NELL BRYDEN sings from the heart and shoots from the hip. The blonde bombshell from Brooklyn has the urban lifestyle in her blood, the country/folk spirit of Americana in her soul, and the great American songbook in her head.
Love and loss are the fuel that lights her songwriting fire. Rhythm and melody come as naturally to her as a morning latte in a Greenwich Village café. And a well-travelled journey through life provides a rich seam of experience to mine.
She’s a native New Yorker with a fondness for old-time music and vintage clothes, who’s seen the world and absorbed its musical influences: country and jazz, blues and soul, and more besides. You can hear as much of it – or as little – as you care to find in her music. Because, for all its familiar scents and flavours, her songs are distinctly her own.
Nell Bryden was born and raised in a bohemian quarter of Brooklyn where her mother Jane was a classical soprano who sang at Carnegie Hall and her father Lewis a renowned landscape painter whose works hang in some of America’s finest museums, galleries and private collections.
At only four weeks of age, her mother brought her on a concert tour of South America, planting the seed that has so beautifully blossomed on ‘What Does It Take’. “I always knew I would end up on stage,” says the ebullient singer. “As a child I used to put on plays with my friends – back when I was seven I wrote and directed a version of The Little Shop Of Horrors.”
For ten years she studied the cello and dreamed of becoming an opera singer until the day she first heard Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. “And that was that. I was 15 and that was the first time I realised it’s more about your personality than your technical prowess. People fell in love with Janis because she gave it everything.”
By the time she left high school, Nell still wanted to be the new Maria Callas, but that changed on a gap year trip to Australia, where she turned her travel diary into song lyrics, bought a cheap guitar, and began to sing her own songs for the first time.
Further travels broadened an already inquisitive mind: to Arizona, where she made daily free-fall jumps and lived on a drop zone; to Thailand to work in a refugee camp; to Wellesley College in Boston, where she graduated in English Literature with honours and began to play in public for the first time.
Back in New York City, she poured out songs in the aftermath of 9/11, delving into old American country music for solace, and recorded an album in Nashville. “But,” she admits, “I still hadn’t found my voice.”
She started another album in New Orleans, where the Big Easy’s musical melting pot – “jazz, blues, folk, country, cajun, zydeco… everything except rock!” - inspired her to find her true voice for the first time.
Then came Ireland, which took her to its music-loving bosom when she booked herself a month-long tour through the internet, and arrived in a foreign land with “just my suitcase and my acoustic guitar.” She travelled from gig to gig by bus, and stayed on couches “that every passing musician had slept in for the last ten years.” But it worked: “I played 30 venues and all of them booked me to come back.” So she did – time and again.
Lastly came Iraq, following a chance meeting with a US Army colonel at South By South West, where she set aside her political preconceptions to entertain the troops – not once, but twice – and became, in the process, a Forces Sweetheart.
Her greatest stroke of good fortune, however, came in her own backyard. “I was back at my dad’s studio, out of cash, going through some of his old paintings, when I found an unfamiliar one at the back of a box in his attic.”
It turned out to be a gift that her father had got her as a baby, and forgotten all about. In the intervening years its painter, Milton Avery, had posthumously become a major artist. “So I took it to Sotheby’s and it was sold at auction for $270,000.”
Nell used the cash to re-record the album she had left uncompleted in New Orleans, this time with Grammy-winning record producer David Kershenbaum at the helm. The result is ‘What Does It Take’, a collection of songs and styles spanning her many years on the road. It displays a confidence that can only come from years of constant touring, and a sound that taps into the musical past while remaining very much of its time.
“I don’t see myself as a heritage act,” stresses Nell, “but most of my influences are songs that come from an earlier era. I just feel they crafted songs so well then.”
The album "What Does It Take" came out October 12, 2009 in the UK (Cooking Vinyl), with six playlisted singles on BBC Radio 2.
The story of Nell’s second album, Shake the Tree, began at Metrophonic Studios just outside London in summer 2010. It was there that she met Patrick Mascall, a British guitarist and songwriter with more knowledge of American culture than most Americans. The pair immediately hit it off after discovering a mutual admiration for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, and quickly began writing a flood of songs that would later form the backbone of Shake the Tree.
On a car ride home from the studio one evening, Patrick played Grammy-winning producer Mark Taylor some of their work and plans for cutting an album immediately ensued. In early 2011 a band of carefully selected musicians went into West London’s State of the Ark studio. Owned by legendary songwriter Terry Britten and renowned for its large collection of vintage gear, including an old EMI console complete with “Mick and Keith” scratched into it courtesy of some former users, the studio provided the perfect environment to bring the album to life.
“Shake the Tree” is a metaphor for the way Nell has approached her career in the music industry. Never one to wait for others to come to her, she's applied her New Yorker can-do attitude to everything from touring to releasing records. When she started touring Europe, rather than courting uninterested booking agents, she set up 250 shows a year herself, staying on the road for four years. She has been self-releasing her own EPs and albums for the last ten years, doing licensing deals with record labels in various territories. Realizing that the days of being “discovered” by a record label are over, witnessing the seismic shifts throughout the music business, Nell has stayed true to her music and her vision, always finding a way to connect with her fans and continually “Shake the Tree.”
THE NEW ALBUM "SHAKE THE TREE" WILL BE RELEASED IN MAY 2012.
NELL BRYDEN sings from the heart and shoots from the hip. The blonde bombshell from Brooklyn has the urban lifestyle in her blood, the country/folk spirit of Americana in her soul, and the great American songbook in her head.
Love and loss are the fuel that lights her songwriting fire. Rhythm and melody come as naturally to her as a morning latte in a Greenwich Village café. And a well-travelled journey through life provides a rich seam of experience to mine.
She’s a native New Yorker with a fondness for old-time music and vintage clothes, who’s seen the world and absorbed its musical influences: country and jazz, blues and soul, and more besides. You can hear as much of it – or as little – as you care to find in her music. Because, for all its familiar scents and flavours, her songs are distinctly her own.
Nell Bryden was born and raised in a bohemian quarter of Brooklyn where her mother Jane was a classical soprano who sang at Carnegie Hall and her father Lewis a renowned landscape painter whose works hang in some of America’s finest museums, galleries and private collections.
At only four weeks of age, her mother brought her on a concert tour of South America, planting the seed that has so beautifully blossomed on ‘What Does It Take’. “I always knew I would end up on stage,” says the ebullient singer. “As a child I used to put on plays with my friends – back when I was seven I wrote and directed a version of The Little Shop Of Horrors.”
For ten years she studied the cello and dreamed of becoming an opera singer until the day she first heard Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. “And that was that. I was 15 and that was the first time I realised it’s more about your personality than your technical prowess. People fell in love with Janis because she gave it everything.”
By the time she left high school, Nell still wanted to be the new Maria Callas, but that changed on a gap year trip to Australia, where she turned her travel diary into song lyrics, bought a cheap guitar, and began to sing her own songs for the first time.
Further travels broadened an already inquisitive mind: to Arizona, where she made daily free-fall jumps and lived on a drop zone; to Thailand to work in a refugee camp; to Wellesley College in Boston, where she graduated in English Literature with honours and began to play in public for the first time.
Back in New York City, she poured out songs in the aftermath of 9/11, delving into old American country music for solace, and recorded an album in Nashville. “But,” she admits, “I still hadn’t found my voice.”
She started another album in New Orleans, where the Big Easy’s musical melting pot – “jazz, blues, folk, country, cajun, zydeco… everything except rock!” - inspired her to find her true voice for the first time.