nina nastasia tour uk

Nina Nastasia

Hearing her voice is like being wrapped in silk sheets and slowly rocked into a blissful state of peace and relaxation. She is compared to Nick Cave more...

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LIVE: Nina Nastasia – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, 05/04/2023

The 22 nd  of July 2022 marked the arrival of  Riderless Horse ,  Nina Nastasia ’s seventh studio album. It had been twelve long years since the release of its predecessor,  Outlaster . The reasons for this creative absence are painful and harrowing. But perhaps to place this performance – of which, the songs from  Riderless Horse  provide the most powerful of foundations – in its full and proper context, the stark details must first be recounted. 

For a quarter of a century, Nina Nastasia’s partner and musical collaborator was Kennan Gudjonsson. In a statement accompanying the release of  Riderless   Horse , Nastasia said that she had  “decided to stop pursuing music… because of unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan” , the latter characterised by his increasingly controlling and psychologically abusive behaviour. On the 26 th  of January 2020, she left him, determined to lead a better, more emotionally healthy life. Gudjonsson was to kill himself the very next day. These are the brutal, inescapable facts.

Running parallel to Nina Nastasia’s lack of recorded output for the dozen years prior to the release of  Riderless Horse  was a relative dearth of live performances. This is the third date of her current UK tour, signalling the Los Angeles-born singer-songwriter’s first appearances on these shores in a decade. And tonight’s show is a welcome return to the Brudenell, nearly 15 years since she last played here. 

“I’ve missed this place” , Nina Nastasia tells us, as she reminisces fondly about those delicious Brudenell pies she had here last time around. She is even beguiled by the gentle hum of the venue’s refrigerator which she feels could easily be the perfect panacea for her insomnia. Despite the narratives of domestic abuse, death, and despondency that lie at the heart of many of Nastasia’s songs it is clear that there are shafts of light and gentle humour to be found within. 

Nina Nastasia is equally not afraid to be laughed at when she  “really fucking screwed up the (first) encore”  by completely forgetting the words to the song. But it is the raw subject matter that percolates right throughout her performance. With a startling, painful honesty she sings of the toxicity in her personal relationship, the devastation it caused, and the sorrow that was to follow. Accompanied only by her acoustic guitar, Nastasia clearly enunciates every single word she sings, magnifying the feelings that they express. It becomes almost unbearable on occasion, no more so than on the startling a capella delivery of  ‘A Blazing Fire’  where you feel as if you are somehow intruding upon a person’s private grief.

But ultimately this towering performance is one that reflects the capacity of the human spirit, the depths of individual resilience, and the sheer will to survive. At one point Nina Nastasia says  “I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here”  and we share with her that huge sense of relief at just being, of moving beyond fear and the absence of any unwelcome control in your life. She underlines this feeling of liberation and improved emotional well-being on  ‘Lazy Road’  (from  Riderless Horse ) when she affirms  “And I feel like I’m happy for the first time.” 

Speaking to The Guardian newspaper last May, Nina Nastasia had said “I’d rather go just above mediocre.” This concert was a profoundly moving experience that took us way beyond the ordinary.

Photos: Simon Godley

More photos from  Nina Nastasia at the Brudenell Social Club

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Nina Nastasia

Nina Nastasia's rare gift of a voice is an intimate, winged presence that is able to either freeze or melt your heart; that can powerfully soar and twist, or brush ultra-gently against you, suddenly summoning goose bumps. Mojo commented on its ability to "suck the air out of the room". Picking over themes of love, longing and loss, childhood, dreams and human dramas, her beautifully concise, hook-laden songwriting and the spare arrangements of her band have a certain gritty, rustic charm and intensity. Simultaneously tough and fragile, her songs crackle and smolder with an intimate emotional honesty and a dark undertow.

Now a resident in New York City, Nina Nastasia was born and raised in Hollywood, CA. Having moved to New York on a whim, Nina has gradually carved out a career as a singer-songwriter there since the early 'nineties. In October '99, Nina recorded the album 'Dogs', which would finally document this well-seeded life in music. That debut album came to exemplify her style - the delicate string arrangements; the restrained, understated beauty of her live band; the deceptive simplicity of her voice and poignant, life-wise lyrics. The recording necessitated that Nina and partner Kennan Gudjonsson establish their own vehicle for its advance, and the following year, 'Dogs' was released on micro-indie label Socialist Records.

