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Folk Singer Nadia Reid On Her Move To The UK, Motherhood And 'Reclaiming Joy'
'Watch me in my great departure' sings Nadia Reid on her dazzling new album Enter Now Brightness.
In the wake of the pandemic which stopped her budding international career in its tracks in 2020, Reid had itchy feet and, thanks to her mother, access to a British passport.
In 2023 - with her partner, their toddler and another baby on the way - the award-winning songwriter left New Zealand to make a new life in the UK.
She tells Charlotte Ryan about finding self-compassion via motherhood, leaving "deep sadness" in the dust and the joy of anonymity in a fitness class.
Reid says the "deep sense of sadness" that defined her first two albums Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs (2015) and Preservation (2017) was that of a young woman whose childhood "wasn't as good as it could have been".
It's no one's fault, she says, that as the only child of an immigrant single mother herself doing it tough, she struggled for many years with self-acceptance.
That changed a few years ago with the birth of Reid's first daughter which she says filled her with deep empathy not only for the baby but for her own inner child who had long been "pushed down".
"[Motherhood] really softened me."
The best gift a parent can give a child is a steadfast commitment to their own fulfilment and happiness, Reid believes.
When guilt about being away from her daughters hits, Reid finds solace in Carl Jung's maxim that "the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents".
Newly married and touring the world, Reid felt like she was starting to find her musical "stride" as she released her third album Out of My Province in March 2020.
But that very same month the Covid-19 pandemic swiftly stopped her blossoming international career in its tracks.
In the five years since Reid says she's been "gradually reclaiming joy" while doing her best to ignore the "heavy" stuff like buried emotions, the news and the inevitable death of one's parents.
While Reid feels blessed to be a New Zealander, she says her life in Aotearoa was starting to feel "ceilinged-in" before the move. Keen to explore the world, regaining some anonymity appealed, too.
"I wanted to live in a big city and go to like a dance [fitness] class where no one knows who I am."
Thanks to her British-born mother, Reid was able to get a UK passport to try out life in "this mystical place where I knew I was from but I never got to go".
While she feels lucky to now be living with her family in Manchester, planning your family's international move in the wake of a pandemic while pregnant and parenting a toddler isn't something Reid recommends.
"Tangled up in pieces" is how she felt while trying to organise her family's exit from New Zealand, but outside fellow musician Dudley Benson's 40th birthday party, Sean 'SJD' Donnelly offered a fresh perspective.
"[Donnelly] said to me 'Going to the UK is going to be really good for your writing - to have some distance from the place that you grew up and place you know really intimately'."
The idea that moving far away from their home country can help people contextualise their own personal history was one Reid says she hadn't considered before her friend pointed it out.
"Distance is required, Distance is desired" she sings in the new song Even Now in homage to Donnelly's timely encouragement.
Reid says that before she was feeling "in a bit of a rut" with guitar-based songwriting before recording Enter Now Brightness in 2021.
The idea of laying her guitar down - "not forever but just for a while" - was the only one she gave producer Tom Healy before they began working on the album.
Over a series of short recording sessions between 2021 and 2023, Reid says Healy earned her "deep trust".
He also understood her inability to talk about creative work before it's completed - whether that's an album or its cover shoot.
"I don't know if it's a Kiwi thing or it's just the way I like to work but I almost can't imagine it until it's done ... I couldn't imagine it up until it was finished."
- My Current Song - Nadia Reid
- INTERVIEW: Nadia Reid at the APRA Silver Scrolls Award Ceremony 2020
- Reid & Ruins Live on Music 101
- NZ Live: Nadia Reid
- Nadia Reid: Out Of My Province
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