Once upon a time there was a little girl called Kim. Her parents played her Mozart when she was in the womb. Kim begged to learn the piano at three, and was impatient as she waited for her hands to grow. When her hands were big enough, she played on the piano that was in the house her dad and mum had built, and had a really special piano teacher called Mrs Newlands, who helped her to learn about music and words and how they could work together. She started listening to Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega and Tori Amos and thought she would like to write songs, too. So she started to write. She learned about lots of things at school, university and college, about reading, writing, playing music, learning and children. And she kept writing songs. More and more, she enjoyed performing her songs, and liked the way songs could help her to talk to people she didn’t know, because she was shy about talking to people in the regular ways. One day, as if by magic, a song that Kim wrote (called “Thaw”) was picked as a winner in a Scottish songwriting competition (called Burnsong). It was a really lucky thing that happened to Kim. The prize was a week writing with other songwriters! Kim made lots of new friends, heard great artists performing in Dumfries and found her songwriting was getting much better. The next year, Burnsong invited Kim to take part in a SongHouse, living for a week in a secret location with lots of songwriters she really admired, including Karine Polwart, Emma Pollock, Chris Difford and Future Pilot AKA. Kim was so excited that she got up first every morning and went to bed last every night of the SongHouse. She wrote lots of songs and performed them in two concerts at the end of the week. After the SongHouse was over, Kim found that she kept writing lots of songs like she did in the SongHouse. She was really happy when Karine Polwart performed the song they wrote together on the Hogmanay Show 2006 with Paolo Nutini on BBC Scotland. Karine also asked Kim to write piano arrangements for her traditional album, The Fairest Floo’er. Kim was very excited because she had been a very big fan of Karine’s for some time! Mattie Foulds liked Kim’s songs and offered to produce her debut album. He asked his brother Jamie to engineer, and loads of great musicians to play. The Scottish Arts Council gave Kim support towards the costs of recording the album. Lots of other people helped, too. Kim set up her own label, quietly fantastic music. Her talented friends helped her. She was really happy with her debut album, Butterflies and Broken Glass. She felt proud of the songs and hoped that lots of people would like them.