Interview / Nell Bryden

L’art pour l’art.

In an unusual, almost fairy tale, twist of fate, New York songstress Nell Bryden caused a stir last year when she funded her tour with money earned from a Milton Avery painting found in her attic. Trish Keenan talks to Nell about her last year.

You kept a wonderful blog while you were on tour with the army in Iraq. In the blog you mentioned that you covered a Muddy Waters song. Are you a fan?
Absolutely. Jazz and blues is where I started out, so to do that was sort of a no brainer! I was trying to come up with things that would be a sort of musical meeting for people, sort of something they could latch onto and the blues are sort of that way. And they’re nice and easy to play, plus it’s 40 days and 40 nights and your in the middle of a desert and there’s no water around for miles, so it was sort of ironic!

So who would you like to cover your songs?
Wow, what an interesting question! I think in the same way that I’m covering different songs from all different genres it would be interesting for me to have people cover my songs from different genres, even a traditional Irish musician
would be amazing, because when you hear the song in a different kind of way, it makes you think differently about the whole thing.

Your first tour was self financed, a brave move. What did you learn from that?
Well you look now and you know the recession has hit especially hard in Ireland. I noticed in Iraq, that a lot of people were still serving there because of economic reasons, back home they got laid off. So I think in that light it’s kind of scary to think I sank all this money into a tour and I was thinking “should I have kept it in the bank”. But if I had kept it in the bank, then I would have lost it all in the stock market, so it was actually a great investment because now I actually have a career that I can rely on, because a full time professional musician is all I ever wanted to be anyway.

What did it feel like to find a painting worth $300,000?
It was amazing. It’s one of those things where it felt so much bigger than me, I know that sounds sort of cliché to say, but you find something like that and you just sort of think somebody up there really wants me to keep doing this. It had come right at a time in my life when I was, for whatever it’s worth, I was just thinking and praying and meditating all the time, how can I do music full time. And then suddenly I find this random thing that seemed to be of no value but turned out to be exactly the opposite. It was really so magical that I couldn’t possibly put it down to just pure luck, it had to be something that was meant to be.

It really sounds like a fairy tale!
[laughing] I know! People keep asking me if it’s true and I say yeah it’s really true, there is no other way I could be doing this otherwise. Its great because I was touring before that and I was thinking about it today in baggage claim, how I used to come here and do half tours. I’d take my acoustic guitar and take Bus Eireann, just living on CD sales alone. I think ever musician should do that, night after night just out there but then when I actually had the money, I thought I can do a different tour, I can bring a band with me, do bigger shows and have some promotion behind me which is lovely.

Your album is coming out soon and you have huge promotion behind that. You worked a producer that worked with Joe Jackson, how did it come about?
Well I had this song that I had written in Denmark and I had done the demo over there. My manager sent the demo to David Kershenbaum, he just wrote back saying I love the song, lets work together. It’s not an extravagant album, that was the great thing about finding the painting, we were still very motivated in the studio and focused but it’s just so great to be able to decide what you want your album to be and not have to listen to a record label or a board meeting. It was really just about what we thought sounded great.

So how do you feel about the album coming out, having made it as you did?
I feel kind of wonderfully fatalistic. I think after doing the trip to Iraq and doing a bunch of tours, I think one of the big things in music is you always think your next thing is going to be the thing that breaks you and so I kind of held onto that for a while. But I think I finally have a more mature view of it all. My mother is a singer and she was touring for years and she said that her goal was always to sing in Carnegie Hall and then one day she sang Carnegie Hall and she woke up the next morning thinking ‘oh God now what’ [laughs]. I think I’ve given up thinking that there’s going to be one huge thing that makes me and everybody is suddenly going to know who I am. What I’m really concerned with is having fans.

You have a mix of country, jazz, blues to your music. Where did you come up with your sound?
You know it’s funny because I think it’s sort of been a blessing and a curse to have all those different sounds in there. For me, it’s just literally what I want to hear, because I have so many different musical influences myself. I grew up with classical music, I played cello for about 12 years, I thought I’d be an opera singer at one point and then I realised that I don’t have the voice to be like Maria Callas, it’s just not on the cards [laughs] and then I studied jazz for a number of years and really loved the singing and style of jazz but wanted to sing my own songs and that when I started teaching myself guitar. So I think at that point, I got really into country music, which is funny because I’m a girl from Brooklyn, so country music doesn’t come naturally into my life which meant I had to seek out country records, which was good because then I don’t have the contemporary influences. I think though when you cross the Atlantic there are a couple of words that have different loaded meanings on different sides. Folk music in America, it’s kind of not a great term and then over here you hear the word country and it has all these connotation like Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and I don’t sounds anything like that. For me it was the old music like Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline and that’s what I started getting really into. And a lot of it was just travelling around, you end up being exposed to different kinds of music. When I came over to Ireland I realised the tradition of narrative song writing and that was very freeing for me coz I’m an English major from college so I could stretch out a bit more. I think it’s a bit of a curse because I never know how to categorise myself, especially in a place like the States which is so big and so eager to put everybody into little box so they can fit in the huge system, someone like me has a hard time figuring out where I’m gona plug in. That’s what has been so refreshing about coming to Ireland because people just simply don’t care what category you’re in, it’s just music. It’s either good or it’s not and they like it or they don’t. So in that sense it’s been so much better to be over here and play all this different type of music.
Ireland is like my adopted homeland. I have a second family here. I feel like I have collected families all around the world but Ireland was the first place for me. The jumping off point for Europe. My first tour here, it was amazing to be in a place that you could nationally reach people they would sort of embrace you for being an unknown and I feel like people here really root for the underdog it’s incredible.”

Why did you choose to go back to Iraq a second time?
“I went the first time with this Colonel and it was amazing. He was going to retire and go back to the States so he said why don’t you come back out for one more trip. I had such a good time with the troops the first time. But the thing that was really different about this tour was that we got this documentary filmmaker interested. It seemed like such an opportunity to bring a film crew and film this crazy experience. How many people actually get to go and stay on American military bases and play to audiences and be in a war zone, it’s not something that many people get to do and I figured that it would be really interesting to see the footage from that., if it’s publicised, it’s not news and you’re seeing it on CNN. It can open all these doors for me to meet new people and it can also give them a night to just hang out and check out a little bit from all the stress.“

Nell plays Boyles in Slane on July 2nd. www.nellbryden.com

Interview by: Trish Keenan