INTERVIEW: Jodie Nicholson

Image: Jodie Nicholson by Amelia Read

Jodie Nicholson has produced some of the most melancholically beautiful music in the region – and perhaps nationally – in the last few years. Her debut album, 2019’s Golden Hour, is a wonderful collection of brooding chamber pop, and last year’s Safe Hands saw her gain more national and international acclaim, with her textured, intricate songwriting occupying a similar space to Julia Holter and The National. Not content with resting on her laurels, Nicholson’s new extended play, We Can Talk, adds to her increasingly enviable body of work. Consistent with much of her writing, We Can Talk is a collaborative affair, leaning into some of the key aspects of Nicholson’s MO.
“Between releases I tend to line up a few writing sessions with other artists/songwriters, it’s kind of my go-to if I’m in a wave of wanting to write, but don’t necessarily know what to write about or everything I’m writing feels a bit mediocre. I think it’s healthy to lean into co-writing every once in a while, especially as a solo artist, but also, when you’re wearing the producer hat on your own releases too, sometimes it’s nice to share the writing process with someone so that whole foundational part of creating new music isn’t solely resting on your own shoulders – I’ve learned that the hard way!”
Nicholson tells me that collaboration has become the ethos for the whole EP. Not just in the songwriting itself, but with a whole cast of musicians bringing their personalities to the songs with their parts including Joe Ramsey for bass on Sleep On It and Francesca Knowles for drums across all but We Can Talk, as well as leaning on people who love the visual side of releasing music like Melanie Baker, who Jodie describes as “an incredible artist in her own right and a visionary when it comes to capturing the music visually”.
The four songs on the EP are graceful and beautiful; Sleep On It is a gospel-tinged slow-burner, Nicholson’s remarkable voice pushed front and centre, supported by gorgeous, bubbling vocal harmonies and a languid piano part, culminating in cacophonous climax. Sunday utilises intricate percussion and another soaring vocal performance to speak to a pronounced sense of longing; Easy is a more cheerful folk pop number which skips along to intricate arpeggiated guitars; while closer We Can Talk, which features The Early Purple, produces a glorious vocal harmony between the two singers which elevates
the song.
Jodie talks me through the genesis of the song: “I reached out over Instagram and asked if Matt would be open to writing together – we’d never met before or even spoken before, and we ended up spending an afternoon at Summer Studios going through loads of ideas – there were over 30! Matt had been writing that week and choosing one to experiment with. It was Matt’s first co-write session, and there’s never any pressure for what’s written to actually ‘go’ anywhere, it’s just nice to write for the sake of writing and if
anything comes out of it that someone wants to release, that’s a bonus. There was a piano in the room and we essentially jammed for the most part, looping round the two sections that became the song’s structure. We then set a mic up and took it in turns – literally, one of us would stay in the room and record some vocal ideas whilst the other person would walk around Glasshouse for a few minutes, and then we swapped over. I’d never done that before and it was really nice to have your own space with the track for
a minute or two. We ended up using my vocal and I invited Matt into the studio to add his vocals – they instantly lifted the track and gave the lyrics/narrative more context.”
It’s this spirit of spontaneity and play which colours the spirit of the record. For Jodie, the process of collaboration wasn’t quite as straightforward as with The Early Purple: “Sunday was written with Ben from Old Sea Brigade over Zoom and a seven-hour time difference (Ben was in Nashville at the time). I remember we actually started out with a completely different idea, it soaked up probably over half of the session and for some reason we were getting stuck or something didn’t feel quite right, so we started
something new and wrote Sunday from start to finish. Weirdly, it seemed to fall out of us quite quickly. I made a demo after the call ended, sent it to Ben, and that demo lived in a Soundcloud playlist for two years before revisiting more seriously at the back-end of last year.”
Nicholson describes the songs as outsiders in the sense that at the time they were written: “They either sonically didn’t sit quite right alongside other songs/projects I’d written/was working on, or I didn’t fully know what to do with them to take them forward. I’d been sat on Sunday and Sleep On It since 2022 and, with both of them, I loved the songs as a foundation, but didn’t know what direction to take either of them
production-wise – I’m a big believer in timing and things happening for a reason, and with these two tracks in particular, I think they needed me to go through self-producing a full album’s worth of material [Safe Hands] to experiment, to learn and to give me time to become a better producer so I could eventually serve these songs in the best way I could.” Irrespective of the different methods taken to arrive at the destination, We Can Talk is a terrific body of work which stands alongside Nicholson’s best material.
Jodie Nicholson releases We Can Talk on 27th June.