Sold largely at shows and coming in a lush, classic package - letterpress lyrics, hand-mounted photo - by the end of 2000, 'Dogs' had slipped out of print. The costly packaging and tiny infrastructure of Socialist put its re-release on indefinite delay as Nina prepared to record her second album, 'The Blackened Air', in 2001. But 'Dogs' had a special grassroots effect on Nina's career, as fans of the record would correspond across internet message boards and 'zines, discussing songs and soliciting copies of the rare edition. The album would also mark the beginning of a lasting peer-relationship with noted recording engineer Steve Albini, who said of the record in an interview for Mojo magazine: "There are cruel ironies in making albums for a living. In the process of making a record, you hear it so many times that the charms of even the best of them can wear off through over-exposure. On rare occasions, records I've worked on have withstood this scrutiny and ended up being personal favourites. Of these, a good handful are beautiful and sublime, and I listen to them for pleasure. Nina Nastasia's 'Dogs' is a record so simultaneously unassuming and grandiose that I can't really describe it, except in terms that would make it (and me) sound silly. Of the couple thousand records I've been involved with, this is one of my favourites, and one that I'm proud to be associated with."

Veteran BBC DJ John Peel got hold of a copy of 'Dogs' and became similarly enamored with it. In an interview with Harper's and Queen, he called it "astonishing" and in Mojo said: "[Nina's] songs are very direct without being posy or too clever. There's an attractive air of melancholy without self-pity.\" He gave the then-unavailable record constant plays on his Radio 1 show, helping to garner an international demand for 'Dogs'. In April 2002, Nina released her well-received sophomore LP, 'The Blackened Air' on Chicago indie label Touch and Go and began an extensive international touring career.

'The Blackened Air' was followed up in 2003 by its darker sister, 'Run to Ruin', again engineered by Albini and released on Touch & Go. In 2004 'Dogs' was finally re-released on Touch & Go, and Nina spent the next year touring across Europe, Russia and the Balkans, and starting work on new material. In that year, she invited friends Sayan Bapa and Kaigal-Ool Khovalyg, founding members of the Tuvan (Siberian) band Huun-Huur-Tu, to join her band for a special tour of the UK. The collaboration was met with much critical acclaim, and Nastasia has since made a side project of performing with Huun-Huur-Tu, most recently in Iceland.

In September 2006, Nina Nastasia released 'On Leaving' (again recorded by Steve Albini), her first recording for FatCat . The move from Touch and Go implies "nothing scandalous," says Nina, "just moving, the way you move sometimes. This is a good move all around." Nina's long-standing peer relationship with engineer Steve Albini and musical organizer Kennan Gudjonsson continued, and 'On Leaving' was realised as well by veteran members of Nina's band, Dylan Willemsa (viola), Jay Bellerose (drums), Steven Beck (piano) and Jim White (drums).

The following year (2007) saw the release of a second album for FatCat, arriving in the form of a collaborative album with Jim White, a perennial member of Nina's backing band and the peerless drummer of beloved Australian instrumental trio, Dirty Three. Stripped back to just a two-piece (drums, guitar, vocal), 'You Follow Me' is a fantastically focused record - a taut, raw document of two incredible musicians in deep dialogue, exploring the boundaries of songform to find a rare and striking complement. An incredibly instinctive and distinctive drummer, Jim White has become a guest musician of choice for acts such as Will Oldham / Bonnie Prince Billy, The Boxhead Ensemble, Smog, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and countless others, yet this was the first record to bear his own name. Following the release, the pair embarked on tours of Europe, USA, and Australia.

A 7" single showcasing new track, 'What She Doesn't Know' was released in February 2008 and in April, Nina toured the US West Coast. Over the summer she played at various festivals and one-off events throughout the UK, Ireland and Belgium, and toured the US and Canada.

Nina released her most recent full-length - the gorgeous, lushly orchestrated 'Outlaster' - in June 2010. It is an album of quiet longing, braced by rich string, brass and woodwind arrangements, produced by Steve Albini and featuring the arrangements of Paul Bryan and other musical input from Tortoise's Jeff Parker and T-Bone Burnett collaborator Jay Bellerose.

