Nanna – studio session at The Current (music & interview)
[Music] take me up into the chaos waiting up for the Leos [Music] pulled up with my emotions another trick to calm the oceans good morning [Music] you could be my Phantom limb and then I lay on your shoulder to sleep [Music] [Applause] [Music] disasters thinking and I think that you are you don't you swap through this tell me barely made it foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you tornado just swept through this time we barely made it is [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] the chemicals [Music] start remember [Music] [Music] local time those things [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] Super Monkey [Music] another time get it right but for now [Music] you're rooting for me now [Music] right now [Music] you you're beginning you should be maintenance [Music] it's worth it [Music] on me and I'm not right she's bleeding again [Music] right now thank you foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] somehow I feel oh it's frightening this is forever [Music] I cannot hold you but it's harder to let you go and try if you don't know if you can see colors [Music] if I would have known [Music] you can see me now my tank of love [Music] so you the ocean [Music] in my The Cliffs up ahead foreign [Music] the high life you don't know if you can see a color how do I know you can see me now I cannot keep you but it's harder to let you go all the time now can see [Music] me now I cannot keep you but it's hard if I would have known we'd be like this see the girl [Music] I think of love [Music] you're twisting [Music] moving into one hello my name is Mac Wilson and we are here in the current studio with Nana Nana thank you for coming by today thank you for having me so we've had you in the current Studio a couple of times before your time with Of Monsters and Men and this is your first solo appearance here and you have a an entirely new band of folks who are not on camera right now but you wanna if you can introduce the the folks who have played with you here today in your band Yes so um in my band my my touring band we have um he's playing guitars and then on violin and and um vocals and Basin and all kinds of stuff and then Thomas Johnson piano on trumps you noted on Instagram a couple of days ago that you're at about the halfway point of the U.S tour now I know that America is a little bit larger than Iceland but roughly which direction are you working you're working towards the East Coast or towards the West Coast so we're going towards the West Coast yeah so we're um we're about to go and play play LA and uh we're kind of yeah working our way through America slowly but surely have there been any instances so far where your experience of touring or just like being around cities in America has been different than your time with Of Monsters and Men well I haven't been touring now like we of course the cement toured last in 2019. so it's been a while and just being back on the road feels completely different you know um but uh but it's nice too because I'm revisiting a lot of these places and uh you know there's still some of the same like same restaurants you know that I used to go to or something like that you know I'm thinking about it a lot in terms where if Monsters and Men if you're playing like larger festivals then you're on much more of a compressed time schedule and I didn't know if you've got any more time to explore like you're talking about seeing these same places do you have opportunities then to be like oh I saw this place before I have a little bit more time to get out and explore I have I feel like I have more time now which is quite nice actually so I've been trying to explore more this time around I overheard some of your band members in the booth before we sat down to chat talking about Iceland right now where even in the last couple of years and decades where it's become such a popular tourist destination to always have notably with the Iceland Airwaves festival and how folks who are clearly tourists it's almost like something that you have to navigate around when you are in Iceland is that a phenomenon that you've noticed as well no I don't feel like we are at that point you know I think um it's uh I think it's kind of expensive to go to Iceland so it's you know um I think people kind of sometimes think twice maybe about it but but also I don't feel like that's become the case yet you know um like we had a very big boom in tourism um like 10 years ago or something like that and I feel like it's kind of stayed consistent you know well I have the app on my phone that tracks airplanes that go overhead and just about every day I see a Reykjavik flight go over the house so I mean there's clearly enough people maybe I'm just like desensitized at this point yeah yeah so the new record that you've got the solo album is how to start a garden yes now in addition to there being layers of metaphor with that when you go and put that into Google you literally get instructions on how to start a garden is that something that you took up at all literally over the last couple of years during the the pandemic or otherwise like literally gardening oh I was trying very hard to like become like very wholesome and and start these things but uh I didn't do any of those things but I I had like a I moved into a new house and there was my neighbor was um my upstairs neighbor he he is a big Gardener so I would just kind of watch him and admire what he did um but I have yet to uh start my own about any new pets oh I have a talk yeah you have a dog the dog it works its way in as sort of an analogy in in one of your songs can you walk us through where this this the dog viewers sort of plays a role as