Nina Gordon

By Alex Teitz

Warner Brothers Artist Nina Gordon is not new to the music scene. The former co-founder of Veruca Salt is back with a solo album called Tonight and the Rest of Your Life. The new album was recorded in Hawaii, and has a friendly intelligent pop sound to it. FEMMUSIC was honored to have a few minutes with Nina. For more information visit Wikipedia

FEMMUSIC: Can you describe your songwriting technique?

NG: Yes. Basically I wait until the spirit moves me and generally the spirit that moves me is one of confusion and chaos and dissonance. Sometimes it’s excitement and happiness and I sit down and play guitar and either I’m inspired to sing something or I just sit there and think, “Hmm. This really isn’t working.” and I go and do something else. But generally it’s just a very organic kind of thing. I just play chords and either I sing something that is meaningful to me or I sing something that sounds like somebody else and I say, “Alright. It’s not happening today.” Generally when it does happen it’s melody. I’ll play the chords and sing the melody and sort of mumble some words and then those mumbled words will form themselves into thoughts or actual lyrics. If it feels good then I pursue it, and I keep going and then I write a song. But if it doesn’t feel good then I just sort of let it slide.

FEMMUSIC: How did you meet with Bob Rock? and how did you end up recording the CD in Hawaii?

NG:  Very simply I wanted to work with Bob Rock who produced the last album that I made with Veruca Salt. He and I worked really well together, and I knew that I wanted to record this album with him. He lives in Maui and he has a studio in Maui so if you work with him you basically go to Hawaii. Which is not a bad side effect.

FEMMUSIC: Were you making repeated trips? I noticed this was taking seven months?

NG: No I stayed there the whole time. In fact I stayed there longer than that because my boyfriend’s band also ended up recording with Bob and so he was there too. I basically spent about a year on Maui, which was heavenly. And because I was recording over the winter. I live in Chicago, so I missed the Chicago winter and I know that the album would have sounded completely different if I’d made it in Chicago. I think it was really important for me to go away and get sort of far away from everything that I knew previously. And there’s something very uplifting and peaceful and hopeful and spiritual about being on an island in the middle of nowhere with this vast endless ocean all around you, and mountains all around you. If definitely gives you a sense of hope, endlessness, limitlessness

FEMMUSIC: In regards to the sound of the album, after coming from Veruca Salt this is definitely a different sound for you.

NG: I’ve done a bunch of interviews and I have been told this, but I know that it is a departure and yet I believe that if you took the songs that I had written in Veruca Salt. And if you took them out of context and put them on a disk with these songs that are on this album I don’t think it would like as drastic a leap as you think. I always wrote ballads, and I always wrote pop songs. The one thing that I know is different is that I think that I’m a lot more open with my lyrics and open with my voice but in terms of songwriting the process is still the same and the things that excite me about songs are still the same i.e. melody.

FEMMUSIC: What was your biggest challenge making Tonight and The Rest of Your Life?

NG: Honestly it what was whittling down this enormous list of songs to one album. I had so many songs. As a songwriter, not to compare myself to one of my truest, greatest heroes who is George Harrison. I imagine after he first went to write All Thing Must Pass he’d been sort of stifled within the Beatles because he only got one song or two songs per album, and then suddenly he had this vast number of songs. It’s kind of a similar thing because Louise and I were both the songwriters in the band and so we sort of split the albums. They were generally about six of my songs and six of her songs. So were constantly having to let go of songs that we had written and not record them. In this case I ended up recording a lot of songs and the biggest challenge was figuring out which ones were the best and the ones that I was going to feel the most connected to for the longest period of time.

FEMMUSIC: What one thing would you like to see changed about the music industry?

NG: That’s a good question. I suppose I would like songs or albums and artists wouldn’t necessarily be presented to the mainstream because they’re considered not “pop” enough or something like that. I would like those certain bands to be brought to the forefront because I think that I would like to think that the public is a little smarter and a little more open to different kinds of music. There are so many bands that just get stuck in this indie ghetto or this experimental ghetto where nobody in the real world hears their music. So much of it is so beautiful that I feel like that it should be shared but at the same time I think maybe people aren’t that open aren’t that deep maybe they just want the simplest TV commercials and TV theme songs for their pop music. But I think there are little glimmers of hope when Aimee Mann starts doing well you know something really good is happening because that is not music that you would initially think, “Oh yeah! That’s going to straight on the radio.” Yet people are really touched by her music. I think that’s a really positive sign.

FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you been discriminated against?

NG: I don’t think so. I have not felt discriminated against. I’ve felt very supported and respected. The one thing that sometimes comes into play when you’re a woman and you’re making pop music and your record label is going to radio stations and saying, “Will you play this song by this female artist?” And they say, “No. We have too many female songs on right now. We need some more men on this station, or we need…” And really what that means is they’re playing like two women. And that’s just frustrating that it’s like that if you’ve got two female artists in heavy rotation that that’s too many, but I don’t feel that that’s necessarily discrimination it’s just people trying to gauge what the public want and, “do men want to listen to women”, “do women want to listen to women. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works.

No. In answer to your question I do feel discriminated against. Definitely not.

FEMMUSIC: What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?

NG: Well there are two pieces of advice. One is to be sure that you’re making music that you can stand behind. You’re not writing music for anybody else. You’re not writing music for what you think is the current taste of the people out there because you can never gauge that, and people are very fickle, and you really have to write music that is really very meaningful and powerful to you and hope that it translates and other people feel that way too.

The second part of advice would be just play that music for everyone you possibly can, and don’t shut up about it until something happens. That means playing as many shows as you can. Going to open mics if you don’t have a band. Going to bars and playing on open mic night and playing songs and giving tapes to people. Just being obnoxious about it, and playing it for everyone that will listen and even those that won’t listen. Hopefully it will enter the right pair of ears and somebody will snatch you up and exploit you. (laughing) Just kidding.

But there are so many ways especially now with the Internet people can put their music out there. Get wider and wider audience and people who would have never heard your music can instantly someone in Israel can be listening to someone’s band from Ohio. It’s a pretty cool thing. The key is to keep going and not shut up about it until something happens.

FEMMUSIC: What are your plans for the future?

NG: My plans for the future are in immediate future; I’m going off to Los Angles.  I’m playing The Tonight Show on Tuesday night (August 8), which I’m fairly nervous about. After that I’m playing some of more promotional kind of shows then I’m going off to Japan and Australia to do promo touring and then I’ll be back in the states and probably touring for real at the end of October and playing at a rock club near you.