Nina Nastasia has announced a new album, Riderless Horse , produced by Steve Albini and Nastasia, and due out July 22 via Temporary Residence Ltd . In a statement about the project, Nastasia notes that  Riderless  Horse is her first record not produced by her partner Kennan Gudjonsson, who died by suicide in January 2020. “ Riderless Horse documents the grief, but it also marks moments of empowerment and a real happiness in discovering my own capability,” she wrote.

Riderless Horse  arrives more than a decade after its predecessor, 2010’s  Outlaster . Prior to that, Nastasia joined Dirty Three drummer Jim White for  You Follow Me  in 2007. Nastasia made the out-of-print  Outlaster ,  You Follow Me , and 2006’s  On Leaving  available online for the first time earlier this year. She’s currently on a spring tour with Mogwai.

with Nina Nastasia

American aquarium, mass of the fermenting dregs, with cam kahin and  blush, jazz está morto – celebrating 80 years of marcos valle, st. vincent, with dorian electra.

Nina Nastasia announces new single and UK Tour with Sons of Noel & Adrian

The New York based dramatic folk chanteuse Nina Nastasia is due to release her new two-track digital single ‘You Can Take Your Time’/‘One Turned In’ on Dec 6 via Fat Cat Records. Taken from her critically acclaimed summer album Outlaster , ‘You Can Take Your Time’ has existed as a live favourite in various guises for quite some time now. Drenched in sweeping orchestral harmonies the most recent incarnation will be accompanied by the brand new, sparsely arranged b-side ‘One Turned In’, exclusive to this release.

Fresh from the European leg of her tour, Nina will kick things off in the UK on November 29 with support for all dates coming from experimental folksters Sons Of Noel & Adrian .

November 29 – Cardiff, Glee Club 30 – London, Scala

December 1 – Bristol, Thekla 2 – Oxford, Jericho 3 – Brighton, Audio 4 – Nottingham, Glee Club 5 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club 6 – Cambridge, The Haymakers 7 – Manchester, Deaf institute 10 – Dublin, The Workman’s Club

Tickets for all shows are available now from www.seetickets.com .

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Nina Nastasia review – a mettle-testing, memorable comeback

“This new record is a bit of a bitch because it’s not particularly fun to perform,” Nina Nastasia said last year while promoting Riderless Horse , her first album since 2010. That’s the risk an artist takes when they frame a record around a traumatic event. The Hollywood-born alt-folk singer took a 12-year leave of absence due to “unhappiness [and] overwhelming chaos” that culminated in her longterm romantic and musical partner, Kennan Gudjonsson, taking his own life in 2020, the day after she ended their relationship. Riderless Horse, which forms the backbone of this show, condenses her grief into jagged bursts that are as hard to hear as they must be to play.

A fortifying glass of whisky is at her elbow – “I have a nervous tic, it calms me,” she laughs, perhaps to forestall judgment. But nobody is judging; she commands such reverence that a fan who begins to video the show quickly thinks better of it. It’s something like being at church; this is Nastasia’s first UK tour in a decade, and every moment is taken as a gift. Jokey asides add light to the shade – the one about John Peel’s family making her a Liverpool supporter is a peak American-abroad moment.

Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, Nastasia enunciates every word precisely, ensuring that we understand that she and Gudjonsson were pushed beyond endurance. “You set a blaze inside our house/ Burned it down, smoked us out,” goes You Were So Mad , deceptively lilting in its rage. She’s strident on Nature, facing down Gudjonsson’s accusations – “I was always in the thick of his sorrow and blame / I could never save you” – and on The Two of Us her voice is drained of energy: “Trying to crawl out of this dung, the stink of it.”

Veteran songs such as Superstar and All Your Life still have emotional heft but the mettle-testing new material is what makes this a show to remember. The audience is overjoyed to have her back: her suggestion that we visit the merch table rouses worshipful cheers, and she replies, “Stop, or I will cry.”

• At EartH, London, 4 April; then touring the UK until 13 April.

