It’s fair to say that Donald Trump is not a fan of singer-songwriter Karine Polwart.

“Cover Your Eyes”, the first track of Polwart’s most recent album, Traces, would cause the flamboyant tycoon to combust. The song concerns one of his most controversial property developments—the conversion of a previously pristine and protected area of the sand-dune coastline just north of Aberdeen, Scotland, into the Trump International Golf Links.

“It involved the Scottish government overruling the local authority’s decision not to allow planning permission,” says Polwart, on the line from Pathhead, near Edinburgh. “Over the past eight years it’s proved one of the thorniest issues in Scotland around what constitutes an infrastructure project that’s in the public interest. The development destroyed a site of special scientific interest, promised great economic benefit to the area that hasn’t manifested, and above all involved treating many of the local residents where the golf course is located with great indignity, with harassment and contempt. There’s a documentary called You’ve Been Trumped that exposes the corporate machinations, and caused a furore here.”

Polwart is home for a few hours in the middle of a 10-day composers’ lab and residency program at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She’s a busy artist, with a rapidly growing reputation for crafting contemporary folksongs with a strong social conscience, akin to short stories in their subtlety. She has music in two films at the fest, directed by friends of hers.

“One is a follow-up by Anthony Baxter to You’ve Been Trumped, called A Dangerous Game,” Polwart explains. “It’s a global exposé of the corporate realms of golf, basically—golf as an industry, and the way in which these developments happen around the world. I’m also interviewed in it. The other is an animation called Sea Front by Claire Lamond based on archival letters from the First World War. Most of the soldiers were from the Black Watch regiment in Fife, so I’ve used four pipe tunes as the forms for the score. It’s a really beautiful little piece of work, all 3-D puppet animation. That was a real challenge, but a joy to do.”

Polwart’s studies, and her work before she emerged as a full-time writer and musician 14 years ago, are still very present in her compositions. “If I look at the kind of arc of my career, it looks like three disparate elements. I was a philosophy teacher, and I specialized in community-based philosophy, and then I was a children’s-rights worker for Women’s Aid, which is a national domestic-abuse charity in Scotland, for seven years. And then I became a musician and a songwriter.

“They look like three unconnected things,” Polwart continues. “But in my head they’re very connected. The work with Women’s Aid obviously dealt with some of the worst aspects of human behaviour, and I guess I’m a bit obsessed with how people treat each other, what the issues are that underpin that, and the emotions within. It wasn’t all dark work—it was also very inspiring, because so many families I was working with were leaving abuse and making better lives for themselves. I met some amazing people, so there’s definitely a hopeful bent in my writing. Although a lot deals with quite heavy subjects, I always try to leaven that with general optimism. And where my interest in philosophy and critical thinking comes through is that I’m not interested in preaching to anyone, but in provoking thought.”

Karine Polwart plays a Stage 2 showcase at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival on Sunday (July 20).