Nina Nastasia Continues Her Musical Healing With Jolie Laide

For the past year, Nina Nastasia has been living as a nomad. “I made a choice,” she says, speaking over Zoom from the bedroom of a family member’s home in California, “to not have an address. This year has been a lot of traveling and a lot of projects. It’s been a little bit rough because I have a dog, but it’s been fantastic, too.”

Though she insists that she will be searching for a landing place after the holidays, for the time being, Nastasia is content to float wherever the wind might lead her. Some of that is purely situational as she has been busy touring as the opening act for Mogwai and Wilco, and been visiting Canada to work with the members of her new project Jolie Laide. It also feels like a byproduct of the difficult and harrowing situation she found herself in — and that caused her to take a 12-year long pause from making music as a vocation.

As Nastasia has since revealed, she spent 25 years in a creatively fruitful and emotionally abusive relationship with her former manager Kennan Gudjonsson. His never satisfied expectations of her and himself led Nastasia to go musically silent in the years following the release of her 2010 album Outlaster. She would pop up on stage here and there and put out one small bit of music (the wistful 2018 holiday tune “Handmade Card”), but mostly she stayed put in New York, taking what odd jobs she could get to keep her and Gudjonsson afloat. Eventually, Nastasia gathered up the strength to leave the relationship in early 2020. Within a day of her departure, Gudjonsson took his own life.

Each step forward that Nastasia has taken in the wake of that traumatic period has been determinedly forward. Last year, she released Riderless Horse, a devastating and cathartic album recorded in a bare bones style — mostly just acoustic guitar and vocals — that unpacked the emotional damage of her relationship with Gudjonsson through plainspoken lyrics.

With her creative fires reignited, Nastasia poured out those songs quickly. She kept a similar pace when she began working with Jeff MacLeod, the artist who is part of the Alberta-based art-rock ensemble The Cape May. They’ve been friends for some time, but found their way back into each other’s circles in wake of Gudjonsson’s death. MacLeod was soon sharing music with Nastasia, noir-ish rock with elements of cowpunk and goth baked into each reverb-heavy guitar line and dusty rhythm. The resulting self-titled album, released earlier this month, also finds Nastasia moving her lyrical gaze beyond herself, incorporating characters in bad shape and bad situations. “I say we’re in for a long night stay,” she sings on the dusky “Why I Drink,” “Drinking us thin ‘til we both fade away.”

I spent some time with Nastasia on the evening of Halloween, discussing her work with MacLeod, moving forward in the wake of Riderless Horse’s release and the origins of this project’s multi-layered moniker. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Paste: You just wrapped up a tour opening for Wilco. How did that all go?

Nina Nastasia: It was amazing. It was on a much bigger scale than I’ve ever done. I’ve played festivals that were really big with a lot of audience members, but not this kind of thing. They were exceptionally great people and really welcoming. And the crew members were fantastic, too. I tend to get really, really nervous going up on stage, no matter what. It was always great to have those moments with those guys because they’re just having fun. They made it really comfortable.

Your last album Riderless Horse was written from such a personal place where you were exposing some fresh wounds from your recent past. With this new project, you are using more storytelling devices and painting this sort of Jim Thompson / Bonnie & Clyde-like world with some of the songs. Was this where you wanted to go after Riderless or was this something that came out in response to the music Jeff was sending you?

For Riderless Horse it was a slightly different way of working in that I didn’t really care how poetic it was. It lent itself to just vomiting it out. Cathartic. Kind of like, “This is fucking awful. You can have it.” With Jeff… I don’t remember how it happened. He knew Kennan, my partner who had committed suicide. He ended up in it. We talked a lot during that time. He even came out to New York. I do know at some point, I was like, “Please, send me anything.” I was away from music for so long and I had this new freedom to create stuff with other people. So it was definitely influenced by what he was sending me because what he was sending me had such a landscape to it. It sounded like I could hear a movie attached to it. Funny enough, during the lockdown and this very fresh mourning for the death of my partner at the time and all the craziness of my life for about 25 years with him just being in a kind of cave. I think I was so excited to be doing a project. And there was a lightness to it. I didn’t consider myself particularly good at it. It was a new way of writing, and I’m very happy with it.

I’m curious then about the timeline of you coming to work with Jeff. You said that he knew Kennan, so did you know him very well before this started?