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Friday 05 May 2023

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Brudenell Social Club, Queens Road, Leeds LS6 1NY Leeds, UK 01132752411 www.brudenellsocialclub.co.uk/

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‘I want people to listen’: songwriter Nina Nastasia on surviving abuse, grief and psychosis

A favourite of John Peel and Laura Marling, Nina Nastasia gave up music as she endured a controlling partner and botched drug therapy – then even greater tragedy struck. After 12 years away, she returns with a tough, beautiful album

This interview contains discussions of domestic abuse and suicide

I n early April, Nina Nastasia was preparing for her first live dates in a decade, supporting Mogwai in the US. She felt nervous, having never planned a tour alone, and overwhelmed about playing for people again. A friend reassured her that, as she was the opener, nobody would really be listening. “I was relieved,” says Nastasia. “But then I thought, ‘Well, wait a minute, nobody’s gonna listen? I want people to listen.’”

The audience was “completely silent” for her sets, says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. Nastasia’s friend underestimated how sorely fans wanted this beloved songwriter back. Between 2000 and 2010, her catalogue struck a hair-raising balance between hope and melancholy, elegance and earthiness – popularised by the fervent support of John Peel. Steve Albini recorded all her albums, and considers them among his proudest work. Laura Marling calls 2007’s You Follow Me “an example of how to do something so straightforward as recording a songwriter differently”, and a mysterious record that “speaks in symbols directly to the soul”.

But, after 2010’s Outlaster, Nastasia disappeared. When I interviewed her then , she seemed so concerned about her memory that I worried she may have fallen ill. In actuality, she quit music as a result of the psychological abuse she endured from Kennan Gudjonsson, her partner of 25 years. On 26 January 2020, she left him, determined to salvage her life. He killed himself the next day. Nastasia’s profound new album, Riderless Horse , was written in the aftermath – part of which, she admits, was characterised by a sudden sense of freedom. Yet, she is also emphatic in her absolute love for a man gripped by mental illness. What is complicated, she says, is how “he gave me so much in the positive, and also as much, if not more, of the very painful stuff”.

Nastasia, 55, is at her cousin’s home in Pasadena after the Mogwai tour. She barely needs any prompts to talk. She is kind and composed, if worried about making sense of a story that defies it. She often circles back to why she wants to be heard. Maybe it could help others, she says, as her new support dog, Misha, gnaws noisily at her feet: “And I’m looking for those people, too, because it’s hard to get your head around.” She also wants to talk compassionately about suicide. She isn’t angry at Gudjonsson. “I think he did it for my survival, and for the pain to just stop for him.”

Gudjonsson was instrumental to Nastasia’s career. In the early 1990s, she moved from Hollywood to New York City, where she had a miserable waitressing job. She would come home, cry and write songs. Friends suggested she start performing and recording her material, so she blagged some cheap late-night studio sessions. “We just had to pay the night manager,” she says: Gudjonsson. He was rude to her, “but that was his way of being endearing. He went over to a friend of mine and said, ‘I need her name and her ring size.’” They immediately clicked creatively and romantically. “Then it went whirlwind.”

Gudjonsson, an artist, moved into Nastasia’s minuscule apartment. She was offered a development deal, but Gudjonsson overheard label executives suggesting she alter a song and became adamant they go it alone, inspired by Albini’s famous 1993 essay on major-label corruption. He wanted her to work with Albini too. (Despite his reputation for his work with Nirvana and PJ Harvey, he operates as an engineer-for-hire.) They threw a massive fundraiser to pay for it, and made it to Albini’s Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, to record 2000’s Dogs: an album based on Nastasia’s Hollywood youth, populated by damned figures and the lure of oblivion.

Gudjonsson produced extravagant CD packaging that cost $12 to make and sold for $10. It was typical of his obsessive quest for perfection, says Nastasia. She trusted him when he suggested she quit her job. But he was also detached from reality, always certain money would come if they made something great. “You can’t count on that,” she says, wincing. “We put ourselves in a lot of financially stressful situations finding ways to make the next record.”

She wrote songs in their tiny bathroom and credits Gudjonsson’s edits with honing her lyricism. He never wanted credit for anything – making artwork, producing – and had rabid faith in Nastasia’s potential. But he also had crushing, impossible standards. Songwriting was joyful, she says. “But doing anything else was painful because I was always failing, then getting horrible outbursts and bad scenes after everything. I had this feeling like I was really ruining our lives because I just didn’t have enough ambition or skill, or was lazy.”

