Aotearoa’s sweetheart, Nadia Reid is breaking free from folk to create powerful, expansive soundscapes amidst signing to Chrysalis Records. Also new Single & Video, ‘Changed Unchained has been released + New Zealand tour dates announced.
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. 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 earlier this year.
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.
This November, acclaimed songwriter and New Zealand’s sweetheart, Nadia Reid, returns home from her SOLD OUT solo tour in the UK for a series of pre-summer shows in some of her favourite towns. Joined by her resounding band—guitarist Sam Taylor, drummer Joe McCallum, and bassist Richie Pickard—Reid will also perform as a duo with Taylor for one of the New Zealand dates.
Listen to ‘Chained Unchained’:HERE
