EXIT SANDMAN, ENTER JOY - A NADIA REID JOURNEY

BREAKFAST TIME IN MANCHESTER finds Nadia Reid, now of the British northwest but for the 30-odd years before this a New Zealander, a little sluggish. Kids, calls from Australia coming in, an English winter in full swing still, the lingering effects of a two-and-a-half year recording project that has landed her fourth album – she’s got a bit on.

Reid is polite and welcoming, albeit with the camera off, because she’s, well, polite and welcoming – did I mention she is a New Zealander? – but apologies are made, unnecessarily. Two children, early risers, parents’ horror?

“I feel like I’ve got a bit of a superpower sleep gene, that I have slightly passed on, so I shouldn’t really complain,” she says. Adding a little less convincingly, “It’s good for me to be up and about.”

Mind you, one of the themes of her new album, Enter Now Brightness is what is passed on down through generations, specifically trauma. Maybe the positive generational legacies will appear on the next record.

“Yeah, yeah. As these little people grow I feel like I’m just getting started really,” says Reid. “It’s interesting because this record has sort of been pitched as this album about motherhood but it kind of is and isn’t; I think I just happened to become a mother during the process and I think it sometimes takes time for these things to catch up. I’m already kind of ready to move on …”

From the children?

“No, no, no,” she laughs. “The record.”

As Reid wrote recently in a newsletter to fans, “mothering brings so much to the surface”. (In fact she said a bit more as she contemplated going out on tour again with the four year old and one-year-old, an opportunity she calls a blessing, though, not without its questions and demands: “Lately, I’ve craved some sort of force/mother/big sister to come in, wrap her arms around me, and say, “Look at this chubby baby and look at your mad, nearly-four-year-old singing ‘Unliiiiiimited……. (Mama, I am Elphaba, and you are Glinda)’ at the top of her lungs. They are both thriving. You’re doing an incredible job.” Perhaps in writing it out, the affirmation has subconsciously been received.”)

While motherhood – her own and the more troubled one of her mother – does factor in the songs on Enter Now Brightness, it seems at least as much about finding a place, not necessarily the place, for yourself in the world. What I’m hearing in this fuller sounding, brighter presented record is someone who has a better sense of and comfort with who they are than she was 10 years ago at the start of her career making half-internalised folk pop on the quiet, not too dissimilar to friends Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins) and Hannah Topp (Aldous Harding).

“It’s such a bizarre thing to do, this whole making a record thing, and I was reflecting on it being 10 years since my first album [Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs] had its Australian release. When [third album] Out Of My Province came out in 2020 I thought, this is my arrival: I feel like I am in the front seat now, this is me, here I am. Then when we finished this record I was like, no, no, no, this is my arrival,” she laughs.

“Certainly if I look back over the 10 years and compare myself to that young woman that made that album down in Lyttleton in 2014 there has been so much growth. I guess there is a confidence, and an arrival. Making this album it was the first time I finally felt really at ease in a studio setting, and in a creative space, and that was to do with my personal development.”

Neither of us is suggesting this is Nadia Reid the finished product though.

“I do want to keep progressing. When I was talking with a few people about the departure from the folk mould I thought I don’t really want to keep doing the same thing over and over again, if I can help it,” she says. “But it is a lovely way to document my life really.”

Most of us document our lives via dodgy memories, occasional photos and people telling us ‘remember when you did such and such?’, while she documents her life in songs that stand theoretically inviolable, or at least easily referenced by people like me asking her to explain herself now and back then.

“It’s funny, I can’t … I really would not get any pleasure listening to these older albums, and I tend to not. I suppose performing them is different because they take on a sort of new life, which I really enjoy, and they get deeper and deeper as the years go on. Sometimes I have these moments of ‘oh, maybe that’s what I was getting at’ and it may have taken 10 years or 12 years to come to the surface.”

