There is a photograph that Nadia Reid still keeps, taken ten years ago now on an old iPhone 4. It shows the singer at just twenty two, standing in a backyard in Auckland, her face obscured by a bright bloom of sparkler flame. ‘It was just a throwaway photo, but I clung to that image through the years,’ she says. ‘You have those points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change. And that was one of those points; all my cells were changing.’
Reid was drawn to this image once again in the making of her fourth album, details of which are to follow soon. This was the obvious choice for the artwork for her first single Changed Unchained. Her first new music for four years and first for new label Chrysalis Records.
Much had changed since Out of My Province, the album she released in early March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic sent the world into lockdown. In her native New Zealand, restrictions were some of the toughest in the world, the country’s borders remaining closed for over two years. Reid toured the record as best she could, she put on hold her plans to move to the UK, attended to the steady rhythms of living. In July of 2021, she gave birth to her first daughter, Elliotte; her second, Goldie, arrived this past Spring.
On the new single, Reid moves away from her earlier folk inclinations. ‘I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk and being a folk singer. It makes me sort of cringe. It’s too confining.’ Reid expands on her new fuller sound. ‘Changed Unchained is a great example of me bringing lyrics and a melody into the studio, then Tom (Healy, producer) and the band letting the mojo/muse/spirit do its thing in the room. That was a really freeing feeling for me. The song begun in this delicate introspective way and formed into something quite powerful.’
As well as a taste of what’s to come next, Changed Unchained closes a chapter on her first three records as something like a trilogy; music that belonged to a time before everything changed.
Nadia is currently on a sold out solo tour in the UK playing a short run of intimate venues. She’ll then return to tour Europe/UK in March 2025 with a full band in support of her new record.
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