Similarly to the Taylor Swift Eras tour, Guelph’s F. Scott is releasing an album about all the different eras of his life from the age of 16 onward.
He is releasing his new album Scotty Season in five parts in the span of three months, with the last song released on Dec. 10.
All of the songs on the album were demos he made years ago, some are over a decade old, but are revamped to fit with the music he is producing now.
Gabriel Burke who goes by the pseudonym F. Scott, is named after Burke’s father who he said he has a close relationship with.
“I mean, it's kind of cliche, but he really … represents a lot of the kind of person I want to be,” said Burke.
The songs from his album are being released slowly in a purposeful way. Doing this will have people pay attention to all the songs if they are released a couple songs at a time, he said.
“I think even Taylor Swift releases an album, and maybe some people don't listen to every single song,” said Burke.
Scotty Season is “like a chapter book of my life”. Each song represents a different part of Ontario Burke has memories from.
He grew up in Creemore and moved around Ontario, living in Toronto, Collingwood and eventually ending up in Guelph for university. He found himself back in Guelph in 2020.
During the pandemic he felt nostalgic and started rifling through old recordings of songs he made over a decade ago.
In his last year at the University of Guelph he wrote a song called The Feeling is Mutual.
“That song just really reminds me of, it's sort of a bittersweet feeling of having a ton of friends in Guelph, but everyone was … about to leave and go their separate ways,” said Burke.
Lyrics from The Feeling is Mutual exemplifying the theme, "no shows but you showed and we chose to stumble home and stumbled on a milestone but we’re miles from it now."
Most songs were made to fit the indie, folk genre but since then his musical taste and style has evolved. He used hip hop samples, trap drums and reworked the lyrics of his older songs.
“Almost like, as if I was sampling my own previous work and kind of … chopping it up,” said Burke.
Although he changed the original songs, he said the meaning of the songs stay relatively the same.
An example of this is the song Lakes, where the singer is travelling to different bodies of water. The song is about finding yourself and trying a bunch of different things in order to get there, he said.
Coming back to the song many years later, he had more maturity and could see the direction the song was going in.
His musical abilities haven’t developed too much when it comes to playing guitar, but he believes singing and building a song have.
He feels his 17-year-old self would be proud of the music he is releasing now.
A young Burke was fully himself, a little misguided, with a happy attitude and can take on anything and he misses those parts about himself.
The advice he would give to his older self would be to stop caring what other people think, go out and play your music.
F. Scott will be performing at the Bullring at the University of Guelph campus on Nov. 10 at 7:30 p.m. There will be an album listening party at the Red Brick Café on Nov. 12 at 8 p.m.
