Pages tagged “kate nash”

Tomorrow (June 19) night, The Sundance Channel plans to set you up with a very intimate date. The venue: Abbey Road Studios, London. The soundtrack: Dashboard Confessional, Mary J. Blige and James Blunt. The event: the premiere of the second season of Live From Abbey Road.

British songbird Kate Nash is working on a collection of short stories for children that she plans to release at a later date, NME reports.

Nash is the latest in a line of entertainers to journey into the world of children’s literature, following in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, Madonna, Sting and Joni Mitchell. While her predecessors have been alternately cheered and jeered for their literary efforts, Nash said she was not concerned about what the critics might say. “There’s a lot of things I want to achieve creatively,” she told NME. “I just like chucking things out and thinking ‘Whatever.’ I’m not scared of falling flat on my face.”

One of her stories tells the tale of a 12-year-old boy named George who comes across a seven-foot-tall cross dresser named Roy. Nash said the story is about imagination and following your dreams, and was influenced by the work of renowned children’s author Roald Dahl.

Fans breathlessly awaiting Nash’s book can catch her touring down under in support of her debut album Made of Bricks. Nash will be playing six shows in Australia and New Zealand later this month as a part of the Big Day Out traveling music festival, and has scheduled a few performances of her own in Sydney and Melbourne.

Related links:
Featured Video: Kate Nash - GameTap Artist to Watch
KateNash.co.uk
Kate Nash on MySpace

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Ever since songwriting phenom Kate Nash "melted" Paste editor Josh Jackson's heart at a live gig back in September, our magazine has kind of had... well, a thing for her. There was the 4 to Watch designation in our November issue, an appearance in this month's Paste CD sampler, and now a swanky #56 slot on our rag's favorite 100 albums of 2007. Finally, the young Briton is coming back to North America for some tour dates, and... aw, shucks... it's just great to have her back in our hemisphere. The trek accompanies the stateside arrival of her debut album, Made of Bricks, on Jan. 8.

Here are those dates:

January
7 - Toronto, Ontario @ Mod Club
9 - New York, N.Y. @ Bowery Ballroom
12 - San Francisco, Calif. @ 330 Ritch
14 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Troubadour

Expect more U.S. engagements in the spring. Until we cross her path again, we'll just have to savor the sweet, sweet taste of Nash's new "Pumpkin Soup" video:

Related links:
Kate Nash on MySpace
KateNash.co.uk
RollingStone.com: Kate Nash - Artist to Watch

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

Hometown: London
Fun fact: Nash not only honed her acting chops at a U.K. performing-arts college, she scripted her own short film and a full-length play, too.
Why she's worth watching: Her brilliant folk-pop debut, Made Of Bricks, is filled with quirky observations sung in a whimsical English lilt; Already topping the overseas charts, it lands Stateside on Geffen in January.
For fans of: Lily Allen, Regina Spektor, Camera Obscura

Naturally, with all her stage experience, Kate Nash assumed she’d be a shoo-in at Bristol’s posh Old Vic Theatre School. She thought wrong. And the moment she received her rejection letter, she recalls, “was the fickle, fateful day. I hate how you’ll concentrate all your energy on something like that, and then in one line you know the worst.” Devastated, she went to the cinema to cheer herself up. “And I ended up watching Brokeback Mountain, all by myself. Happy, happy times.” In the evening, Nash got dressed up to see a play, headed out of her room, and thud—tripped down a flight of stairs, breaking her foot in the process. “I just sat there at the bottom and bawled my eyes out,” the 20-year-old admits. “And it wasn’t even the pain in my foot—it was just a way for me to finally cry, because I hadn’t cried yet over being so upset.”

And therein hangs the ironic tale. Confined to her bedroom in a full leg cast, Nash was given an amp and an electric guitar by her sympathetic parents, and she began to write songs in earnest. She’d played piano as a kid, and toyed with an acoustic six-string. But the wry conversational vignettes she began setting to music—like the eloquent-boy-meets-goofy-girl “Birds,” and her soured-romance breakthrough hit “Foundations”—quickly caught on in self-booked club gigs and in the star-making arena of MySpace (a la her chief supporter Lily Allen).

After Nash’s first successful concert, she was quite pleased to phone her boss “at this rubbish job I was working and say ‘I’m very sorry, but opportunities have arisen that are steps in the right direction toward my career.’ And I never went back—one show had given me the idea that this would be my life.”