It illustrates nicely the bigger picture, Tom McKinlay discovers.
An unscripted smile plays round Nadia Reid’s mouth in the video for new single Hold It Up, as the camera creeps in for a closer view of the singer.
She might well smile. It’s a joyously soulful song and the video brings its own blue skies to an otherwise overcast Piha day before bursting into dance in the celebratory chorus.
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland dancer and choreographer Oli Mathieson leaps into the frame, building a flowing human trigonometry of shapes over the melody. Perhaps reminding us all that we needn’t just listen to Reid hushed and reverent, struck again by her voice and command, but we can move too.
On the phone from what is now home in Manchester, Reid is entertained by the suggestion Mathieson’s lithe boogie might inspire responses to her new music.
"Yeah, I love that idea."
But she gives credit where it is due.
"That was a decision that Oscar Keys, who directed the video, made," she says of Mathieson’s commission, while pointing out that it’s not the first of her videos to incorporate contemporary dance.
Preservation, from 2016, did too. Although it’s safe to say that song’s down-tempo contemplation was less likely to have prompted her own response to hearing Hold It Up playing on the radio.
"I was listening to that song being played on BBC 6 Music and, you know, I was dancing away in the kitchen with my little girl," she recalls.
It turns out Reid has been called to dance in new ways just recently — literally and otherwise.
"Since I’ve arrived in Manchester I’ve been going to this, sort of, this dance fitness class."
It doesn’t sound like there’s any "sort of" about it, but we’ll let Reid away with a qualification this once.
"It’s mostly, I’d say, women in their 40s and 50s. And it’s a fitness class, but it’s anything from Elton John to Beyonce and the music is like really loud, like way too loud. And you have to dance for an hour, you follow all the moves. And I absolutely love it. But I think if I was still living in Dunedin I don’t know if I could do it.
"I don’t know if I could do something like that in such a free way, because no-one knows me from anyone. You know? I’m just Elliotte’s mum from the school.
"There’s a real freedom in being completely anonymous and being in a dance class on a Monday night and realising that I love dancing."
Which does rather sum up the mood, the energy, that Reid radiates — even down a globe-spanning length of fibre-optic cable — and indeed shares on new album Enter Now Brightness, long-player number four from the formerly Ōtepoti Dunedin singer-songwriter. An album she says emerged from a time of "cellular change".
The last line of Hold It Up speaks to a similar sort of sentiment: "I see her flying/she must be going somewhere/I can believe in it".
Love has a lot to do with it.
In two other videos for early Enter Now Brightness singles, there’s a second presence, that of Reid’s elder daughter Elliotte. She’s a good bit of the brightness that lights the record.
"There’s 50% of me that wants to keep it really sacred and a private part," Reid says of motherhood’s joys.
"And then there’s another part of me that just wants to sort of, you know, scream it from the rooftops like it’s, you know, this incredible ..."
Reid struggles to find words sufficiently evocative to finish the sentence, as surprised as anyone to find herself in this position.
"Because I had such, before I had children, I had such strong ideas — wherever it’s come from of, you know: ‘children will ruin your life or you can’t have a career and a child and it’ll ruin your music career’."
It’s a messaging that just bubbles away everywhere, she says.
"And now that I’m doing it and it’s enhanced me, deepened my existence, I think it should be celebrated."
This upward swing in experience and expectation of life predates the arrival of Elliotte, in 2021, and her sister, Goldie, more recently, but it’s all part of a trajectory, Reid says, that’s found expression in the new album.
There was her marriage in 2021 and the continued steady progress of her career in music.
"I was feeling very fulfilled after having a very, very tumultuous and sad young childhood, without putting it too bluntly, you know. You just have to listen to those two first albums, it’s very tinged with melancholy, which is not uncommon for people to feel like that, especially in their teens. So I was starting to reclaim the joy and then, of course, you just can’t help it. I couldn’t help but feel tremendous ecstatic joy and a deep enhancement."
Reid’s talk of cellular change seems to involve a mashup of the figurative with the material and biological, a shorthand for all sorts of things.
"I think I do quite a good job at blending and within the songs there’s a blend of the truth and story and metaphor," she says. "But at the heart of it, it is really personal. And it is essentially, without being too sort of cringey, it’s like, these four records are the diary of my last 10 years.
"I hope no-one would take it literally. But it’s such a crazy thing, you know, that this is kind of my career and it’s so intertwined with what’s going on for me as a person. Which is a positive and a negative thing, I suppose."
And then there’s the change of scenery too, the shift to live in Manchester, which, 14 months in, also seems to have gone very well.
"I’m very fond of it now," she says of the northern England city, population about 550,000.
Reid had been thinking about moving to the United Kingdom since at least 2019, but international events intervened, meaning she was unduly ready to nest and put down roots by the time it actually happened.