The Cape May, his band, toured with us and was the base of my band. We toured the U.S. and Europe. I met those guys in Chicago. They were just finishing recording with Steve Albini and I was just coming in to record with him. We became friends pretty fast. Then we did these tours and it was amazing that they didn’t end with them never wanting to talk to us again. Kennan and I were living on the edge of trying to fund these crazy-ass tours and over our heads. So there was a lot of stress. And these guys just wanted to have fun. But we all stayed friends. Kennan and Jeff had a whole other writing project they were doing. Jeff definitely had an understanding of who Kennan was. The thing about Kennan was that he was an extremely difficult individual but a very special individual. People loved him, but understood his insanity. I was very quiet about what I was dealing with in my relationship with Kennan. It really, really helped me because everything’s a little bit of a blur during that time because the COVID thing happened two weeks after or something like that. Lockdowns and the really bad part of COVID happened around that time. I think I was so hungry to do as many projects as possible, but I was an absolute mess.

What is it about Jeff that helped you two get along so quickly and so well?

We always got along as human beings. But this was one of those projects that was very simple. He would send me something, and it was a full song instrumentally. I felt very free to come up with ideas and lyrics and melodies. Then it was super fast. The second record that we’re gonna finish is not like that. It did not work. We were like, “What happened?” It didn’t quite work like that until we got to the studio and we realized that the first record was just Jeff and myself. We wanted Morgan [Greenwood] and Clint [St. John] to be involved in it as well. We wanted them to be part of the band. Logistically, it didn’t work out for the first record and we were throwing things out really fast and doing it fast. The second record has those guys on it, and I have to say it was one of the best experiences I have had recording. We all worked really well together. I’m going to go back there right after Thanksgiving and finish up.

This new Jolie Laide record was done with you guys working remotely, yes?

Jeff went in and got all his stuff recorded in Canada, and then I went and recorded everything I did. My friend Tim Midyett stole some mics from Steve Albini and went into his basement and recorded some stuff. All the vocals were recorded there. It was a lot to do to try and make it sound cohesive, but it sounds pretty great. I’m really happy with it.

I ask, in part, because with the next album, I wonder if some of the struggle to get it rolling because you were all in the same space and having to build everything from scratch together. Did it take a bit to get your head into that working method again?

I think it was. We were trying to do it a similar way, sending stuff back and forth, but there were times when I wasn’t hearing a full song. I’m pretty limited in that I can’t really pick up a guitar and start doing crazy stuff on it. I’m not that kind of player. We would get together and go through what we had and it was loads of ideas, but it didn’t have the same flow. Clint does a lot of writing and there were funny experiences where he and I were working on the same song separately, and the little bits we’d come up with were like, “Wait, we’re going in different directions.” But we got into the studio and ended up using both parts. Then you have Morgan coming in and sewing the pieces together with this weird thread of his electronic stuff. Somehow it all pulled together and we came out kind of shocked by how things ended up.

Tell me, then, about the name of this project. It’s a band context so were you thinking of something bigger than just referring to it as a Nina Nastasia project?

Band names are the worst, right? Everybody’s got a list of hundreds of names, and none of them are quite right. But I like the idea of that phrase. I guess what it means is a very specific type of beauty that has the elements of ugly in it. That’s how I’m interpreting it. It’s an unusual beauty that has an off-putting edge to it. The thing in art that I really love is that you can create this beautiful thing out of this horrendous thing. You see it in films like Naked. I haven’t seen it in a long time but I remember being overwhelmed by it, how beautiful it was and how ugly. To be able to construct something that allows people to relate to or look at a subject that is difficult.

That isn’t too far removed from you making an album like Riderless Horse, this beautiful album that was inspired by an awful time in your life.

I’m always drawn to subject matters that are extremely sad or almost hopeless. I think it’s because of that great challenge in trying to look at them in a different way. But I always end up wanting to do something like happy music. I think happy music is amazing. [laughs] I never do it.

I feel like both of the records you’ve released since your return from the wilderness are tied into this spirit of catharsis. Now that you’ve gotten those two under your belt, do you feel excited about what comes next for you artistically?

I kind of do know what’s coming next for the next record that’s my thing. This band thing is so fun and it’s great to find your little family. I’m excited to see how that develops. It’s a funny thing to be back after being away for so long. I didn’t really know what to expect. I did find that I had not lost my core group of people that have been appreciating the music. It didn’t feel like starting over from scratch. But at the same time, who knows? I just hope I have the opportunity to keep doing it. I mean, I’ll always keep doing it, but to have the opportunity to spend all my time doing it. I’m hoping for that.