We can hardly be critical of that in songwriters, given the idea that we understand our motivations and act with clarity and forethought in the moment is at best amusingly naïve. Not to mention the assumption that those thoughts and actions are from people who haven’t changed.

Take Reid for example. She remembers that at the time of her first album, if she had been made to choose between a music career and the family, she would have chosen music. But since then “I suppose I’ve had a determination that I could have both, a career and an entry into motherhood. I know it’s a big topic, it’s not all smooth sailing and lovely for everyone, there’s been such a deepening experience and one that my own mum didn’t quite get to have herself.

“And that’s just circumstances; it’s no one’s fault.”

In the song Emmanuelle, the album begins with an understanding that there is uncertainty about life when things are no longer just you, when you are not the only one in your control, in your responsibility. But it ends, in Send It Down The Line, with a note of confidence that she will end this sequence of difficulty and pain. There is a mix of these emotions across the album of fluctuating assuredness about life decisions, and that is a large part of what makes it so fascinating. It is a batch of songs where Reid is not saying she knows it all now, or that she is the finished product, but that she knows what she needs to do to be herself.

That’s a lot to try to get across in life, let alone in 40-odd minutes.

“I suppose in thinking about the first and the last songs on the album I sort of feel like I may be used to it now, but that feeling of the enormity of this, that there is so much at stake – it was so much simpler when it was just me – but now there is this little thing that hijacked me,” Reid says. “Without sounding too hippie dippy, it brought my inner child up to the surface so I could think about her and what it might have been like for me to be a child and a baby. So it was confronting and is something that I hadn’t quite considered, thinking the unthinkable that ‘now that I’ve met you, and I’m in love with you, can this circle never break? I can never lose you now’.”

All these issues are serious, and in some cases pain and fear are involved, but there is also a lightness and joy across this record. Hotel Santa Cruz for example is joyful, lyrically and musically, and while that may be the most obvious example, the album overall has a freedom that comes from joy. Maybe that comes from being a little clearer about who she is and what she wants to do.

“I think it also what was happening at the end of 2018,” argues Reid. “It’s kind of clichéd but I got married in 2019 and I was ready to shake off … like my first two albums, they are kind of heavy albums [and] I think I was slowly coming to bring joy to the picture and really enjoy my life. Things had started to go well for me, career -wise, I had success in the UK and it was bubbling away and I had this great sense of achievement and purpose that I hadn’t really ever had before. Then when I had my first daughter I couldn’t help it, it was ecstatic joy. It was like I was on drugs - hormones are crazy – sniffing this baby like I was on LSD and it was just joyful.”

All good clean, if sometimes bedazzling or bewildering, fun.

“There is a photo of me at my 30th birthday, when we were in the depths of lockdown, and I’ve got this four-week-old baby on my shoulder and I am absolutely beaming, like glowing. So it naturally bled into these songs and making [Enter Now Brightness] over those two-and-a-half years, and the joy of the band and [producer] Tom Healy has a real playfulness, he has a cheeky sense of humour that I would like to say that I share too. It was deeply, deeply fun in the studio.”

And that does come across in songs like Cry On Cue and Second Nature, songs which are like soaking in a 1970s pop bath.

“The element of performing this record as well, having this freedom of finally, after 10, 12, 14 years, feeling comfortable on the stage and feeling like I can command and enjoy it.”

There is a limit to this living with joy business, this new life in a new town and welcoming everything business, that limit is sport. Specifically, football. You might think that now she has moved to Manchester, surely she has chosen a football team, chosen the red or the blue. You might think that, but you would be foolish.

“Anytime anyone says the word football I completely glaze over,” she laughs. “So, no, I haven’t chosen a football team. Do you have any suggestions?

Yes, Liverpool. Obviously. Then we’d really be talking enter now brightness. You’re welcome Nadia Reid.

READ MORE

Enter Now Brightness – album review

Out Of My Province – album review 

Preservation – album review

 Enter Now Brightness is out now on Chrysalis