IT’S an interesting question: just how much of North Uist is made up of water? “I can’t remember the exact percentage”, Julie Fowlis concedes, “but it’s something surprising. When you fly over it you see it’s actually mostly water, or more than half water, with all these lochans and everything around you”.

Later, she emails a photograph taken by a friend, on board a light aircraft over the east side of North Uist: it confirms that more than half of the island is indeed made up of water.

Fowlis, who spent her first 13 years on the island, is well placed to talk about the lasting impact of the sea and the coast on Scottish culture - an influence that is frequently invisible to those of us who spend our daily lives in the urban, over-populated central belt. “I maybe wasn’t aware how how deep that connection runs within me. It’s only something you begin to notice with age. That feeling of growing up beside the water, that feeling of being drawn to either the sea or the water-side or to lochs. As I get older I realise that I’m at my happiest, I’m at my calmest, when I am beside the water. There is something very deep and personal about that.”

She can only only guess at the extent to which “the idea of water” has shaped the content of songs and has even influenced the way they sound; “I’m sure that there’s something deeper in there than we’re perhaps aware of. I mean, we hear bird songs, and birds from the coast and the waters… Their sound is often mimicked in songs, so why wouldn’t the sound of the sea, melodically or rhythmically, come through in our songs sometimes too?”

Fowlis will star in a Celtic Connections event, Coastal Connections, on the afternoon of January 18 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. It will feature new and established acts “along with a few international surprises”, and film, story-telling and workshops. It’s described as “a unique opportunity to celebrate the rich heritage and diverse culture of the coasts and waters of Scotland”.

Also on the bill are Tiree-based Skerryvore, Oban-founded Capercaillie, the Hebridean super-group, Daimh, a musical contribution from Ferry Tales, a forthcoming production from the National Theatre of Scotland, and an immersive performance, Launch!, setting footage from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s film archive to live music. The whole event has been funded through EventScotland’s International Programme supporting Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters 2020.

“It features people you probably would see at Celtic Connections but the idea of shaping a day around coastal connections is a lovely way of doing it”, says Fowlis. “It gives all the artists a focus on what they perform as well. Having said that, in the case of a lot of the artists on the programme, much of their music is so naturally influenced by coasts and water and sea-faring routes. That connection is there naturally anyway; it makes up so much of the heart and soul of the Gaelic music, certainly.

“The one thing I have noticed from islanders - Orkney, or Shetland, or wherever - is that all our stories and our tunes and our songs are inspired by similar stories, and we might be telling these stories through the medium of Gaelic or through the medium of fiddle tunes, but the content is all the same, and that is the glue that binds us”.

She’s struck by the notion that islanders, surrounded by so many different sea-routes, might thus be open to travel and myriad cultural influences. She recalls one sea-related project she was involved in, when she was starting out: the Atlantic Movement project, commissioned for the Stornoway festival, HebCelt, and featuring seven female Celtic singers from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cape Breton. “I was by far the youngest of the women there but we spent an inspirational week together. Inevitably, many of the songs I learned have connections to the sea. That set me off on a path of learning and collaborating with other artists. I learned so much from these women”, she says. “It starts the process of storytelling that brings you back to the thing that connects us”.

It has been observed of Fowlis that she changed the face of Scottish music by singing almost entirely in Gaelic yet becoming an international success. She crosses genres with fluency. She has collaborated with everyone from Nicola Benedetti to Mary Chapin Carpenter; she has won numerous awards; she sang live at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Ryder Cup to a TV audience of 500 million, and two years later, watched by a global TV audience in excess of one billion, she sang live at the opening ceremony of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Just over two years ago, she released, to some of the best reviews of her career, her fifth studio album, alterum. Its Latin-derived title indicated a subtle change of musical direction, a certain otherworldliness. One critic noted that it explored “supernatural places and spaces – an orphic world of selkies, kelpies and whispering birds”. As she continued to develop her broad repertoire of Gaelic song, another critic wrote, “alterum succeeds in exploring connections with other languages, cultures and art forms that enrich her music even further”.

‘We put a lot of work into it at the time,” Fowlis says now, “and we felt really ready to tackle it. Sometimes you feel under pressure to put something out, but we felt really involved in that album. It was really enjoyable, and we did it all from home, too. It’s just about time for another album, really. We’re just at the beginnings of all of that at the moment”.

Fowlis and her musicians spend three or four weeks in the States every year. This year, they were there twice, the more recent visit taking in New York, Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire and Utah, as well as Toronto. On Facebook she posted that she had taken her two young daughters to Walt Disney World in Orlando. “I even bumped into my old friend Merida”, she added, an amused reference to the Oscar-winning Disney/Pixar hit animation Brave, on which she sang two songs, Touch the Sky and Into the Open Air.

Last March she guested at a concert at New York’s celebrated Carnegie Hall, a venue which over the decades had been graced by everyone from Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd to Tchaikovsky and Arthur Rubinstein. “That was great,” she marvels. “It’s a long way to go for a couple of songs, but when you get asked to play in Carnegie Hall … I moved a few mountains to make it happen but it was a great experience. When you stand on that stage you really get a sense of everybody who has been there before you. It’s incredible. It’s a wee bit like the Royal Albert Hall in that way, in terms of the actual room. We have been lucky enough to played bigger rooms than those, but there’s just something about playing a venue like that. I felt it in the Albert Hall and I felt it in the Carnegie Hall - you’re walking along the corridors, which are lined with images of all the amazing people who have played there. By the time you actually get onto the stage”, she adds with a laugh, “you’re half-terrified, and wondering what on earth you’re doing there”.

*Coastal Connections tickets (£25.85 (adult), £13.20 (child)) are on sale online and from the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 0141-353 8000. celticconnections.com. Julie Fowlis’s website is at juliefowlis.com

Life and Loves; Julie Fowlis

What is the last book you read?

I’m currently reading Spring, by Ali Smith.

And what was the last film you watched?

The Hobbit, at home with the family.

What is your favourite holiday destination?

I love visiting different parts of Spain, the North West especially, but nothing beats going home to the beaches of North Uist.

Who (dead or alive) would be your ideal dinner-party guests?

Joni Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Billy Connolly and Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, a Scottish Gaelic poet.