Nell Bryden

Nell Bryden

Nell Bryden is a US singer-songwriter whose music draws on country, folk, blues, soul and the wider American songbook. She is born in the United States in 1977 and has roots in Brooklyn, New York, where she is raised in a bohemian part of the city. Her songs combine urban experience with older American musical forms, and her work also reflects jazz, cajun and zydeco influences.

Early life and influences

Bryden grows up in a musical and artistic family. Her mother, Jane, is a classical soprano who sings at Carnegie Hall, and her father, Lewis, is a landscape painter whose work hangs in museums, galleries and private collections across the United States. At four weeks old, she travels with her mother on a concert tour of South America. As a child, she stages plays with friends and writes and directs her own version of The Little Shop of Horrors at the age of seven.

She studies cello for ten years and initially hopes to become an opera singer. Her direction changes after hearing Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at 15, which leads her to value personality and emotional commitment over technical perfection. By the time she leaves high school, she still wants to become a Maria Callas-style singer, but a gap-year trip to Australia changes that. There she begins turning her travel diary into lyrics, buys a cheap guitar and starts singing her own songs.

Travel, study and early career

Travel becomes a major part of her development as a songwriter. She spends time in Arizona, where she makes daily free-fall jumps and lives on a drop zone, and in Thailand, where she works in a refugee camp. She later studies English literature at university in Boston, graduating with honours, and begins performing in public there.

After returning to New York City, she writes songs in the aftermath of 9/11 and explores older American country music. She records an album in Nashville but feels she has not yet found her own voice. She then begins another album in New Orleans, where the city’s mix of jazz, blues, folk, country, cajun and zydeco helps shape her sound.

Ireland, Iraq and recording What Does It Take

Bryden later books herself a month-long tour of Ireland through the internet and travels there with only a suitcase and an acoustic guitar. She moves from gig to gig by bus, staying on musicians’ couches, and plays 30 venues, all of which ask her to return. She also travels to Iraq after meeting a US Army colonel at South by Southwest, and performs for troops there twice, becoming known as a Forces Sweetheart.

A major turning point comes when she finds an unfamiliar painting by Milton Avery among her father’s old possessions. The work turns out to have been a gift to her as a baby and is sold at auction for $270,000. She uses the money to finish re-recording the uncompleted New Orleans album with Grammy-winning producer David Kershenbaum. The result is What Does It Take, a collection that draws together the styles she has absorbed on the road.

Style

Her writing centres on love and loss, and her sound mixes contemporary songwriting with older American roots styles. She presents herself as a singer-songwriter rather than a heritage performer, even though much of her material is shaped by earlier musical traditions. Old-time music and vintage clothing also form part of the image associated with her native New York background.