Nina Nastasia - London, UK - Autumn 2006
By: Michael Lewin
Tell me a story, I demand.
The woman opposite me won't fall for that. 'You tell me a story,' is the genial, laughing response.
Damn. Think quick.
Of course! The French Spy and the porn film. That always works.
And it does; Rockfeedback may only have two stories with which he bores everyone, but at least he's well practiced at telling them. The mood was certainly in need of some levity: for the majority of our interview, Nina Nastasia is charm, pure gregarious charm. I had just been forcefully asking about her music, however, and she had done a fairly passable impression of a clam.
It's the First of September, but on his arrival Rockfeedback refrains from indulging himself by pinch-punch-first-of-the-monthing the PR type who greets him at the bar. Congratulate me.
I also refrain myself from doing it to the next lady I encounter. She's severely dressed, all blacks and greys and tight-fitting, dark-dark hair scraped back. I smile politely, then recognise her and greet her with significantly more warmth, silently cursing morning bleariness - I am interviewing her, after all.
Nina Nastasia, then. She's a musician; let's call her a folk musician. Why? Because I can. But also because it quite suits her - these days the term is loose, a garment that might happily fit many regardless of their shape. Once, perhaps, this was far from true, but such definite times as Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger might have inhabited are faded, fractured, gone. It's a broad term now, lazily used and often.
So why would I use it? Because it really does ring true in this instance.
Think 'Folk': villages; dirt roads; carts and horses. Something archaic, something lost and something grounded, earthy, humane. Something very possibly dead, but very well remembered. Something...personal.
Nastasia's palate is sepia, the landscape a turn of the century American midwest Gothicana. Listening to her music, one is often put in mind of late daguerreotype portraits of mildly wealthy landowners that linger in collective memory, portraits of Lincoln-esque men standing all too straight-backed and puritan, one hand lingering prohibitively and dominatingly on the shoulder of their seated and primly-postured wives. Posed and stiff, certainly; but there is a peculiar intimacy for the modern viewer, almost a transgression of the privacy of the subjects' ended lives.
All of which sounds very not urban - odd, really, considering Nastasia has been a city girl all her life: childhood in Hollywood, and New York for her twenties and thirties.
While she may be rather terse concerning her music, she speaks with vivid and illuminating enthusiasm on other subjects, and seems quite happy discussing many aspects of her life. Perhaps this isn't too surprising from a rather confessional songwriter, one whose lyrics - though often obfuscated - convey a deep sense of personal emotion, almost to the point of leaving the listener feeling rather like a voyeur.
Her father was an artist and an art teacher. 'He had a favourite model', she says, 'a beautiful, voluptuous woman called Frances. I used to come home from school...I don't know how old, I never remember - I'd come home, and she'd be lying naked in the bath and he'd be painting her.'
Brilliant. If slightly weird.
'Yeah, she had these amazing hats. They were huge, and floppy.'
She shows me, miming a hat brim stretching a foot either side of her head and down.
'When he was teaching, sometimes he'd take her along as a model. He once had her in the centre of the room, as you do in life drawing classes, and he projected a map of the world onto her ass. He said that it emphasised the contours of her body, her curves...'
And once more she gestures illustrative, holding her hands quite a way apart and curving them round slightly in the universally recognised mime for booty, grinning big.
Brilliant.
Nina Nastasia has a new album out - naturally, otherwise why would she talk to me? It is called 'On Leaving'. When I speak to her, however, I have yet to hear it.
I ask her if it is good.
She laughs at me.
I ask her if I will like it.
She keeps laughing at me, and tells me off for asking impossible questions.
Very well. Let me tell you about it: it is very good, and I do like it very much indeed.
'On Leaving' is instantly recognisable as an album by Nina Nastasia - this is because she has A Voice, one perhaps even deserving of entire capitalisation: A VOICE.
It is an incredible voice. Singer-songwriters, well, I daren't guess how many there are but seeing as all you need is a throat, a guitar, some primitive means of recording and wilfully, often mistakenly, high self-regard, I'd estimate that the population of India would be a safe numerical comparison. Most of them are DREADFUL. Including you, whatever your partner / friend / mother / reflection may tell you.
The good ones, of course, have something truly unique. Sufjan Stevens has a desperately insipid voice and his lyrics make me angry, but his song composition is simply stunning. That fella from Neutral Milk Hotel, well, he's offering something pretty unusual. And you can always tell a Bright Eyes song, even if he's making ill-advised electric twaddle like 'Digital Ash...'
Nina's songs are lovely, thin, floating things, delicate strands of luminous hair and percussive flashes of starlight on a rich black background.
But oh! Her voice... That's where it's at. She's with you, for you. She's right there, her chin on your shoulder, gently cooing dark lullabies while she looks in your eyes and you can't quite keep the breath in your chest because you want to sigh happily. She's singing for you.
Except...she's not. She's singing for herself, not for you, you arrogant fool, and not for an audience and CERTAINLY not for fame. She's singing and she's playing and she's writing and recording because she, well, needs too.