But Nastasia found a devoted fanbase and fervent critical acclaim: “For all the raucous, brutal records Albini has recorded, this one, in its own way, is scarier than any of them,” Pitchfork wrote of 2002’s unsettling The Blackened Air . She and Gudjonsson inspired affection, too. “They’re both hugely warm and very funny people,” says Tom Ravenscroft, son of the late John Peel. “I know my dad loved having them around almost as much as he liked her music.” Gudjonsson, says Albini, had a “gigantic capacity for the darkest comedy. I have spent a lot of time around professionally funny people but there was literally nobody on earth funnier in the moment than Kennan.”

But fear came to permeate Nastasia’s life. “Every time I failed, the anger and frustration got bigger and bigger, and it got to daily … bad …” She sighs and averts her gaze. “It’s hard for me to even call it abuse. I feel like it is important to talk about because there were times I just wanted him to hit me because then I could recognise that this is not healthy. But, otherwise, it just felt, like, ‘No, but I am the problem. I am the reason why things are so bad.’” She lost all confidence. “It became, like, ‘I must have brain issues.’”

Around 2007, Nastasia was invited to tour England. There wasn’t enough budget to bring Gudjonsson. She accepted, despite his accusations of betrayal, determined to prove her ambition and capability. One night, he called threatening to kill himself if she didn’t come home. She got friends to intercede, and planned to leave him. He was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and medicated. “And we stayed together,” she says. Nastasia had faith in her capacity to survive, “while I wasn’t quite sure that he could”. It made leaving harder “because I was afraid that what happened” – Gudjonsson’s suicide – “would have happened”.

Belittled, and made to feel completely incapable, Nastasia ultimately “lost control of everything”: her emails, phone calls, finances. They saw a couples therapist, but Gudjonsson limited what they could discuss. His control intensified. Her friends had no idea. She couldn’t see them much. “I was on a shorter and shorter leash,” she says. “It became like the place I was living just got smaller and smaller until it was this box I couldn’t really move in.”

Knowing all this illuminates much of Nastasia’s songwriting: this wasn’t foreboding songcraft but often completely literal. From 2006, On Leaving refers to hiding, refuge and her faith in a fresh start; Outlaster craves having one’s time all over again to do it differently. She often confronts someone’s frustrated ambitions with sympathy and exasperation. Gudjonsson didn’t seem to notice, appraising the songs only on a technical level. “He really must have separated it quite a bit, and I did, too,” says Nastasia. “It was, like, ‘The song works! Let’s do it!’”

As an artist, Gudjonsson made immaculate miniatures and puppets, but was petrified of failure. He sounds like a man trying to create his own impossibly perfect world and prove his worth, I suggest. “I think that’s exactly what it was,” says Nastasia, “because he had a terrible self-esteem issue and he was constantly trying to justify his own existence.”

She recalls the one video they made, for Outlaster’s lovely Cry, Cry Baby . At the last minute, he insisted they needed forget-me-nots. They were out of season. Time was tight. He found similar flowers and painstakingly painted every petal as Nastasia looked on in anguish. Filming was “miserable”, she says. But when she watched it back, “it gets to those damn forget-me-nots and it’s my favourite part, because it looks beautiful”. Gudjonsson would go through hell for the perfect end result. “I want to like the experience,” Nastasia shrugs. “I’d rather go just above mediocre.”

After Outlaster, Nastasia wondered if they would have a better chance together if she abandoned music. They did try recording with Albini again in 2017: Nastasia remembers him ceasing proceedings, disturbed by Gudjonsson’s behaviour; Albini says the session “ran out of steam on its own”. Her only new music after that was a Christmas song in 2018, about her “hope for a new year and strength for what it brings” in the face of financial destitution. Getting day jobs helped, says Nastasia, but they still couldn’t support Gudjonsson’s impossible ambitions. “Housing court became a familiar place. We both became completely unable to take care of ourselves. We were lucky to have such good friends and family willing to bail us out time and again.”

A desperate situation worsened again after they tried the psychedelic plant medicine, ayahuasca, as a last-ditch hope to “jolt us out of this stuckness”, Nastasia says. It helped Gudjonsson for a while. But she thinks they were overdosed by a dodgy shaman. “Maybe I wasn’t in a good mental state to be doing something like that, because I ended up getting PTSD,” she says quietly. “Persistent psychosis. Horrible anxiety. I was bedridden for almost a year.” She became dependent on Gudjonsson. “He did a beautiful job taking care of me,” she says. “But then it became like, when I was getting better, that … wasn’t working out so well.”

