Jacob Alon? Damn. They’ve got the voice of a tortured angel, and the darkest of lyricists. One of the funniest too. Has lived a life, and puts it’s all into song, every last drop. Bleakly beautiful bittersweet symphonies. Undresses themselves completely in telling those stories (metaphorically speaking), and it’s visceral stuff. The real deal. Scotland’s young Makar in waiting. That voice..

“I’d seen a classmate of mine play ‘Fur Elise’ on piano to the rest of the class, and I could have sworn I saw electricity coming from her fingers,” the Scottish musician remembers. Straight away, they rushed home and asked their mum to teach them a song on piano, which they played in a school talent show a few weeks later. “I didn’t win, but I did feel very validated,” they laugh. “It was a feeling of being able to command a room, and the first time in my life that I’d felt really special.”

Growing up in Fife and raised by a young single mother, Alon was surrounded by winding woods beyond the sprawling housing estates, which lacked glamour but instilled in them a determination to make their own fun. A mischievous child at school, Alon could be found sneaking into places they shouldn’t be and on the naughty list of many a teacher.

Growing up without much music in their household (“my family’s idea of musical brilliance was whoever was on The X Factor”), Alon then taught themselves guitar and singing on YouTube as a teenager after finding a dusty nylon-string guitar in a cupboard at their grandmother’s house. “I never really liked rules and I didn’t take well to the dogmatic and creatively devoid process of classical musical education,” they say. “It was quite empowering, being able to take it into my own hands.”

It was Alon’s friends at school that introduced them to Nick Drake, David Bowie, and more, and they had finally found their tribe. At school, they formed the bands The Pleaser Tweezers and TRAMADOL NATION and primarily made songs in order to make their friends laugh and take power away from some of the more toxic characters at their school. Though songwriting wasn’t taken that seriously at the time, “music became a tool with which to reclaim a bit of power over my life,” Alon says.

After feeling a lack of support and encouragement towards music from their family, Alon instead enrolled in first medical school, and then to study theoretical physics. “I thought I wanted to save the world somehow, to help people ,” Alon says. “But I think I really just wanted love and respect from my family. When I finally got it, I fell into a deep depression. That’s when I realised I can’t keep living to please other people. Despite this newfound obsession with music, Alon never considered a career in it and was actively discouraged from it. “I remember a family member telling me, as a child, I’d be a poor fool to ever become a musician. And it stuck with me.”

It was while living alone in lockdown, and after dropping out of university for the second time (“I realised I was living someone else’s dream”), they picked up the guitar again – inspired by the bewitching playing of Nick Drake and Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker – and “found the thing that brings me this all-consuming curiosity”. Through the discovery of open tunings, they played the guitar almost as if discovering it again for the first time. They might have gotten into music through a “desire to be exceptional and to get love where I didn’t feel it from the inside out,” but an eventual deeper love and safety in the format came from making choices for themselves and not anyone or anything else.

After COVID, Alon tried to move to London to start a music career, but all-too-common run-ins with shady landlords and declining mental health took the artist back up north, where they took out a bank loan and decided to live in a van and travel around Europe, before returning home to work in a series of queer nightclubs, vowing to never pay another penny to a landlord. They also became a regular at Edinburgh’s lauded folk clubs, becoming a core part of a scene that they initially saw as “aloof and impenetrable” but grew to feel truly at home in. At these nights, musicians would play anything from old Gaelic Walking songs and forgotten Scottish folk tunes to Leonard Cohen and Britney Spears. “I was looking for approval again, but in a good way this time,” they smile.

Getting songs ready to perform at the Wednesday sessions at the Captain’s Bar brought a new intensity and pace to their songwriting, as well as excavating feelings about their life and ostracisation from their family. “Suddenly, I was able to translate deep, deep things within me and pour them onto a page – and I knew that I could trust this small group of misfits – young and old – to receive them first.”

In this time, Alon also found what they describe as their “chosen family” within the local queer scene, who encouraged them to flourish. “We hold each other up and I owe so much to them,” Alon says of their community. Alon’s queerness is also embedded in every song they make, as in their entire life, and is an integral part of them as an artist.

At the time they were doing the rounds at the folk clubs, Alon was working in a small coffee shop and playing the archetypal hopeful artist, gigging any time and place people would have them and praying for a big break. The way it arrived was just as much of a fairytale. Put in touch with a manager via a band made up of Alon’s friends, the artist – a music industry sceptic – and the owner of the café they worked in held a “summit” with the manager. “He loved that he was getting grilled,” Alon laughs of his still-manager’s attempts to impress both Alon and their protective boss. The meeting went well, and the rest is history. The first taste of this extraordinary songwriter comes in the form of debut single

‘Fairy in a Bottle’, a bright and yearning acoustic masterstroke. On it, they sing of impossible, obsessive love, and of falling for unavailable people. “I met someone that I just thought was the best in the world, so much so that I didn’t let myself see any of their flaws,” Alon explains. “I put them on this giant pedestal, and was addicted to an idea of them I had created, that I thought would be the answer to all the problems and pain in my life. It’s quite a selfish thing to do.” Through this discovery of limerence – and following the energy and self-understanding that songwriting has brought them – Alon untangles their knotty, complicated feelings and lays them out with grace and beauty.

Though their first songs have flickers of Lenker, Nick Drake, Rufus Wainwright and other titans of modern-day songwriting, Alon also feels like a limitless artist. While their raw power shines through clearest with just a voice and guitar, they have the personality and panache of a pop star and has flirted with the idea of a future turn towards electronic music. In whatever sonic guise, their commitment to devastatingly honest and frank lyricism, and to pulling humour and warmth out of despair, makes them a truly special new voice.

Throughout all of the twists and turns of their childhood and young adulthood, the love they didn’t receive and then learned to give themselves, music has remained the freest and most effective way for Alon to make sense of the world. In finally sharing that wisdom and beauty with others, they make the deeply personal universal and reaffirm the unrivalled power of the form. 

Jacob Alon? Damn.