Lately, Nadia Reid has been thinking about the past decade. “Ten years of documenting my life in song,” is one way she describes it. “The highest privilege” is another. With the release of her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness, has come a reassessment of so many moments across those years. “You have points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change,” she says; a realisation now that so many of these new songs have been drawn from the times when “all my cells were changing.” 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.

This period of lockdown and motherhood felt something like an enforced hiatus. “At times it was really difficult,” Reid says. “It was difficult for me to not have things on the calendar. It was difficult to be patient when I had this sense of urgency. I had this fear that it would all disappear, because things move so fast and I was watching my peers do so well. But I needed it. I needed to get off the hamster wheel and reevaluate what it was that I was chasing.”

The result of this period of reflection has been the finest songwriting of Reid’s career. Enter Now Brightness is a record of poise and great beauty, the sound of a cellular shift, of pain giving way to tenderness and joy. It takes its title from a passage in a book Reid was reading — from a line that seemed to call out to her from the page: ‘Brightness entered the study.’ “I wrote that down,” she says. “It was the image of opening the curtain, or turning the light on, or of standing in the wings of a theatre and waiting to go on stage. It’s the idea of life beginning now.”

These songs took shape in what Reid refers to as ‘the luxury of time.’ Each of her previous three albums having been set down in 14 days flat, for the first time in her career, she entered the studio in January 2021 without a clutch of songs written and ready to record. 

There were half-songs and sketches and lyrics untethered from music, but without the natural cycle of touring and promoting her previous record, Reid felt short of the broader experiences that usually fed her songwriting. But through this uncertainty she uncovered a new kind of open creativity. “I guess there was a revelation of: it doesn’t have to be finished, it doesn’t have to be a perfect song before it’s taken to the band.”

Reid was joined in Port Chalmers’ Chicks Hotel studio by long-standing guitarist Sam Taylor and producer Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams). “It’s funny because it is my name on the record but they are so integral to the whole thing, there was such trust between us. Sam has played with me for 12 years, and he’s part of the sound — there’s this mutual understanding that we have. Tom kept encouraging me to keep writing, even when I didn’t think that I could.”

She was pregnant then, and plagued by morning sickness — there are photos of her asleep on the studio sofa and memories of vomiting between takes. But she found impending motherhood, and, later, the intricate process of raising her daughter, brought a new focus for her songwriting. It runs through the tracks on Enter Now — from the exquisite Baby Bright to the remarkable Send It Down the Line.

“I think for me, becoming a mother brought all of [the issues of] the inner child and all of my own mothering up right to the surface,” she says. “A lot of women say that when they’ve had babies they’ve said to their own mums ‘Thank you so much!’ because they have this revelation of what their mother’s sacrificed for them. And I guess I had that in a different way. There’s a lot of stuff on this record to do with my own mum.”

When she was pregnant with her first child, Reid posted a Carl Jung quote to Instagram: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” It was a nod, she says, to the fact that she had grown up keenly aware of how much her own mother had sacrificed to have her. “And that was, partly due to circumstances beyond her control, a lot to carry. It’s too much for children to carry.”
Her conclusion has been that she must continue to live her own creative life alongside mothering — for herself, but also to free her own daughters from ever carrying that same burden. In November, then, Reid will be away from her oldest daughter for three weeks while she tours. “And in the short term that’s hard,” she says. “But I’m not going to not do that, because she needs to see me doing that sort of thing.” In a way that has been complicated and vulnerable and illuminating, Reid has found in motherhood a reason to continue her work as a songwriter. “The stakes feel really high now,” she says, “because someone else matters.”

On this record, Reid moves ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is distinctly her own. “I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk and being a folk singer.  It makes me sort of cringe,” she says. “It’s too confining.” She has grown weary, too, of all the inevitable likenings, to Mitchell and Dylan and more. 

“Everyone wants to have their own individual voice but I’m interested in what it takes to find it,” she says. Oftentimes in the making of this record, it has involved disregarding earlier ideas about the way she felt she ought to write. “Because I think the most dangerous thing for writing is to put down rules.”

On Enter Now she writes in a way that is wide open, and she sought a similar unguardedness in its music, She rethought not just the sound of her songs, but her role in its performance. “The first thing I said to Tom was: ‘I want to move away from these heavily acoustic, guitar-driven songs. Maybe I don’t even play guitar. I just want to have the freedom to sing,’” she says. “It’s not that I don’t love the guitar, it’s just that I’m not a very good guitar player and I don’t really need to be; it’s more of a tool for writing.” 

She thought back to a few years earlier when she performed with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra, standing on stage without her guitar she felt herself “carried by everyone”. She wondered how to find that sensation on record, how to bring it to her more regular performances, and realised that stepping away from the “protection” of her instrument was key. “It’s more vulnerable that way,” she says. “There’s a depth I can get to.”
 
This past year, Reid finally relocated to the UK, settling in Manchester, where not long after their arrival, Goldie was born. With this move has come a reassessment of her career and her craft. She is four albums deep now, steadied by the confidence of experience, and has come to see her first three records as something like a trilogy; music that belonged to a time before everything changed.

Enter Now feels different. It is an album, she says, of departure and questioning, that has reminded her how songwriting can be “the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger.” That through music we can find great change. “I’m so much better off now that it exists,” she says. “Now feels like a new time.”

Praise for 'Out of My Province' (2020)

“Reid channels the personal to universal effect.. Her best album yet” ★★★★ – UNCUT

“Nadia Reid has come of age on her third album.. deeply personal and yet relatable” ★★★★ – The Times

“beautifully crafted, incredibly assured” ★★★★★ – The Skinny UK

“Out of her province maybe, but rarely out of her depth.” 7.5/10 – Under the Radar Mag

“Leaves listeners captivated and exposed.. Reid has created yet another astonishing record.” – The Revue

“Reid’s most polished album to date” 8/10 – The Line of Best Fit

Praise for 'Preservation' (2017)

“One of the year’s landmark releases” ★★★★ – MOJO

“…Continues Reid’s graceful trajectory…” 8/10 – UNCUT

“perfectly crafted statements from a blossoming talent” ★★★★ – The Guardian

“Simply breathtaking” ★★★★★ – Record Collector

“Pretty much off the scale” 8/10 – The Line Of Best Fit

“‘Preservation’ proves that whatever she discovered on her journey, it was very much a worthwhile undertaking.” – Loud & Quiet

Praise for ‘Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs’ (2014)

“Inspired debut by a young New Zealand singer-songwriter you’ll feel you’ve known forever.” ★★★★ – MOJO

“Nadia Reid’s impeccable debut will maybe set a wider orbit in motion” ★★★★ – UNCUT

“For a new artists, her confident grace is all the more remarkable” – Pitchfork

Album Of The Day – BBC 6 Music

“The self assurance of Reid’s voice, artfully undermined by the lyrics, announces an artist wise beyond her years.”
– Sunday Times (UK)

★★★★ – Sydney Morning Herald

“When I hear a young artist making an album as soulful and rich and self-possessed as ‘Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs’, I feel so thrilled not only for the existence of that record but for all the music they will make over all the years to come.” – The Guardian