SCOTTISH folk singer Kaela Rowan will open her 2017 tour at the Black Swan Folk Club, Peasholme Green, York, on February 12.

She will be joined by Shooglenifty guitarist Ewan MacPherson and percussionist James Mackintosh, co-producer of her second solo album, The Fruited Thorn, a haunting collection of traditional Scottish and Irish ballads sung in Gaelic, Scots and English. Released last August, it earned Kaela a nomination for Gaelic Singer of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards last month.

Kaela was the lead singer in influential Scottish band Mouth Music, making four albums with them in the 1990s. She has recorded and performed too with the Eliza Carthy Band; Karen Matheson; the Mike McGoldrick Band; Nusa; Anna Murray; the Loveboat Big Band and the Bevvy Sisters and she linked up with Shooglenifty for their seventh album, The Untied Knot. After touring extensively with the Shoogles throughout 2015, she will record with the band again in 2017 in India.

Picking out her her career high spots so far, Kaela nominates singing with the great Dick Gaughan. "That was definitely a real highlight, seeing as I ate, slept and breathed his A Handful Of Earth album in my early singing days," she says.

"Performing on the main stage at the Woodford Festival in Australia just before the bells on Hogmanay 2014/15 was incredible. The venue is a huge natural amphitheatre in the middle of the Queensland rainforest, and I sang a Gaelic air while Bunna Lawrie, an Australian Aboriginal singer and musician, performed an ancient fire ritual in front of a crowd of 40,000 people to bring in the new year; a real honour and such an amazing atmosphere."

Kaela has performed at the Jodhpur Riff Festival four times. "Every one of my trips to Rajasthan has been amazing, from our first performance in 2012, a dawn concert on a dais overlooking the city of Jodhpur, from darkness to sunrise, with the city slowly waking below, to Shooglenifty's collaborative main-stage concerts with the local manganiyar classical folk musicians in 2014 and 2015.

"Our first rehearsal with the Rajasthanis was unforgettable, as when those guys sing or play, they do so with incredible passion, and it's a really powerful, almost overwhelming experience to be sitting in the midst of them in while they're in full swing,” she says.

"Looking back to my younger days too, just being in a session with the great Glenuig musicians Iain and Allan Macdonald was a pretty special experience. Having been a huge fan of his since my Glenuig days, a total life highlight was meeting James Taylor, and spending a couple of hours blethering with him in a van en route to Edinburgh Airport. To my delight, we got stuck in a traffic jam and I had the opportunity to sing some puirt [Scottish traditional song] into his left ear."

Tickets for Kaela's Black Swan Folk Club and Please Please You-promoted concert cost £11 from wegottickets.com/event/383392 or £12.50 on the door from 7.30pm.