Simon de Voil has made a soft landing after many years on a rough road, and that’s what the Scottish-born singer-songwriter said his new album is all about.

Titled “Trust” and completed in collaboration with seven other Jefferson County musicians, it’s set to be released on Jan. 31.

“[The album] expresses a lot about my gratitude for the things I have in my life,” de Voil said. “It’s also about my healed heart and my new relationship with life.”

BUILDING A NEW LIFE

De Voil, 42, has had many lives, throughout which his music has been woven. He’s worked with domestic violence perpetrators and with people in prisons. He lived in an abbey for three years, learning sacred music from around the world. And, “a lifetime ago,” he underwent a gender transition, a story that became the subject of a 2005 documentary called “Funny Kinda Guy.”

Now he’s an ordained interspiritual minister, youth worker, wooden-boat builder and musician living on Marrowstone Island.

Getting to this new place of contentment wasn’t easy.

More than a decade ago, de Voil said, his life was crumbling as his first marriage was falling apart.

He was still living in Scotland at the time and suddenly found himself summoned to be what he calls a boatbuilding minister.

“I didn’t know what that was,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about carpentry or boats.”

De Voil said he prayed and pondered over that calling. He finally realized that what was most important was the care and love he brought to the endeavor, rather than the details itself. Those would fall into place.

“I had to trust I would be able to rebuild a new life,” de Voil said.

So he set off to find the only other boatbuilding minister he knew of in the world – a man living in Maine – and was eventually directed to Jefferson County and to the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in 2010 to continue his craft.

During this time, de Voil was writing songs for his last album, his fifth, “The Boat Builder’ – or “music to get divorced to,” the album’s “unofficial” title – which was released in early 2011.

The songs on that album are darker and more personal, de Voil said of the pieces he wrote during that time of challenge and vulnerability.

Since then, his life has unfolded. He met an “American girl” and fell in love.

De Voil began to write the songs that would become his sixth album in the fall of 2011 when his visa had expired and he had to go back to Scotland, leaving her behind. He got the visa and came back, and the couple are now married.

“It was during this time that I wrote the title track, ‘Trust,’ he said. “The rest all flowed from there.”

“Some of the songs are about boat building, others about ministry and a few are about my sweetheart because everyone loves a good love song,” he said. “And there’s songs on there that are about people who have trusted me and told me their story – and my care for them; their care for others.”

EMOTIONAL DIARY

De Voil said his two favorite songs on his new album are “Unfolding” and “The Iona Boat Song.”

“I love ‘Unfolding’ because it holds so many memories for me,” de Voil said. One of those memories is of the first time he sang the song in Port Townsend in 2015. It was the winter solstice, and he was surrounded by people holding candles and singing. “I’ve tried to capture that memory in the recording by having six voices all singing along at the end of the song,” he said.

The “Iona Boat Song,” de Voil said, helps him feel connected with lives lost.

In 1998, eight years before de Voil went to live in an abbey on the Isle of Iona, there was a boating accident in which all the young men on board drowned. The memory of that still affects the lives of the island’s people, de Voil said, even almost a decade later. “This song is my way of letting peace come into the process of trauma and death,” he said.

It’s a traditional Scottish song about burying kings on that island where the boating accident happened. De Voil changed the lyrics to be about all those young men.

COMMUNITY

De Voil said he approaches his ministry work and boatbuilding mentorship by creating a space that welcomes people just as they are, and hopes that the music he creates, his own emotional diary, nurtures the souls of those who listen.

He works twice a week with youth from Irondale and Quilcene as part of the Community Boat Project facilitated by the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.

“Anyone who’s an underdog – I will go out of my way to be an ally for them,” he said.

He welcomes those students to be themselves while also working toward building community – it takes at least three hands to build a boat, after all, he said.

“As a transgender person, I really believe that we have to be uniquely ourselves while at the same time be part of our collective human community. That paradox is pretty much the core of what my ministry is about.”