Julie Fowlis is a Scottish folk singer and multi-instrumentalist who sings primarily in Scottish Gaelic. Fowlis grew up on North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, in a gaelic speaking community. Her mother was a Gaelic-speaking islander from a family of fishermen and crofters which originated on the remote island of Heisgeir, while her father hailed originally from Pitlochry on mainland Scotland. She attended the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and studied the oboe and the English horn, earning a B.A. in Applied Music in 2000. After university Fowlis attended the Gaelic-language college Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the Isle of Skye to improve her Gaelic and formally study traditional Scottish music. Following that she returned to Ross-shire, taking a job with the organisation Fèis Rois in Dingwall as music development officer between 2001 and 2004.
Fowlis had been involved in singing, piping and dancing since she was a child. She began her professional music career as a member of the Scottish group Dòchas which included Shetland fiddle player Jenna Reid. Billed as “a young and dynamic all-female band playing traditional music from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Ireland,” the band released its first album in 2002. The group was nominated for the Best Up and Coming Artist/Band award at the inaugural Scots Trad Music Awards in 2003 and won the award in 2004. Fowlis herself was nominated for the Gaelic Singer of the Year award the same year. In 2005, Fowlis also began to strike out on her own. In the same year she released her first solo album Mar a Tha Mo Chridhe (As My Heart Is). The album was remastered and re-released in 2012.
Her second solo album Cuilidh was released in March 2007, becoming a worldwide top-seller in the Traditional and World Music charts. Her album is a collection of songs from her native North Uist. Doorley played bouzouki on nearly all the tracks and co-produced the album with Fowlis. She is also accompanied by John Doyle, Ross Martin, John McCusker, Iain MacDonald, Kathleen MacInnes, and many others. Fowlis won the Horizon award at the 2006 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, won Folk Singer of The Year at the 2008 awards and was nominated for the Folk Singer of the Year award at the 2007 awards. She appeared on Later With Jools Holland.
In 2008, Julie recorded an album with long-time friends and collaborators Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Ross Martin and husband Éamonn Doorley. The album, entitled Dual, was released in October 2008. Fowlis also toured extensively around Scotland, Ireland, central Europe and America and launched both her solo albums while on tour. Fowlis recorded a Scottish Gaelic cover of the Beatles “Blackbird” to celebrate the anniversary of the Beatles’ ‘The White Album’. In April 2009, Fowlis announced that she would begin recording her third studio album in May and that she would preview tracks from the project on her May 2009 tour of England. In August 2009, she announced the album’s title, Uam (Scottish Gaelic for ‘From Me’). The album was released in October.
In September 2011 she performed the hour-long Heisgeir at the Phipps Hall in Beauly. The piece, half-documentary, half-arthouse meditation, celebrated the history, landscape and legend of the now-uninhabited Heisgeir, as part of the six “Blas 2011” concert series. In 2012, Fowlis contributed to the Pixar film Brave with the songs “Touch the Sky” and “Into the Open AIr”, sung in the off-screen musical thoughts of the lead character Merida. Her fourth studio album, Gach Sgeul (Every Story), was released in February 2014. Her fifth, Alterum, came out in October 2017.
