In early March 2020, Nadia Reid released her third album, Out of My Province. It had been recorded in America, and she was headed back there to start a year of touring, after playing a quietly triumphant album launch gig in Auckland. Her previous albums, Preservation (2017) and Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs (2014) had won her international attention for her folk-framed songs, the wise-beyond-her-years lyrics, and a voice that reminded many of Joni Mitchell, among others.
She’d played Preservation’s break-out track and ode to an ex, Richard, on the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland in 2017, and having recorded Out of My Province for hip indie American label Spacebomb, it appeared the stars were aligning for the Dunedin-raised Reid. Except it was March 2020. And the day after her Auckland show, the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas, where she was due to fly, was cancelled because of the developing pandemic. It was the first domino to fall in her 2020 diary. It was soon apparent Reid wouldn’t be getting out of her province any time soon.
“I quickly got a flight back to Dunedin and landed there, and Angus [McBryde] picked me up, and I couldn’t talk. I cried the whole way home. And after that, I just got on with it.”
Nearly five years later, Reid is talking to the Listener from Manchester, where she now lives with husband McBryde and their daughters Elliotte and Goldie. The kids arrived in 2021 and 2024 respectively, the latter after the shift to England. The move there had been years in the making, she says.
Though her management is Manchester-based and she’s now signed to UK legacy label Chrysalis, the shift wasn’t all career-related. Her mother is UK-born and she felt an ancestral pull to the place. They’d considered London, where Chrysalis is, but it’s too expensive at present. She has lawyer friends there living in shoebox apartments. Plus, she says, the further north you go in the UK, the warmer and friendlier the people get.
Those upheavals in Reid’s life have worked their way into some of the songs of her new and fourth album Enter Now Brightness. It readjusts that delicate folk framing of the past, delivers indie-rock and country-rock energy levels elsewhere, and sounds like her boldest, happiest album yet. You can imagine the likes of Changed Unchained being belted out from a Glastonbury stage.
“I don’t see the point in doing the same record twice. My first two albums are quite similar, and they were written quite close together. I like the idea of just pushing the boundaries and expanding. “I’m a folk singer at the root of it all … but I have to be growing and trying different things. Otherwise, I’ll just pack it in.”
The album was recorded with producer Tom Healy, guitarist in Tiny Ruins and past producer of albums by Marlon Williams, The Chills, The Veils and more.
Reid and band first convened at the studio-converted Chick’s Hotel in her home town of Port Chalmers. She was pregnant with Elliotte during some of its writing and recording, and dealing with morning sickness between takes. But impending and eventual motherhood and her considering what it all meant to her life had some beneficial effects on the finished songs, she thinks.
She remembers early in her first pregnancy having a reassuring conversation with singer-songwriter Delaney Davidson. He told her he thought when his female peers had become mums, it had sharpened their songwriting.
“I really held on to that because, for whatever reason, there was this sort of underlying fear about, ‘oh, you have kids, it ruins your career, ruins your life’ … it’s a big topic, basically. I’ve got a really good partner, so that’s something that gives me a really good chance of doing both. But it’s just such a beautiful and worthwhile thing, and it’s really sharpened me. It’s deepened the well of my whole being.
“There’s 50% of me that wants to keep this whole part of me really private and sacred and tucked away, and then there’s another part of me that just wants to sort of shout it from the rooftop. So, it’s sort of this juxtaposition. I mean, I’m not the first working mother to have a child, but there’s certainly some fears that have been put away.”
The last song she wrote for the set was Even Now, after Healy said the album needed “a “Nadia song” – one carried just by her guitar and voice. Reid says it was inspired by her and Angus “having this really big road bump” while being stuck in limbo waiting for paperwork for their shift to England, and by why she wanted to get away from New Zealand.
“It’s a little bit about leaving where my mum and dad are, needing oceans between us. And about leaving my homeland. I had begun to feel very suffocated and ceilinged and I couldn’t think properly, I couldn’t figure out what I thought about things. And so, this is a little bit about the distance required.”
How does Angus feel about their life being refracted in her lyrics?
“He’s pretty laid back. I think I do a really good job of blending it all together. There’s nothing literal. Everything is part of a story. There’s metaphor, there’s like a little bit of truth, but no one would ever know what I’m really trying to say. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it. I’m so private with my writing. I’ve certainly had experiences with hurting people’s feelings [with her lyrics].
“I own my stories and my experiences of the world with all of the relationships I’ve had,” she says, adding she tries not to anticipate what others might think of her songs.
Talking of her husband, Reid laughs at the memory of a woman who she talked to after a recent gig.
“Bless this lady. She would have been in her 60s, and I could tell she could not get her head around the fact that my husband was at the hotel with our two young children, and I was here playing this show to 400 people.
“At the end of the night she said, ‘You’re going to have to give him a good pat on the back …’ I can sort of laugh at it, and I can take it with a grain of salt and find it amusing. But the alternative is that I sit at home twiddling my thumbs and just go bananas.”
Judging on her shows at home, a fair portion of Reid’s audience is older than her own 33 years. Do they look the same in the UK? “Well, I never look anyone in the eye. I pretend no one’s there,” she laughs. “But I’d say, yes, but there are also a lot of Antipodeans who come out, especially in London.”
That demographic is also reflected in how she has been championed in the UK by dad-rock magazines such as Mojo and Uncut.
“It’s just really meaningful, more so than the social media stuff. I’ve had my arm twisted and someone’s running a TikTok for me. I’ve already talked about my hesitation with it and how it feels like it sort of degrades music … the other side of that is I do feel a bit like an old soul.”
Enter Now Brightness is out now.
