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Never mind all that alien abduction business: in days gone by it was the fairy folk you had to watch out for, and even in the 21st century, such beliefs still cast their long shadow. In the Border country, for example, a 15 minute drive will take you from the Rhymer's Stone to Tamlane's Well - both landmarks associated with famous ballads of fairy abduction, while near Aberfoyle, ribbons and messages still bedeck the "cloutie tree" that marks where the Rev Robert Kirk, chronicler of the little people, is supposed to have left the human world to join his "true flock" in 1692.Such otherworldly matters have long fascinated harpist and singer Rachel Newton, clearly a musician-in-demand, given that recent months have seen her perform with Jim Sutherland's Struileag epic at Glasgow Green as well as touring with the Emily Portman Trio, the Shee, Karine Polwart and the Elizabethan Sessions.Amid this hectic schedule, she has managed to record her second album, Changeling (Shadowside Records), which takes as its theme the old belief that fairies could abduct a human child, leaving in its place an unco craitur known as a changeling.The sequence of traditional and self-composed songs in Gaelic and English was premiered as a "New Voices" commission at Celtic Connections in January and for the recording she has re-assembled the cast, including Lauren MacColl on fiddle, Su-a-Lee on cello and musical saw, backing vocals from Corrina Hewat and a guest spot from singer Adam Holmes.It's a suitably beguiling mix, ranging from traditional material such as the Gaelic fairy lullaby Mo Chubhrachan and the Childe ballad The Queen of Elfland's Nourice to a setting of the poem The Fairy Man by the late Sidney Goodsir Smith, with Adam Holmes intoning the song as Su-a-Lee's saw creates an eldritch whistle that would do justice to a Twilight Zone soundtrack.Instrumentals range from the fast-driving reel Up the Lum (which is where a changeling goes if you call his bluff) to the beautiful Three Days, in which Newton joins fiddle and cello on viola, the title reflecting a custom in which village women would stay in a house with a new baby for three days to make sure neither mother or child were assailed by supernatural forces."I've always been interested in otherworldly things, fairy tales and their connection to folk songs," the Edinburgh-based Newton tells me, speaking from the Sidmouth Folk Festival, where she was appearing with the Furrow Collective, which involves her, the Emily Portman Trio and Scots singer Alasdair Roberts, "especially working with Emily because she's really into that as well and writes her own songs about it."My first album was very much a case of spewing up everything I'd wanted to record, the way you do with a first album, and I'd called it The Shadow Side because it turned out quite dark. I hadn't really been aware until then, I suppose, that I had that interest in the darker side of fairy stories. For my second album I wanted to do something more specific. I'd worked in theatre and with Emily and with Karine - people who really think about their subjects, and I wanted something I could really work with as a theme."Newton, who is 28, immersed herself in supernatural lore and songs, using sources as diverse as Margaret Bennett's book Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave and the Tobar an Dualchais online song and story archive.In the past, she notes, people believed in the existence of fairies just as they did birds and other natural things. "It was very much part of life - all the things you had to do, so as not to annoy the fairy folk."As ever with the ballads, even supernatural songs could conceal a nub of human truth. Newton suggests that issues such as still births, abnormalities or learning difficulties might be explained by saying the child had been "taken".Another aspect she hadn't expected emerged in The Queen of Elfan's Nourice, in which it is the mortal mother who is spirited away to nurse a fairy child - possibly, she speculates, an explanation of post-natal depression.In the meantime, she continues to appear with Portman, the Furrow Collective and the Shee (whose flautist, Lilias Kinsman-Blake drew the artwork for Changeling), before touring both sides of the Border next month in her own right, to promote the new album - not quite spirited away, but definitely hard to pin down.For tour details see www.rachelnewtonmusic.com