NADIA REID
From New Zealand, after-dark folk visions for the environmentally attuned.
“I’m worried that I’ve made another heartbreak album,” says Nadia Reid, laughing a little, her image glitching slightly on the Skype feed from her home in Port Chalmers, New Zealand. Reid’s new album, Preservation, is sure to be one of the year’s landmark releases: a series of narcotic late-night tales, mapping the stormy peaks, desolate valleys, and far horizons in the wild landscape of a young romantic life, it’s delivered in her consoling, lonesome voice, and illuminated by a jazz-schooled trio of sympathetic accompanists. A work of wisdom and often ruthless poetry, it bears comparison to such after-dark confessionals as the Cowboy Junkies’ The Caution Horses and Mazzy Star’s She Hangs Brightly, moving seamlessly from boldness to self-doubt, in a manner that is oddly similar to encountering Reid “in person”. “Sometimes I’m really apologetic about my songs,” says Reid. “Thinking, Oh God, do people really want to hear all this again, but part of this new album is about sitting with the way I am, alone, and feeling OK about it.” Something of Preservation’s power lies in the contrast between the sadness in Reid’s lyrics and the warmth of their delivery, so it comes as something of a surprise that she came late to singing. Born in Devonport, Auckland, and raised in Dunedin by her actress mother, she never thought of herself as a singer. “When I was nine I auditioned for my
“IF I WAS UP ALL THE TIME IT WOULD BE VERY BORING.”
high school choir and didn’t get in,” she explains. “I’ve never forgotten it. I still lose perspective and think everything is a load of shit, but I am learning.” An apprenticeship in the welcoming Dunedin and Christchurch folk and indie scenes, plus a borderline obsession with The Be Good Tanyas, fed into her stunning 2014 debut, Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs, an album informed as much by her New Zealand surroundings as its lyrics of heartache and fortitude. “I’m really sensitive to place and environment,” she says. “Touring Europe was incredibly inspiring, and that in turn fed into the new album.” As with its predecessor, Preservation was recorded in Christchurch’s Sitting Room studios, with producer Ben Edwards and a group led by long-term guitarist Sam Taylor. Thematically, however, the album differs in that, “I now have more confidence in myself. These songs are more about me; the first album was more about people around me.” For the next album, Reid envisages “just guitars and voices”, the emotions of the songs liberated from their seductive production. “A lot of artists suffer,” says Reid, “and there’s still a huge stigma talking about mental health. I guess if it was any other way I would be doing something completely different. But, yeah, if I was up all the time it would be very boring.”