Nastasia ultimately realised she would die if she stayed in the relationship. “That’s it: this is my life. I couldn’t do it. So I told him,” she says, looking away again, “that we had to try to be whole people apart because we’re not helping each other. He was, like, ‘You’re really doing this?’”

A day later, she found Gudjonsson’s body in his studio. “I felt entirely responsible, emotionally,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t responsible for it, but I felt like I killed him.”

Nastasia immediately cleaned out the apartment and studio and moved their things into storage. Then the pandemic bit. Mercifully, neighbouring friends invited her to stay at their house and she spent 18 happy months there, reconnecting with friends and family.

Leaving the relationship was “one of the hardest things I’ve done”, she says. “Kennan was a beautiful person, an ugly person, one of the smartest people in the room and the least capable. He was all the things and all at once. I don’t regret my experiences with him.”

She’s trying to understand her actions and help others understand why abused partners stay. She thinks back to her childhood: Nastasia’s mother was “constantly on the verge of dying, my entire life”. Her medication sometimes made her psychotic. “It was this concentrated time of not pulling away – just being right in there, to be as close with her as I could in the time that I could have.” Nastasia was 18 when her mother died, and found herself drawn to risky situations, “edge-of-death kind of behaviour”, an inclination she has to monitor now. “Especially now things feel really great, I’m just waiting for the next horrible thing to happen. I have to check myself to not create anxiety that doesn’t need to be there.”

Soon after the tragedy, Nastasia says, with no small amount of astonishment, she became “unafraid of showing people songs” again, whether or not they were perfect or finished. She sent some to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, started a band with friends in Canada, and wrote Riderless Horse, which she took to Albini (and she intends to finish their curtailed 2017 project). “I just wanted to love it again,” she says of music. “Because I do love it. I’ve always loved it.”

Although Nastasia’s records have only ever had her name on the cover, she calls Riderless Horse her first solo album. It is self-evidently brutal: she sings about being wired to expect punishment, the couple being “deep in the shit, trying to crawl out of this dung”. “I was concerned that voicing these songs would prolong rather than release her from her bouts of despair and mourning,” says Albini, who had Nastasia live with him and his wife, Heather Whinna, for a while, “but I also trusted Nina to know what she needed to do, and as one does with family, I was willing to go to the ends of the earth to help her.”

But it is beautiful, too, the unadorned music – just her and an acoustic guitar – luminous and clarion, the lyrics memorialising the couple’s rare moments of peace, and tracing her burgeoning courage. “I might be mean,” she sings on The Two of Us, “but I just got strong.” She didn’t edit herself. “It was basically vomiting out songs,” she says. “Who knows, in five years, I might go, ‘Ugh!’ Whatever – I really don’t care.” Initially, she felt the same about touring: why endure the stress? “But it felt like great proof that, no, I can do this.”

I notice a tattoo on Nastasia’s ring finger, a black, folk art-style design. She got it after the pandemic lightened and she staged a memorial for Gudjonsson, recreating his studio in her storage space for his loved ones. After her tribute to him, she made one to herself. “I thought, ‘After I finish the last placement of the last puppet, I’m gonna get a tattoo of a ring,’” she says. “If I ever did get into some kind of relationship again, I always remember that I’m married to myself first. So I have to know myself. Not lose myself. Not divorce myself.”

Riderless Horse ends with Nastasia singing: “Oh how I want to live / I want to live / I am ready to live.” She has moved to Vermont, with Misha, where she is getting used to space and quiet. She doesn’t believe in an afterlife, so she’s taking her one chance while she can. “I’ve always been the opposite of wanting to leave the Earth,” she says. “It could be hell, but I want to stick around through it so I could get to something enjoyable because I just love it so much. I want to get it right. Be happy.”

Riderless Horse is released on Temporary Residence on 22 July

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Riderless Horse is my first solo record, and it's the first record my former partner, Kennan Gudjonsson, didnt produce.