And it's because of this, I imagine, that Nina Nastasia just doesn't really want to talk about her music.
She moved to New York on a whim. There, she worked as a waitress in a Mexican café/restaurant on the first floor of "some building".
'People got drunk,' she tells me, 'especially at lunch.'
Fantastic; that's what I like to hear.
'The place had big windows at the front, and you could see in from the buildings on the other side of the street. There was a guy...'
She giggles. I'm curious.
'Ok, so for a while there was a guy living opposite and, around the end of the lunch shift every day, he'd stand in front of his window and get undressed and...well, I'm over here. What would you call it?'
I hazard a guess. He was wanking?
'Oh, do you not have a better word? We say that, too. I wanted a word I hadn't heard before.'
I apologise for my inadequate vocabulary. She's laughing anyway, so it obviously isn't that disappointing. I manage to refrain from asking if anything else was inadequate, and the conversation moves on.
It was while working in the café that Nastasia began to write and play music. She'd play a lot.
'It was a distraction, a way of getting out of myself and that was all.'
She still practices in the bathroom, now that of the flat she shares with Kennan Gudjonsson in Chelsea Village (Kennan, by the way, is wonderful. Prior to meeting Nina, I sit with him and the PR girl in the bar. He's a sturdy chap, bearded like men should be. In his hand, he holds a magazine called 'Beard'. He is hilarious), a flat that is apparently a mini boho paradise, which would certainly suit them. She plays for maybe 'three or four hours a day', and has never had any objections from the neighbours.
I think for a little while, and realise something needs to be queried: why the bathroom?
'Well, it's a small flat and I like and I need my space. Plus the acoustics are great.'
'For so many years, even before I came to New York, back when I was in Hollywood, I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going,' she tells me. Perhaps sensing I'm ready to spring a question about her music in light of this, she elegantly shifts the conversation to me, asking how I came to write for such an illustrious, renowned organ as the one you read even now.
This is an oft-used ploy on her behalf, one I think is in some way representative of her character, and even more of her status as that kind of confessional singer-songwriter.
She reveals that for some time she wanted to be a journalist, inspired by a trip to Nicaragua with a doctor friend in her early twenties.
'He was going over there to do aid work, and invited me along. There were a lot of journalists, both helping out and reporting on the humanitarian situation. I found it so remarkable, it was something I quite desperately wanted to be a part of...I thought it could be the direction I was looking for - but I found that it didn't suit me. It didn't feel right.'
And music did?
'When I went into the studio for [first album] 'Dogs' sessions, yes, it did feel right.'
And that's it. She doesn't so much refuse to elaborate, it just doesn't seem to interest her talking about it all that much. Neither is she particularly forthcoming on the subject of her albums past - she becomes a little vague and a little wistful, more likely to passively agree to my questions and interpretations than correct them or challenge them.
Which is completely unrepresentative of the interview. Her demeanour is definitely not high-strung, but she radiates a perpetual ready-to-be-enthused interest in everything around her. It's really rather charming.
She once said that she found it "strange to hear what conclusions one comes to about my personality on listening to a few songs".
Reflecting on meeting her, I wonder about that. Nastasia's music is undoubtedly her own; that much is apparent. Her vague preciousness on the subject seems protective, protective of something she found that was very much hers, during 'a time when I really was quite miserable', working in the café.
It's no wonder she's rather terse. There aren't many artists who can honestly talk about their creative processes and production, whether because of a desire to keep safe something sacred or whether because they cannot or will not understand it for themselves. It's particularly true of artists with a long career behind them - they grow out of the youthful surprise one has at one's own thoughts when they're new and exciting, and grow out of their willingness to discuss their processes and theories as though they'd found something completely original that they just have to share, because they feel like they are treading paths to places no one has ever been - when, in fact, so many people have gone there before that the path is one of concrete and restaurants, toilets and even hotels line the way.
Rather, the process becomes something desperately personal, yes, and intuitive. Looking at it too closely causes fractures, and it loses any originality - becoming formalised, deliberate, and the very opposite of intuitive. Your creative output becomes representative not of who you are but, of course, who you were. It's actually rather refreshing to encounter someone who treats their music privately, rather than the onanistic mire of the young, over-sexed, over-inebriated and over-confident just bursting with their own fabulousness.
Nastasia's music, as I said, has a strong flavour of voyeurism. It's not quite heart on the sleeve material, and nor is it particularly time of the month music. Her songs and lyrics, depressing as they might at times be, angry as they may be at others, are not so bombastic and, rather, are much more delicate than either of those. The voyeurism comes from the guilt of feeling such a connection with her, of feeling like you know her.
Of course, we don't know her, but that doesn't make such a feeling false. It comes from her voice, mainly, that voice which seems to originate two feet away, not removed by the various machineries of recording and playing. Whatever gives her voice that power, that intimacy - well, she's right not to share it. She shares enough.
Artists in this article: Nina Nastasia, Jim White,