Nadia Reid – Enter Now Brightness (Pink Vinyl)

Enter Now Brightness feels different for Nadia. It is an album, she says, of departure and questioning, that has reminded her how songwriting can be ‘the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger.’ That through music we can find great change. ‘I’m so much better off now that it exists,’she says. ‘Now feels like a new time.’ On this record, Reid moves ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is distinctly her own. Enter Now Brightness is a record of poise and great beauty, the sound of a cellular shift, of pain giving way to tenderness and joy. It takes its title from a passage in a book Reid was reading from a line that seemed to call out to her from the page: ‘Brightness entered the study.’ ‘It was the image of opening the curtain, or turning the light on, or of standing in the wings of a theatre and waiting to go on stage. It’s the idea of life beginning now.’