever wondered what moon dust smells like? It may or may not surprise you to know that, we have. And with some help from Aislin Barraclough, our #ScentedSongs star for February, we found out. Hint: it has notes of cocoa, lime, vanilla, cassie, bergamot, rose… and a few other things besides!
"I've always had really strong mental associations with my songs and the images they bring up in my mind when I sing them, so it was super cool to bring scent in as another dimension to those images. I tried to pick perfumes that tied in to either a particular lyric or just the scene that I'm imagining when I play.”
We only met Aislin a few days before her gig…
"I didn't know which songs I was going to play before I went into the shop to choose perfumes! It was all a bit last minute which I think made it more exciting, and I had to think off the top of my head - I was struggling to even remember what songs I'd even written! The perfumes certainly provided a lot of inspiration with their backstories and unique scents. It was like smushing together a puzzle and seeing what pieces can go where and what you can get away with (in a good way!)… it was really cool to get the opportunity to mix it up a bit and add that extra dimension.”
Please let this ethereal voice drift you away…
The Distance - a sonnet (paired with Love)
"I loved using Love in my sonnet and Furze in How It Goes because they painted an amazing floral, summer's day kind of feel which I think really set the tone for those pieces.”
We gave a scented version of Aislin’s sonnet to everyone that came.
How to Lose a Friend (paired with All Good Things)
The name of the song says it all - All Good Things matched deliciously well with this subject that just about all of us have been through.
Pixie Dust (paired with Devil’s Nightcap)
When we heard “and the woodsmoke’s clouding my eyes” within in the lyrics of this magical song, we instinctively knew we had to create Devil’s Nightcap smoke for it. Instinctive because, Aislin had the exact same thought. It’s funny how scent can make the mind work!
Planet Earth (paired with Superworldunknown)
“For Planet Earth, which is about space, we got to use the Superworld dust, which everyone blew into the air and it created the most awesome twinkle in the air, just like outer space.”
Only to Pieces (paired with Smell of Freedom)
As this song had such a sensitive concept, with the refugee crisis being at its core, we felt the most appropriate way to scent it was to place a drop of Smell of Freedom directly onto everyone’s hands.
How it Goes (paired with Furze)
When Aislin told us this song had ‘beachy vibes’, we immediately thought of Furze. Turned out, it worked perfectly!
After getting Aislin to smell all of our scents, we thought it was only fair she bestowed on us her own scent memories.
"There's one particular medicine, I think it was some kind of cough syrup, that I used to have as a young child that was sugary sweet and definitely orange-y. I don't know what it was called and I've never found it since but very occasionally I catch a similar scent on the air and it takes me right back, it's really nostalgic. I also can't get enough of the smell of freshly mown grass in the summer, or of my boyfriend's hair. If I was stood over a steaming cauldron of Amortentia, those three things are what I'd smell.”
Aislin is a beautiful example of songwriting and we urge you to go hear her non-scented sets, too!
“I wish I had some mega exciting gig to annonuce, or that I could say I'm going on tour with Taylor Swift... I'm currently at uni with my head buried in notebooks, hunched over the piano writing a lot of material, so gigging's been taking a backseat for a bit, but I'm excited to get back into it.
If you're interested in what I do, I've got a website, you can check out my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter @helloaislin where I write a lot of angry capital lettered tweets about how dumb the world is, and tell you incredibly mundane stories about my life, and occasionally update you about my music. It'll be a blast.”