I havent made an album since 2010. I decided to stop pursuing music several years after my sixth record, Outlaster, because of unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan. Creating music had always been a positive outlet during difficult times, but eventually it became a source of absolute misery.

Kennan, a cat, and I lived in a studio apartment in NYC for 25 years, finding ways to survive while making records and going on tours. Our apartment was the place where people would come stay, eat, drink, play music, and use our tub. It was quite a home we had created, but it was decaying steadily from the moment we moved in, and in the end, it was as if black mold was growing beneath the surface, undetected, and the two of us were dying and getting too weak to ever leave. We loved each other. We were each other's family, but there was ongoing abuse, control and manipulation. We hid. We didnt want anyone to see how ugly things could get, so we increasingly isolated from our friends and family. We were lost.

On January 26, 2020, I made the decision to separate and live apart, and on January 27, Kennan died by suicide. What a thing, suicide. I can only feel sadness and guilt about it. Maybe Ill have other reactions to it later on.

Riderless Horse documents the grief, but it also marks moments of empowerment and a real happiness in discovering my own capability. Steve Albini produced this record with me, and Greg Norman assisted. The three of us are old friends, and we did a field recording in a guesthouse built like a lighthouse that two very dear friends of mine have in Esopus, NY. It was exactly the right environment to work on this record. We all had meals together, cried, laughed, and told stories. It was perfect. It made me realize how much I love writing, playing and recording music.

Terrible things happen. These were some terrible things. So, what to do learn something valuable, connect with people, move the fuck out of that apartment, remember the humor, find the humor, tell the truth, and make a record. I made a record.

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Nina Nastasia: From the heart, not the throat

Nina nastasia prepares to tour the uk with two unexpected new band-members, article bookmarked.

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Nina Nastasia's last album was called Run to Ruin , and it featured an animal skeleton on its sleeve. The one before that was called The Blackened Air . On stage, Nastasia usually pins her dark hair back in a severe, old-fashioned braid, like a schoolteacher in a horror movie. She writes songs about weakness, fear and heroin, and has them engineered by Steve Albini, the dark dynamic genius behind Nirvana's bleak swansong, In Utero . In short, Nastasia doesn't do sunshine pop.

So it comes as a surprise that, in person, the American singer-songwriter is a picture of cheerful sprightliness, and lists the Pontin's holiday camp at Camber Sands as one of her favourite places in the world. "I'd like to move there permanently," she says of the site of the All Tomorrow's Parties alternative-rock festival, at which she has played twice. For now, she contents herself with living in Manhattan, where she moved from Hollywood.

Nastasia didn't write a note of music until she was 25. "I studied piano when I was little," she says. "And I always enjoyed singing, but I was never in a band. I never really thought to pursue music." The years before she began writing were taken up with the sadnesses and tragedies that inhabit her songs. She won't be drawn on the details, admitting only that "most of them are pretty personal, so sometimes singing them will remind me of something that's sad." She also understands why people say that her music feels haunted: "Well, I've felt pretty haunted sometimes... people I've loved that have died..."

Her first album, Dogs , from 2000, was re-released in the UK yesterday. The girlish singing contrasts with the powerful voice on Run to Ruin , but the album, which Albini named as one of his all-time favourites, is more varied. Though she was accompanied only by Dylan Willemsa's viola and Joshua Carlebach's accordion at All Tomorrow's Parties, Nastasia's usual band surround her clear voice in a storm of discordant strings and percussion that makes her one of the few introspective singer-songwriters whose concerts can captivate even those unfamiliar with her records.

Her latest tour features two additions: Kaigal-ool Khovalyg and Sayan Bapa of Huun-Huur-Tu, the most successful group to come out of Tuva, a region on Russia's Mongolian border. Huun-Huur-Tu's records combine throat-singing with traditional songs about love, horses and the steppe that work with a similar lyrical economy to that of Nastasia's brief tales. Khovalyg and Bapa will play several stringed instruments, including the igil , which provides an eerie background and staccato rhythm to their songs, much as the viola and cello do on Nastasia's records.

There are clear affinities between her music and Huun-Huur-Tu's, though the famous throat-singing won't be heard. "I've asked them not to do any of that," Nastasia says.

'Dogs' is reissued now on Touch & Go; Nina Nastasia tours the UK from 14 to 22 June (w ww.cmntours.org.uk )

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