I have an antique armoire in the corner of my closet—dark wood with metal ornamentation—handed down to me by my cousins’ grandmother, who had no granddaughters of her own. It has become a de facto altar for me, on which I have placed a genealogy of jewelry: the lockets that belonged to my mother and her grandmother, engraved with their initials, men (now ghosts) inside; bracelets my mother wore in college, now tarnished black; her mother’s clear plastic butterfly clip I remember clasping over her thin, white ponytail after twisting it into a loose bun for her; my father’s mother’s green stone and sparkling necklaces; my daughter’s bracelets, beaded or woven and given to me as gifts, neon bright and hung behind the more ancient pieces as if backlighting them. I picture this space in my home as I listen to Nina Winder-Lind’s Wild Love with its plethora of textures: brass flourishes, tinny glockenspiel, carnival organ, fluorescent electric guitar.
But it’s not only her album’s textural elements that call my altar, with its heirlooms, to mind as I listen. It’s Wild Love’s embrace of the ancestral, its naming of women’s inherited shared struggles, and its calling forth and honoring of Winder-Lind’s “Foremothers” on the so-titled track that closes out this eleven-song collection. I want to pass its lyrics down to the young girls in my life and hold them up for my own foremothers to admire and recognize as truth.
The album acknowledges girlhood/womanhood in its full animality. Winder-Lind’s “You’re Not an Angel” reminds us of our corporeal reality: “you’ve got bruises you’ve got smells / you’ve got blisters you are cells / building a body you’re electricity / you’re energy you’re acids and oils / you are warmth / and breath.” We’re earthly beings here, “flesh and depth.” Winder-Lind’s voice goes from wail to roar to croak to cry, and she ends most lines with a guttural growl—at times a purr.
A classically trained cellist, she also takes on piano and guitar for this batch of songs (electric guitar for the sake of her matriliny, she says in “Foremothers”). Other instruments make appearances as well, evoking other emotions with the tones they add to the sonic picture. She ends “Headfirst” in anthemic fashion, à la Patti Smith, by repeating the line, “thank God for all that I feel,” along with her band in-studio. At the conclusion of this album, that was my sentiment exactly, and I was thrilled to speak with her directly about how she crafted it.
The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.
Meredith Hobbs Coons: I was about to say your album is lovely, but I don’t think that’s what you were going for with this. What were you interested in conveying?
Nina Winder-Lind: Yeah, I wouldn’t describe it as lovely. That’s not the word I would pick. It’s a funny word for me, a very British word that people just kind of say. I think the album is quite intense.
Meredith: Intense is a much better word for it. I feel like it really embraces the animal within the woman. There’s definitely a thread in it that’s explicitly feminist in a way that you don’t always get to hear. There’s courage in how you tackled some of these subjects. Was that something you intentionally sought out, or did it evolve that way?
Nina: I didn’t plan anything. It was like all these songs came out of me, because they had to. There was a necessity to that process of writing these songs. It was like, “Okay, I needed to say this.” Afterward, I could look at the songs and the album and see what was going on there. Because I wrote these songs over quite a few years, there were a lot of different experiences in there, and a lot of them dealt with working, being a girl, being a woman, and why I am what I identify as.
Meredith: When you grouped them together, did these songs feel like they naturally formed a collective, or were they songs you wrote outside of your project, The New Eves, that just found a home together on this album?
Nina: In The New Eves, we write together as a group. We improvise, jam, and write the lyrics together. It’s much more communal that way. Then I’ve had my solo thing on the side. Writing my own songs is a very different process, and it’s a bit more intimate and personal for me.
Meredith: That makes sense. It’s a different songwriting approach: the individual versus the group. How did you begin writing songs?
Nina: I don’t know. It took me ages. I wrote a lot of bad songs before I started writing good ones, for sure. You’ve got to work it out, and no one can tell you how. You have to find your own way there. I went to classical music college. That’s when I started having my own ideas, and I wrote my first compositions, but it took me a long time to find a place where I felt in touch enough with myself to write songs that felt representative of me and that I felt good about. I’ve noticed that with musicians that I know who are more classically trained versus the ones who are self-taught, there’s a bit of a block when it comes to unlocking the creative component of making music, because so much of their learning is so structured on formal training and doing things the ‘right’ way.
Meredith: Did you feel like you came up against that in your journey as a songwriter? Was that a block for you?
Nina: I felt like I had really wanted to express myself, and I had so many ideas, but the teaching was so rigid and structured that they wouldn’t allow that. I remember I took a class—composition or whatever—and you had to write a little piece. I wrote this melody—I seem to get ideas when I’m moving, and so I would record things on my phone. My teacher was an old man who did not have an open mind at all, and he was like, “Oh, you can’t do this,” and I was like, “What?” He said, “This melody is wrong,” and I was like, “What do you mean? I made it up.” That was the atmosphere of the college. I was frustrated because I wanted to explore all these things and kept being turned down, but I had something to bounce off of at college, because I was really angry and wanted to rebel against them. The block was more technical, actually, because I didn’t know how to improvise. I didn’t know how to play something that wasn’t there, and I had to learn that by throwing myself out there and playing with other people when I left college.
Meredith: Tell me about how you found that community that gave you that sense of permission to improvise and work these things out.
Nina: It was quite amazing, because I finished college in Stockholm, then pretty much moved straight away to Brighton, kind of on a whim. Then, I was put in touch with this girl I didn’t know. There was a loose link to one of my family members, and they were like, “Oh, you’re going to Brighton? You need to meet this girl,” and we got on really well. She was in a band, and she was like, “Oh, we need a cellist,” and I was like, “Well, I’m a cellist.” From there, she would be like, “Oh, let’s go to my friend’s house and have a jam,” I’d be like, “Okay,” and we would do that. Because it was such a new place for me, and I didn’t really know anyone, there was nothing to lose. No one was judging. I could relax more on my instrument and figure things out on my own terms.
