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NADIA REID

Self-discovery doesn’t come easy. It’s usually a rite of passage to get burned before the wounds can heal and often takes a new perspective to truly understand yourself. 18 months and 10,000kms travelled since many needles first dropped on her debut LP Listen To Formation Look For The Signs, it’s safe to say with new album Preservation, Nadia Reid now knows herself extremely well.

“Preservation’ is about the point I started to love myself again. It is about strength, observation and sobriety,” Nadia says. “It’s about when I could see the future again. When the world was good again. When music was realised as my longest standing comfort.”

Through cavernous lows, blissful highs and globe-trotting adventures, music has been by Nadia’s side the entire way. Whether in New Zealand’s familiar rugged beaches and mountains, brutally windy Wellington, her hometown harbour Port Chalmers or the untrodden territory of faceless hotel rooms or the jungle in Kuala Lumpur, every episode of loss, heartbreak, and disappointment glimmers throughout. “Travelling inspires me. I’m learning that things need to happen for the writing to come. Like making time to be alone with my guitar. I’ve grown to crave that. I almost like to starve myself of it to crave it.”

For some, being so far removed from all you know would be unsettling, but Nadia is keen to embrace the challenge of moving forwards in the face of uncertainty. “This place of newness must be where all the good stuff happens,” Nadia reveals. “An artist must be uncomfortable, must tour the world, and mustn’t stay in her home-town for too long. I feel very happy and changed by my time abroad. I have fallen back in love with music, or perhaps learnt to trust her a little more. Often in times of exhaustion, confusion, and home-sickness, music has been the constant.”

An ode to self-reflection and self-betterment, Preservation is the sound of Nadia showing her true colours, taking back a bit of power, and learning more about herself. Deeply intellectual but felt by all, it punches harder than before. Nadia’s beautifully warm vocals coolly wrap around feelings of turbulence, and exude a gently improved confidence. “This record is about being OK with who I am in the world, and who I want to be. Learning to live with the fact I’m a person who operates differently to others,” admits Nadia. “I’m richer for the fact I am a musician. Without this way of being, I couldn’t write songs.”

Returning to the production skills of Ben Edwards in his Sitting Room studios and long term guitarist Sam Taylor, this time around everything is rubbed in more grit and channels Nadia’s deftly profound take on life and whilst we already knew it, her own realisation that it is music which drives her. “I remember recording the tracks, it was about 11 at night, and I felt almost transcendental, as if I was out of my body, singing these words to myself. That’s what these songs are; a confession to my future and past self.”

Nadia has seen the world she once knew become a whole lot larger. Simply singing her truth has taken her to becoming acquainted with her Scottish and Irish heritage during her first full European tour, downtime with long-time sister-from-another-mister Aldous Harding and even making the odd award shortlist along the way (NZ’s 2016 Taite Music Prize).

Rather than growth in its most typical sense of any artist finding their way in the world, Preservation marks a natural passing of time – what you pick up along the way is a bonus. “Making music feels like a very natural expression for me – to record songs and mark time a little. Just like a painter needs to paint pictures.” Sometimes those home comforts can be found a little closer than you might think.


TRACK LISTING

1. Preservation
2. The Arrow And The Aim
3. Richard
4. I Come Home To You
5. Hanson St Part 2 (A River)
6. Right On Time
7. Reach My Destination
8. Te Aro
9. The Way It Goes
10. Ain't Got You

Nadia Reid

Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs

    A richness of voice; a depth of emotion; and wise beyond her years; with Listen To Formation, Look For the Signs, 23-year-old New Zealand native Nadia Reid has claimed her place as one of the country’s most evocative and profound young songwriters. Her music traces the sharp mountain peaks, azure coastline, and mirrored images of the land and sky that pinpoint her home country’s vast open landscapes.

    “For me, inspiration for writing happens everywhere,” explains Nadia. “On buses, airplanes, walking, driving… it can be very unpredictable. My songs have a strong connection to the places they were written, from Port Chalmers, to Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland.”

    Whether nerding about with friends, stunning audiences into silence with her spellbinding live shows or unwinding in the tranquillity of her favourite hometown spot overlooking Port Chalmers’ harbour through her large-rimmed spectacles, Nadia Reid has achieved a gloriously fresh and eloquent new folk sound. “I’ve been in New Zealand my whole life and guess at times I take for granted the serene beauty that I live so closely with,” she says of her music’s majestic affiliation with nature. Mapping out tales of change and loss, whilst drawing inspiration from reading, writing, the human condition, falling in and out of love, death, and birth - it all lends to a superbly balanced album that moves surreptitiously between sparse and fragile melancholia to beautifully brutal lyricism with a philosophical maturity that bellies her years.

    Born in Auckland, Nadia’s acoustic roots stem from an upbringing in a musical household where attending folk clubs and festivals were regular occurrences on the family calendar. “I was lucky to witness a lot of live music and theatre performances because my mum was an actress. I was encouraged to learn piano and guitar, and attended a Steiner school where we spent a lot of time in nature, singing songs.” Before long Nadia was listening to The Be Good Tanyas with friend and fellow recording artist Aldous Harding, which spurred her chosen career path. “There was something spiritual about the Tanyas’ records - I vividly remember the goose-bump feelings up my arms, a true connection to the lyrics and vocals,” she recalls. “[Aldous] was the first person who told me I had a good voice and I thank her for that. I admire her as an artist and writer, and we like to keep up with what each other is up to.”

    Creating her own enchanting wonderworld, each of Nadia’s songs explores the elements; truly organic, her vocals ebb, flow and soar but are always ignited with fire from the gut. Her lyrics clearly reference lush landscapes but equally reflect alienation provided by the surrounding Pacific Ocean and mortality of living in such close proximity to Mother Nature’s wrath, as experienced whilst living in Christchurch at the time of 2011’s devastating earthquake. “It shook the city to its core,” Nadia recalls. “I’m sure living through it has shaped my personality and writing. My first EP was recorded just months afterwards, it was a strange time. We were all quite fragile, but I was braver somehow.”

    Boldly infusing folk with full flavour, Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs was produced by Ben Edwards, owner of Lyttelton Records in his Sitting Room studios with Nadia’s band consisting bassist Richie Pickard, guitarist Sam Taylor and percussionist Joe McCallum. Whilst 'Reaching Through’s rich but unhurried nature evokes She Hangs Brightly -era Mazzy Star and intricate nuances of Beth Orton are recalled on lead single ‘Call The Days’ which talks of moving to a new town and was the first song penned after Nadia moved from Christchurch to Wellington; spurred on by a “panic attack” and being “worried about making the right choices in life”. Elsewhere ‘Runway’ and ‘Some Are Lucky’ immediately channel Nadia’s love of TBGT’s Jolie Holland and appreciation for New Zealand’s Maori music by Maisey Rika and Anika Moa, plus the inspirational narratives of Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire.

    "It has all that well-smoked wisdom, that mingling of strength and yearning that seems to charge the work of all my favourite female artists – Laura Marling, The Weather Station, Sharon Van Etten and Tift Merritt, to name but four. Reid is just 23, and since I am loathe to run that “old beyond her years” line, let us simply say that when I hear a young artist making an album as soulful and rich and self-possessed as Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs, I feel so thrilled not only for the existence of that record but for all the music they will make over all the years to come.” THE GUARDIAN.

    TRACK LISTING

    Runway
    Track Of The Time
    Reaching Through
    Holy Low
    Just To Feel Alive
    Seasons Change
    Some Are Lucky
    Ruby
    Call The Days
    Holy Loud


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