a character in one of your songs oh right well you know she's still all around like when one Court thing we would record in in my cabin and and you know she would just kind of be walking around and sometimes that would just be you know part of the song but um but also lyrically she's very much a part of this record I I very much want it for this record to bring everything that's important to me like make it be a part of the album so there's a lyric that um says can I go start a garden the ghost in me and my dog's name is ghost so it's kind of like a double thing of of it's actually I'm just talking about my my dog and what kind of dog do you have I have a black labrador oh boy so how old is your black lab now she's like two and a half or something like that yeah she's like she's a teenager so one of the projects that we got over the last spring was we have a black lab mix he's you can tell that he's got something else in him but he black lab through and through they're they're very very smart and they're very dumb at the same time and I love living with that that dichotomy with lab right mix I mean they're just so like they love everyone and they love other people sometimes more than they love you so they'll just like run up to anybody which is very endearing and very cute but they also I mean my dog is like she's just really funny like that it's just you know loves people very much we are here in the current studio with Nana the new record is how to start a garden and not one of the cool things I appreciate about some of the songs on the album is songs like Sputnik and Godzilla where those words are not necessarily mentioned in the song but they're really like elaborate metaphors about it is that a case where you started off with like a mental image of either of these things and you're like I'm going to try to add as much descriptive material about it and put myself in this head without just naming it in the song was that the K did you start off with that specific image no I didn't I mean for both of those songs that was just kind of the title that came along when I was working on the lyrics or you know I was like working on the melody and the lyrics at the same time and everything was just kind of like in a big mess and then it just felt like a thing that described the feeling really like with Sputnik where it's just like you know like a traveling companion like a satellite is like traveling with with us and that to me felt really beautiful you know and just captured that exact feeling of the song um and then with Godzilla it's the same thing it's just fast I don't know like big and like the word is kind of the opposite of the song but there's something like there's a tension you know in it and so Godzilla felt like it really represented that song and with the name of the album how to start a garden it it feels very intentional that the word start is in there like this is really the start of something for you with the solo material that you're putting out this doesn't strike me as just oh these are some songs that I had lying around and I put them out on the side like this is your own separate thing we've talked about your work with Of Monsters and Men but this also feels like a very intentional start in an of its own Point does that feel like an accurate assessment of where you're at now yeah definitely it feels like it's like accurate is is pretty different from what I've done with Of Monsters and Men there's like songs with with them that I'm with my bandwear maybe you can hear this world a little bit but it was nice for me now to kind of go and and just completely dive into this world because I really felt like I needed to do that and I am curious to ask because the national are coming to town to Minnesota next week you worked with Aaron desner on some of the music on the record uh how many days or weeks or rather did you spend working with with Aaron and how did that experience go so I went up to Long Pond it was um October I'm gonna get very specific now it was October 20 2021 I think and um we spent like a week together first um and I really didn't know I was just you know I'm just a fan so um I was just excited you know to meet and hang out and see what would happen and we kind of went through some old demos of mine and and picked out a few that that we felt like we could work on together and uh and then I went back to see him for another week so it was like two weeks all in all yeah and it was great it was really such a you know like it's such a beautiful studio and Aaron is amazing and it was a very very cool experience this is probably naive of me but is there a literal Long Pond there oh like yeah there's water wise there's a palm there okay yeah there's a little ponds you know and uh yeah but it's one of those Studios that I mean with with Taylor Swift and otherwise it's becoming one of the most well-known studios in America like electric ladyland or something like it's it's that iconic of a place so I I'm more and more curious what life is like really behind the curtain I think it's a beautiful studio also because it feels very it feels like a very creative setup you know there's like there's stations everywhere so you can kind of you can kind of go around the studio and just like wherever you sit down you just start recording which is really you know I think it's really brilliant and and the room itself is just it's it feels like a home you know well Nana thank you for stopping by today your show in Minneapolis thanks for stopping by and playing those beautiful songs with your band and we look forward to seeing you again soon okay thank you so much for having me thank you again for coming by today the current is Public Media made possible thanks to member support
2023-09-22 23:02