Meredith: It sounds welcoming and also really liberating. What is the freest you’ve felt making music?
Nina: There is something really amazing about playing electric guitar for me, because I always wanted to do that, but it wasn’t really encouraged, and I ended up playing cello instead. There’s always been this desire to rock out on the electric guitar. It seemed so fun, and I didn’t know how to do it. Then we recorded the song “Girls,” and at the end, there’s this explosion where there needed to be a guitar solo, and I knew that I had to do that. I’ve got my friend in the band, and he’s amazing at the guitar, but I was like, “No, this is mine. I need to do this solo,” and I’d never done that before. Then Jack Ogborne, who I’ve made a record with, helped me find the sound that I wanted. We sat there, and I was doing a guitar solo for the first time. That made me so happy and proud.
Meredith: When did you record that one for the album? Was it on the earlier side?
Nina: Yeah.
Meredith: It sounds like that experience set the tone for what the rest of the album could become. And you mentioned that your collaborator Jack helped you find the sound of the album. What were some of the references that you were looking toward to do that?
Nina: There weren’t any outspoken references, but he and I are good friends, and we have similar music tastes. I don’t know if we even talked about it, but it was just understood. The important thing was his ethos. When we record, if everyone’s in a good place, in themselves and together, then we’ll get the take. We recorded what’s there on the record pretty much live, and that was important for me to capture this live feeling, like, “We’re all alive here, and we’re doing this in this moment, and that’s what we want to record.” There was more of a philosophical influence.
Meredith: This album feels playful, too. It’s definitely not by any means a novelty album, or an album that is not to be taken seriously, but there are elements of fun on it that made me and my kid giggle upon listening, like the horns playing off the vocal melody at times, little touches that felt out-of-the-box in a way.
Nina: That’s cool. I would love for kids to hear it and say what they think. That would make me so happy. Something really important when you make music or any art is being curious. As you say, it should be taken seriously, but you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously, and there’s a fine line. I’m really happy when people say that they hear it as a bit playful, because that’s something that I really value when I listen to music. That can make it more approachable. But again, it wasn’t like I sat down and wrote thinking, “Okay, we need to be playful on the album,” you know? It happened, and I’m really happy about that.
Meredith: It sounds like rather than being a set intention, it was more the product of communality and rapport, especially with the live element that you discussed. That sense of fun was present within the players involved in making the album.
Nina: That’s an important thing for me. The people on this album are all my good friends, and they’re such a big part of this project. I always want to make sure that we have a good time, because if we’re not having a good time, something’s not right. Also, it’s not like everything is funny. It’s like you’re enjoying doing something together, and you’re connected, but some of the songs are really emotional, and it’s really important that we’re doing that together as well. I’m singing, sure, and I wrote the songs, but everyone’s making it come alive. They add so much, and they write a lot of their parts. The record wouldn’t sound like it does unless they were present in that emotion, too.
Meredith: I was really drawn to your voice on this album, because, in contrast to the classical training, there is definitely a wildness to it that I really responded to.
Nina: Actually, at college, I wasn’t singing. I thought that I couldn’t sing because the girls who were singing at the college had this perfect voice. They were all trained to sing in the same way, and I didn’t relate to that. I always felt like I wanted to sing. I wanted to sing so bad, but I didn’t really think I could. It’s amazing now that I get to sing, and that people respond to it. It feels amazing to me because I love when people who can’t really sing are singing. If you have something to say, it doesn’t matter what technique you have. You can hear all the old field recordings and stuff like that, and it’s like, “Whoa! Who the hell is this old lady? She is my heart!” There’s just so much like that.
Meredith: Who are some of your favorite singers?
Nina: I love Buffy Sainte-Marie. She is influential for me in a lot of ways. And then Patti Smith, she has that quality of like, “Is she singing? I don’t know.” She is, but it’s incredible, all this stuff is coming out of her, and there’s so much emotion and truth to what she does. Nina Simone is up there, and I love Bob Dylan very much—he sings weird.
Meredith: All of that tracks. I could definitely hear the Patti Smith influence on this album, not in a derivative way, but in that untamed sort of way that we’ve spoken about. So, what do you see yourself doing next?
Nina: I’m going on tour with the band in October, but I hope that we can come to the US next year. That would be super fun. That’s the next thing I’m doing, and I’m trying to rest, because it’s been quite a lot. It’s big emotional work, making and releasing an album.
Meredith: And what does rest look like for you?
Nina: Ideally, I would be in a cabin in the mountains for three weeks, where I don’t talk to anyone, but life doesn’t always work like that. I’m at home now in Brighton, and I’m really grateful to have a home. I feel safe here. It’s been a bit hard to rest, because it’s been so full-on, and then suddenly it just slows down. But then at some point, it’s like, “No, you need to be productive,” so I’m trying to figure it out, actually. Gardening is good. I do the laundry, things like that. Normal, everyday things can really ground me.
Meredith: It’s hard to have time for those things when you’re so busy. Resetting and cultivating the environment you exist in can have such an emotional impact and help set a foundation. I hear you on that.
It’s been lovely talking with you. You know what? I notice I overuse the word “lovely.”
Nina: Oh, it’s a fun word, but I don’t know if the album is lovely—maybe sometimes. What I like about albums is that you can get different things out of them on different days. Maybe some days you want the experience to be lovely, and you’ll pick something up from a song that you didn’t hear before.
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