How Calum Scott Landed a Posthumous Whitney Houston Collab for ‘Avenoir’ (Exclusive)

On the heels of releasing his third studio album, Calum Scott can confidently say that he’s never been prouder of a body of work he’s created.

“I think it’s because it came at a time when I was doing a lot of reflecting, thinking a lot about the last 10 years,” the U.K.-born singer tells PEOPLE over Zoom. “I finally believed in myself, finally gave myself credit for where I’m at and what I’ve achieved, and tried to hush the imposter syndrome.”

The result is Avenoir (out Friday, Oct. 10), a powerful, 14-track project that helped Scott, 36, reflect on the wild ride he’s had in the music industry over the last decade. “When I started to relate Avenoir to my last 10 years in this career, I couldn’t have predicted any of it,” he explains.

The album also prominently features a posthumous duet with Whitney Houston in collaboration with the Houston estate for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and is the first time the late music legend’s original vocal stems have ever been used.

“Working with that voice and listening to her and the song, I wanted to do what I do best and strip it back to its bare essentials,” says Scott of the track.

In an interview with PEOPLE, the Britain’s Got Talent alum opens up about working with the Houston estate, writing music about wanting to become a parent and collaborating with country artist Lauren Alaina.

PEOPLE: Tell me the story behind the title of your new album.

CALUM SCOTT: So Avenoir feels like the proudest body of work I’ve made. I was doing a bit of a doom scroll through social media, I came across this word “Avenoir.” I looked into it, and it is from a book called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. And John’s take on “Avenoir” is the desire to see your memories in advance. He says we move through life like a rower moves. That we move forward, but we can only see backwards.

It is a really interesting concept, and it really got me thinking about everything. I mean, I used to work in a grocery store, so for me to be now going on a third world tour with a third album, having a duet with Whitney Houston, having just toured in stadiums with Ed Sheeran and sang for the King [Charles III] in his back garden… there’s craziness that’s happened to me in the last 10 years, and I didn’t see any of it coming. Avenoir made me realize that actually not knowing what’s around the corner is the magic of it all anyway.

PEOPLE: Why was this the album you needed to make?

SCOTT: This is the album I needed to make in order to believe in myself more. The first two albums were very much me trying to find my feet. I’d never made an album in my life, but I knew the thread of what I wanted to do. I knew what my superpower was on that [first] album, and it was to hit people in the feels and to sing those songs that have such emotive language. It was the same with the second album. I dived into more personal issues like my mental health and gave a little bit more of myself away in that second album.

This third album, I feel like I just reached a point in my life where I felt more content than I’ve ever felt and more confident and more free. And what has excited me is that I think album four is the album I really want to make.

PEOPLE: You have a posthumous Whitney Houston collaboration on your album. How did that come together?

SCOTT: It came by the stars aligning by chance. We were on tour with Ed Sheeran last year, and I got an email from a manager saying, “Oh, we’ve received a song for your album from the writers of ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’” And I was like, “Oh, sick, can I listen to the song.” And we stayed in touch and they said, “Oh, we wrote ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody.’ You should do a cover of us. I’m sure that would sound amazing. I’d love to hear your voice on it.” So, when I was doing our sets on the Ed Sheeran run, instead of going from the “Dancing on My Own” chorus, I went into “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” It was so fun watching everybody come alive. That song is known so well, globally, that every time it created this ripple and everybody was into it and singing the song back.

PEOPLE: You were hand-selected by the estate, correct? What does that mean?

SCOTT: The video made to where it was the Houston estate. They thought it was incredible, and they wanted to send the vocal to us to do an official duet. But this is the first time that they’d ever done that. So, it was an incredible honor to use Whitney’s vocal like this for the very first time.

PEOPLE: What was your approach to taking on this song that’s so huge?

SCOTT: It was intimidating. When you’ve got a voice like Whitney’s to work with it, it’s terrifying because she was such an incredible artist. I think, for me, I did what I do best, which is taking a pop song and making it sound depressing, and I found a way to just reveal the lyric. It’s the same thing I did in “Dancing On My Own.” I found that both of those two songs are beautifully written and tragic in the storytelling, I suppose, in some ways, of that unrequited love and longing.

PEOPLE: Did you have a personal connection to Whitney’s music growing up?

