The Big Read: Tami Neilson: Heartbreaker

Singer Tami Neilson.

Bringing you our favourite features from 2015. If you missed them the first time around, now's the perfect time to catch up. And remember to come back tomorrow for the next instalment.

Considering when it was recorded, Tami Neilson's new album should be a doom and gloom affair. She tells Lydia Jenkin why it's not.

You might expect an album written in the wake of a father's death to be on the melancholy side. Possibly a bit of a downer. But the impressive thing about Tami Neilson's new album, Don't Be Afraid, is that it's not.

Despite the fact that last year's Apra Silver Scroll winner unexpectedly lost her father only six weeks before she was due to record the album, she's come up with a collection of songs that manage to capture her grief and honour her father's memory in a moving way, but one that's not for a moment depressing.

"I do worry that's what people will think it's going to be," she smiles. "I think there's more of a depth to these songs, but they're not all 'Oh my dad died'.

"They're about the different stages of grief too, so a song like Holy Moses is a song about the angry part of grief, frustration and feeling overwhelmed, so I think it's about different stages and different flavours.

"And there are some songs such as Loco Mama, which I wrote before my Dad died, so it's not all doom and gloom," she laughs.

The Canadian has made a home in New Zealand for the past 10 years and has been roundly welcomed here, winning the Best Country Album Tui four times (2009, 2010, 2012, 2015), as well as the Silver Scroll, and being nominated for the Taite Prize for her last album Dynamite!, which received five-star reviews and was on The Guardian's Top 10 Country Albums of 2014 list.

Perhaps that's not a surprising ascent for someone who's been singing and performing her whole life, someone whose family toured North America for 10 years, opening for the likes of Johnny Cash.

Her family have remained tight-knit in their music-making despite being on opposite sides of the Pacific, so when Neilson's father Ron became suddenly and seriously ill in February, she raced to Canada to be by his bedside.

His subsequent passing left an enormous gap in her life, both musical and personal. But it turned out music was one thing that helped to pull her through ...

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