Back in 2019, we shared a single by New York‘s Nico Hedley. Released on Whatever’s Clever, ‘Late Bloomer‘ introduced Hedley’s distinctive take on the country genre, a style indebted to what came before but far more than a simple mimic. Because the Nico Hedley sound doesn’t so much turn towards the classics but continue their progress in the opposite direction. An exploratory, almost stream-of-consciousness style attuned to life’s textures and small details. The result on ‘Late Bloomer’ was a “rich blend of timbres,” we wrote in the piece:
The relaxed yet intimate sound carving a space in which urgent thoughts can unspool with an unhurried grace. Think of the melancholy of a late summer’s night, beams of halogen glow cutting through the dark on an empty street, bits and bugs and tumbling motes of dust caught briefly, beautiful in their fall, before returning the dark.
After a lovely split single with Field Guides earlier in the year, Nico Hedley is back with his debut full-length record, Painterly. If his style was established on previous releases, the album sees it both refined and challenged. There is more depth to the classic country self-reflection, but also more jazzy deviations and intuitive idiosyncrasies. A newfound richness that nevertheless possesses a certain raw, off the cuff charm.
And the conflicts extend further, for the tracks offer a more considered engagement with Hedley’s own interiors—the anxieties, the injuries, the cruelty—but also an effort to step beyond the confines of the self. To elevate the study by widening the frame, turning the perspective outward.
But to say Painterly‘s carefully balanced contradictions represent a perfection, or even realisation, of the Nico Hedley aesthetic is incorrect. Because the idea suggests the songs as some terminus of the creative and emotional process, a notion which betrays the record’s principal concept. Painterly is an album of deferred epiphanies, brief moments of enlightenment come and gone. One which understands there is no endpoint to aim for, just the constant, changing process of moving forwards, and hoping to be somehow better for embracing the ride.
We were lucky enough to ask Hedley some questions to delve deeper into the themes and intentions of the record. Read on for in-depth insight into country music, creative communities and the transition from side guy to leading man.
Can we delve into the title and its wider meaning – Painterly?
“Painterly” from a very early stage in working on this music was a sort of mantra for me. I wanted the music to feel painterly, the decisions I made to be made in that spirit. I think it means to reveal the process to a certain extent, to not make things too slick, but also to have a certain naturalistic movement. I wanted the music to feel human, to see the brush strokes if you will. Before I had decided to call the record painterly—which I decided when I wrote the song of the same name about halfway through the process—I would use “make it more painterly” as a note for the band as we were arranging the tunes. I like to give vague notes like that, to lead the people I’m collaborating with toward something without telling them where to go.
On a more intellectual level I think the word really encapsulates what I meant to say with the music as well. The sort of heartbreak and uncertainty that I was working through in these songs seemed to me to be best described as painterly. detached from reality, a product of misremembering much in the way a painting is in relation to it’s supposed subject, a symbol. I was less interested in telling stories as much as transmitting their emotional content through the music.
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The soul-searching, confessional country album is a well worn tradition, but Painterly approaches this from an oblique angle, or reverses the line entirely. As though the truth of self-examination lies in everything around us, and its just a matter of being attuned. Could you speak a little on the process of reaching beyond yourself when writing the album?
I have been playing music for a very long time. but have always been a little too scared to write my own songs. For a long time I had convinced myself that I was totally happy to just be a side guy, playing bass in bands, contributing to the writing process in that capacity when appropriate. I think the main thing I was scared of was being confessional, or just like some guy with a guitar up on stage being all woe is me etc. Like I didn’t think the world needed more of that. I still don’t think it does. But in starting to write this record I forced myself to get over it and just gave it a shot.
In that process I found that I could overcome that anxiety by trying for something more universal. And looking outward became the way that I was able to walk that line and allow myself to make this stuff. It was a very collaborative process with my band, this music really wasn’t made alone in my room even though that’s how the bones of the songs came to be. I also just stole some lines here and there. An Emily Dickenson poem I was fixated on in “Painterly”, and a line that I stole from Neil Young who stole it from Don Gibson in “Sound So Familiar” among others.
I wanted to be emotionally precise without being narcissistic, which is kind of funny I guess because one of the themes of the record I think is trying to move beyond my own narcissism.
Musically, the record is something of a melting pot. Country twang, jazzy flourishes, left-field turns that break a sense of linear structure. Did you set out to challenge genre boundaries, or is this simply another example of the intuitive, collaborative process?