"I suppose the thing I wasn’t expecting was the warmth of the people up north," she says.
"And because I was quite pregnant when we got here, I started doing a pregnancy yoga group pretty soon after we moved and so all of a sudden I just had all these friends. You know, more than I could really handle.
"Having a small little baby is such a great way to meet people."
Manchester ticked another important box, as that’s where her management is based.
"My manager, Andy, said, ‘OK, these are the suburbs you want to live in’. And we just did it."
The upsides of the shift were not entirely a surprise, or at least unheralded.
Reid recalls a conversation she had with Mozart Fellow and contemporary music polymath Sean Donnelly on the footpath outside a party at Dunedin bar Woof, shortly before she was due to fly out.
"And he said to me that moving to the UK, it’s going to be so great for your writing, just to have that distance from New Zealand, from the place that you know so intimately and the place you grew up. It’s going to be really good for your writing. And I’d never thought about that."
That idea found its expression in the final song on the album, Even Now, which talks about "distance is required, distance is desired, even now".
However, most of the music for Enter Now Brightness was recorded before Reid left for the UK, in sessions stretching from 2021 to 2023, including at Chicks Hotel in Port Chalmers.
"So that was a good two-year span, which was the first time it had actually taken that long.
"My other three albums were made in about two weeks, 10 days."
The change wasn’t a deliberate choice, she says, it just took longer to write the songs this time. There were four or five back in 2021 when recording began, the remainder emerging as work continued.
Indeed, for the first time Reid took half-songs and sketches, "lyrics untethered from music", into the studio to work on with her band and producer Tom Healy.
"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’."
The approach involved a moment of relief, she says.
"Because I kind of realised, I kind of truly then realised what the role of producers is. You know, I really trusted Tom and I got to know him really well throughout the process through the sheer amount of time we were spending together and how much time he put into the project."
As if to underline the point, when asked about some of the production choices on the album, Reid defers to Healy, insisting he’d be more eloquent on the topic.
"I’m sure there are decisions that he made that I wasn’t privy to."
Continuity on the album is provided by Reid’s band — Sam Taylor’s impressionistic washes and squalls of guitar noise remain prominent in the mix — which she also credits for allowing her to do things differently.
After 12 years together, she could be confident of arriving with a melody and some lyrics and knowing they could finish the work together, she says.
"So, I suppose the album is a result of deep bonds with these people — I couldn’t have done that with just anyone — especially someone like Sam Taylor, who’s played on all four of the albums. There’s this sort of unspoken communication."
In many instances it wasn’t a matter of making conscious decisions and there was little discussion, she says.
"We can get in the room together and we can record and we can just see what happens and do the thing, which was a really freeing experience."
The change in process contributed to a move further from Reid’s folk roots — a journey long since begun.
When releasing the album’s first single last year, Reid commented that she felt uncomfortable about the word "folk".
"It makes me sort of cringe. It’s too confining," she said.
However, Reid also provides a rapproachment.
"I think in my heart, folk music is where it all started ... you could argue that everything kind of starts with three chords and the truth."
Her music has been following a natural progression, she says, supported by a growing confidence. That’s given her the courage to step out from behind the safety of her guitar, she says, to be the singer.
"I think it was a concert in 2021, no 2022, a concert at the Auckland Town Hall with [the Auckland Philharmonia] and pianist Somi Kim from the New Zealand Trio. And I was singing unaccompanied — well, with the orchestra — and it was a shift for me to do something like that, that possibly would have really frightened me six or seven years ago."
That sort of boldness is on display in the album’s first single, Changed unchained, released last year, which stands a good distance from folk music. Uncut magazine’s reviewer described it as having an "’80s wallop" — synths and thumping percussion.
But as the Uncut review also observes, "Impressively, the lustrous voiced Reid has changed tracks without derailing the train."
It’s been five years between albums for Reid, but the time has elapsed in a useful, life-affirming way she says, dissipating worries the pause was too long.
"I did time it well because I’ve had this beautiful year of maternity rest with my little one. And, you know, I was really pushing for it to come out last year, but the label and the team were like, ‘let’s just hold fire a little bit’.
"I think I need to give myself some credit for, you know, these two little beings. It’s big stuff."
In Aotearoa, the album is being released on Reid’s Slow Time Records, but she’s signed with international label Chrysalis for the rest of the world.
It’s a multi-album deal, Enter Now Brightness being the first.
"It offers up a whole world of, like, a team, basically, you know," Reid says.
"Like, a marketing team and all these sort of people. This whole release has been, for the first time, working with this larger team and it’s made me realise, to release the record now, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of people. And so that’s a new side of it, which is a privilege."
Family, band, label, Manchester. Reid appears to have joined in a dance with all sorts of community.
"Whether it gets the album into more people’s lives, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see."
The album
• Enter Now Brightness, Nadia Reid’s new album is out now.