SCOTT: I’ve been a Whitney fan forever. My mum used to play Whitney’s music in the car to us all the time. The thing with Whitney’s voice that is so incredibly impressive is that you take her voice out of that production and you put it into a ballad format, where it’s just strings and keys, it’s got nowhere to hide. And her voice lends just as perfectly to that style as it did the production. And that meant that working with her voice was, in some ways, quite easy. 

The very first time I listened to it, I got in the booth, and I was like, “I want to listen to her voice on this piano when I want to record my vocal for the first time. I want to have that magic.” And I was just listening, and she sings, obviously, the whole first verse and the bridge. I was in such awe that I just completely forgot to sing. So we had to wind it back, and it was beautiful.

Even though I was a little bit intimidated and a little bit scared, by the time we were singing together and we were harmonizing, it just felt so right and so easy. I did feel that she was over my shoulder at some point during my verse going, “You can do better than that,” which wasn’t a bad thing.

PEOPLE: Was this your favorite Whitney song growing up, or did you have another song that’s meant more to you from her discography?

SCOTT: She’s got bangers, she’s got absolute hits. “How Will I Know” was a favorite. “I Will Always Love You” is a favorite. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” is just iconic, and you can’t help but want to sing along. It was one of the favorite songs for sure.

PEOPLE: On another note, “Mad” is about your desire to be a parent. Is that something you’re actively working toward?

SCOTT: Yeah. I’ve been speaking to a couple of public-facing people — Tom Daley is an Olympic swimmer here in the U.K. He’s well-known for traveling to America to have his children. There’s also two dads in the U.K. who have set up a charity which helps people, the pathways to surrogacy in the U.K., which is a little bit more challenging, but it can still certainly be done. I’m definitely looking at it.

I suppose in this industry it’s never the right time. I’m thinking, “Oh, well, I’ll finish my tour and then I could start looking at having children,” but then I’m going to be writing the fourth album, and then it’s like, where does the perfect time to do this start? Now is a good time to start looking at it, and it’s something I’m passionate about. I’ve got so much love to give. I definitely want to pour some love into a little mini-me in the not-too-distant future.

PEOPLE: What’s the most vulnerable part of the record for you?

SCOTT: The most vulnerable is probably a song that I’ve got on there called “Gone,” which is [about] the fragility of life. It was a conversation I was having with my producer. He has two young girls, and I said to him, “Isn’t it crazy that one day you’re going to pick up your youngest, you’re going to give her a hug, you’re going to put her back down, and you will just never pick her up again?” You never know when the last goodbye is going to be with somebody. You never know when that last kiss is going to be, that last hug, that last laugh with somebody.

And in a world now that’s ever pacing forward, and people [are] worried about the future and regretting the past, it does make you become less present. I suppose this whole album really is a nod to people, or a challenge, at least, to live more in the present.

PEOPLE: It’s a pretty vulnerable album in general. Are you in a relationship or are you actively dating?

SCOTT: Trying to date when the time presents itself. It’s a difficult situation in the music industry. I started dating when I have the time, and then that time is very quickly taken away from me.

A lot of people don’t understand music industry, and understandably so. Until you’re in it, you don’t realize what a beast it is, and it just makes it impossible. Relationships are built on time spent together, and it does make it incredibly hard to find that loved one, especially a loved one that can understand and accommodate the job that I have. Still “Dancing On My Own,” still “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” We’ll see. Hopefully, it might come around when I start planning to be a dad. I think there is somebody out there for everybody. I just don’t know where mine’s hiding.

PEOPLE: You have a duet on the record with Lauren Alaina. How did that come about?

SCOTT: Again, the stars aligned. I was at a writing camp that we’d done here in the U.K., and we’d written this song about one of my exes. It was about one more drink of wine or whiskey or whatever it was, it’s still not enough to get them out of your head. It just pertained itself toward country. We wrote this back before the Beyoncé country album, before the Post Malone country album. So, it felt very fresh for us at the time. I’d just been to a [inaudible 00:10:57] concert as well in LA, if I’m mistaken, and was very inspired by the writing there and the Nashville approach to stuff.

So we wrote the song and we sent it to a producer called Ben Johnston, based out Nashville, and he properly countrified it. He took it to a country band who all played it in the same room, and kind of like the old-school way of putting a record together, which kind of excites me a little bit for the fourth album because that song sounds so organic. It’s very intentional, and that potentially could be a direction for the next album. We spoke to the label and they suggested this incredible singer called Lauren, and I’d got in touch. She was happy to jump on the record, and she just fit the brief so well. She sang it like an angel.

Avenoir is out now.