Nadia Reid at Henry Ward
Nadia Reid’s fourth album Enter Now Brightness was released at the beginning of last year. She has been thinking about the past decade. “Ten years of documenting my life in song,” is one way she describes it. “The highest privilege” is another. “You have points in life that when you look back, you see were a time of almost cellular change,” she continues; a realisation now that so many of these new songs have been drawn from the times when “all my cells were changing.” At that time in her native New Zealand, Covid restrictions were some of the toughest in the world. Shortly afterwards she had two daughters.
The result of this period of reflection has been the finest songwriting of Reid’s career. Enter Now Brightness is a record of poise and great beauty, the sound of a cellular shift, of pain giving way to tenderness and joy.
Reid was joined in Port Chalmers’ Chicks Hotel studio by her long-standing guitarist Sam Taylor and producer Tom Healy. Later, the intricate processes of impending motherhood and raising her daughters brought a new focus to her songwriting.
On this latest album, Reid moves ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is distinctly her own. “I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk, and being a folk singer. It makes me sort of cringe.” she says. She writes in a way that is wide open, and she sought a similar unguardedness in the music.
This past year, Reid has finally relocated to the UK, settling in Manchester. With this move has come a reassessment of her career and her craft. Enter Now Brightness feels different. It is an album of departure and questioning that has reminded her how songwriting can be “the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger.”
Nadia Reid: Live with Strings comes to Hastings on Friday 25 Sept at Henry Ward Hall, 7 pm. Tickets: alttickets.com/nadia-reid-tickets
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