I definitely didn’t set out to genre bend. If anything I was just trying to write country songs because that’s mostly what I was listening to at the time. George Jones, Lucinda Williams, Gram Parsons, and a ton of others were just what was resonating with me. I think how it turned out has everything to do with the collaborative process of making the music, I trusted the band implicitly and wrote everything with them in mind or in many cases with them in the room. There’s also the fact that I don’t know how to write a country song but this is the closest I could get. It also came from just sort of trusting the material to take us where it wanted to go if that makes sense.
The record begins stranded in the south on ‘Tennessee’, but moves on to the streets of NYC. What role does this varied geography play across the songs, and how does a sense of place shape your work?
It’s funny, I didn’t notice this until after the record was done. I have spent a lot of time traveling playing in touring bands so I guess my life has had a pretty varied geography which naturally gets reflected. The circumstances that led to this record being made also had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn’t traveling. When I started writing this record (late 2017 or early 2018 I think) all of the bands I had been traveling with were either defunct or taking breaks, I found myself home in NYC with no touring or prepping to tour to distract me from myself, and that state sort of made it possible (or necessary?) for me to start working on this stuff.
Could you speak a little of the band which feature on the album? Like so many Whatever’s Clever releases, there’s a real sense of kinship at its heart. A trust, a freedom to let the songs become what they are meant to be. How different a collection of songs would this be without that backing?
I was living with Carmen Rothwell, Ryan El-Sohl, and Adam Robinson in an apartment in Bushwick when I first started trying to write songs in earnest. We were all musicians and would spend a lot of time hanging out in the living room listening to records, and often would all be in our respective rooms playing. It was a really nice time, Ryan playing guitar in one room, Carmen practicing bass, Adam in the shed in his room, me messing around trying to learn how to write songs in mine, and then we would all get together and have these really fun active listening sessions. Just putting on records for hours and listening together.
One day someone brought up that we had never all played together so we just made a time the next week when we would all be home (I think we all had Mondays off from work) to just set up in the living room and play. I had 3 or 4 sort of finished songs at the time and we messed around with those and that first day we had pretty much the finished arrangement for “Waking Dreams” and “The Tower” as they appeared on the record even though I hadn’t finished lyrics yet. It was a big step for me, I think hearing the disjointed song ideas I had kicking around coming together with a band made me realize I had something worth pursuing.
I got Jeff Widener involved soon after who I had played with briefly in a band called Prima, and we started rehearsing and booking some shows. All the songs I was writing from then on were made specifically with them in mind. I really can’t express enough how integral they all were to conceiving of this music. I don’t think they would be a different collection of songs, they just wouldn’t “be” at all.
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Finally, I’m interested in the lasting impression of the record. The sense of transience, a lack of easy answers, of epiphanies experienced but never lasting. It’s a conflicted conclusion. One sad and unsettling and a little daunting in its own way—a world where nothing quite stays as you’d like it—but also freeing, almost joyous, in how progression sloughs off the accumulated baggage of life.
Painterly is a breakup record, they are love songs, which is to say songs about the ways love is experienced, not professions of love necessarily. But they are also about getting better. Not just feeling better but being better. Better to those you love, to those who love you, to those who have hurt you. A better friend, a better companion.
There is a self reflective aspect to all of this I suppose. It’s about the ways we can be cruel to each other, and about regarding that cruelty and trying to commit to being less cruel. It is not lost on me though that the act of me making these songs is not an ameliorative sort of process, that has to be done in the real world.
This record is just a sort of exploration of these things I suppose. I hope there is a hopefulness, a sense that we can move beyond the ways we have been and be better. Not to have those things washed away but to hold them, examine them, and set them aside. To commit to being better and to allowing ourselves to be OK. That’s all a process, it isn’t binary, and frankly we have agency in it. I’m not interested in the ‘I’m so lonesome since you left me’ sort of model of remembering these sorts of things, though I obviously play with that trope on the record.
Ultimately I think the world simply is “a world where nothing stays as you’d like it” as you say, there are no easy answers. Maybe the point here is that that is OK. Shana Tovah!
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Painterly is out now via Whatever’s Clever and you can get it from the Nico Hedley Bandcamp page.
Photos by Caleb Bryant Miller, album design by Benedict Kupstas