Mountain Music

“My new personality is the countryside,” Nina Nesbitt tells Apple Music. Prior to releasing her fourth album, the singer-songwriter upped sticks and left London, her home for the previous decade, for “a field in the middle of nowhere”—a move that inspired a lot of reflection about her Scottish roots, and, in turn, a slew of new songs that became *Mountain Music*. “Growing up in a small village in Scotland, I grew up with a lot of folk music,” she says. “That’s what inspired me to start playing guitar. Then, when I moved to London and got signed and was able to work with producers, I really wanted to explore pop. I also felt a lot of pressure to make that type of music and have a radio song \[because\] I was on a major label. But after being in the industry for so long, trying out different genres and being a songwriter for other people, I’ve figured out what I’m best at as an artist. I think you can write all different genres, but sometimes you can’t perform them as well. This album is definitely about embracing exactly who you are and being OK with it.” Nesbitt had told herself she didn’t want to make another album but, in the process of overcoming a different creative challenge, *Mountain Music* began to take shape. “I’d been songwriting commercially for so long, in these sessions with amazing producers and topliners and artists, and I hadn’t really written by myself in a long time,” she says. “So it was an exercise in learning to trust my own instincts again, and trying to push past the inner critic in my head or needing someone to tell me if something was good. And then the songs just started coming out. In two months, I had the whole album.” Keen to recreate the warm authenticity of records produced in Nashville while still retaining a “British edge,” Nesbitt brought Peter Miles (Orla Gartland, Dodie) on board to produce her finished demos. The result is a delicately crafted collection of momentum-building midtempos and well-measured ballads that trace the painful journey through difficult circumstances until finally emerging on the other side fortified by the strength of acceptance. “There’s been so much attention to detail and so many great musicians on it,” she says. “I think it’s the best work I’ve ever done.” Read on as she guides us through it, track by track. **“Pages”** “I’ve been quite afraid of being honest for a long time, because a lot was going on in my life and a lot of it was quite private. I didn’t really want to write about it. But this song felt like a stream of consciousness just coming out, and it said everything that I wanted to say. My favorite songs I’ve written are always the ones that just come out naturally. And it’s literally four chords—very simple. Writing for so long with so many incredible musicians who are amazing at piano and their chords are very advanced made me think things need to be clever, but realistically, I’m more of a storyteller that plays instruments to support that. It can be simple, it can be honest, and I think that’s enough.” **“I’m Coming Home”** “I wanted to write a song about home, because that’s such a staple on a folk album. So many of the albums I listened to had a sense of where that person is from, so I was like, ‘I want to write about my little village that no one has been to.’ Peter was like, ‘I feel like it’s missing a middle 8.’ My friend Vicky turned 17 before any of us and she passed her driving test really quickly so she used to drive us about. She’s also the person that would recommend music to me. I would go out and ride around the country lanes with her and she would play CDs that she’d made. So I went away and I wrote ‘Flashback, I’m seventeen in the passenger seat’ and it’s one of my favorite parts of the album now.” **“Mansion”** “‘Mansion’ is a metaphor for your own self-worth and a letter to my friend to remind her, just don’t settle. I’m describing my friend as this beautiful mansion, covered in vines and roses in the middle of a city. Everyone’s stopping to stare when they walk past, but she’s inside and the curtains are shut. She can’t see how beautiful she is. It’s also a letter to my younger self. I didn’t grow up with loads of guys queuing up at the door and I was really insecure, so if someone gave me attention I’d be really flattered, even if they weren’t the best person for me. I think it’s hard when it’s you, because if you’re in a bit of a bad place or you’re not really loving who you are, you don’t often see it until you’re out of it—but your friends can see it.” **“On the Run”** “I wanted the album to have two sides: the side where it’s more upbeat and fun and then music that I find easier to write, which is the more mellow, driving-at-night-through-the-mountains type of vibe. I got a driving license between the last album and this one, and I love driving. I did a lot of trips to and from Devon where I recorded the album, and I discovered so many random folky playlists. I would put them on and not want the drive to stop. I wanted ‘On the Run’ to sit among the songs that I listened to. There’s no manual for being a creative person at this age, I feel like I haven’t got a structure or a routine, but I was seeing a lot of my friends move on with their lives in quite a traditional or conventional way and I didn’t know what that looked like for me. This song is about feeling like I might just go and live in a van.” **“Painkiller”** “I feel like a lot of the men that I’ve always been surrounded by—whether it’s family, friends, relationships—have struggled to express their emotions. So they’ve just had a drink, or taken something, or just pushed it down and dealt with it in a different way. When I was younger, I would get annoyed, because I’d be like, ‘Why can’t you confront what you’re feeling?’ As I’ve got older and experienced my own traumas in life, I understand why people maybe deal with things in unhealthy ways. Sometimes it’s easier to take the pain away with a drink rather than dig deep and do the work and be uncomfortable. ‘Painkiller’ is about vices and saying, ’It’s all right to slip up sometimes, it’s all right to not want to deal with that right now, and it’s all right to not have the tools \[you need\] as a human.’ How are you supposed to know how to deal with things if you’ve never been taught?” **“Anger”** “I’d seen the term ‘feminine rage’ somewhere and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel that.’ But I never set out to write the song as a woman. I just wanted to write about a situation in my life that had made me so angry, because it was so hurtful and so unexpected. I felt like I had so much rage, but I wasn’t allowed to express it. I never want to be seen as crazy and I don’t like confrontation, but I’d never felt so much anger inside me and I just had to push it down and get on with it. Then it would creep up on me and I didn’t know why. I eventually wrote this song and I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that that was in there.’ I learned that writing music is my vessel for getting things out, and I felt so much lighter after writing it.” **“Alchemise”** “This song feels like the 2024 take on ‘The Sun Will Come Up, Seasons Will Change’ \[the title track of Nesbitt’s 2019 album\]. Whatever you’re going through: if it’s good, make the most of it, because it might not last; if it’s bad, then just ride through it. It’s not going to be terrible forever. I always have that in my head. I actually wrote it for my mum—she was going through a bad situation—but I feel like anyone can take that into their own life. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is awful. How am I going to get past this? I’m such a mess. I’m crying all the time,’ and it’s just about saying actually, you need to do that to *not* do that.” **“Big Things, Small Town”** “When I was 17, all I wanted to do was get out \[of my village\], move to London, see the world, and be as far away as possible. Lately, I’ve felt really lucky to have grown up there. The cities have massive landmarks, like the London Eye, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower; I think the small towns have invisible landmarks. It might be the field that you had your first drink in. It might be the bus stop that took you into town every weekend, or a tree where you had your first kiss. And there’s always the local celebs as well, the people that everyone knows. I just think it can be equally as important to live somewhere like that. It’s just the band in a room with me singing, and I wanted it to feel almost like a village party. It’s quite chaotic.” **“Treachery”** “I tried to be Bon Iver for an afternoon. I got my guitar in open tuning and ‘Treachery’ just came out. The song is just about betrayal really. Normally, I write in a very honest way, but something I love about a lot of Bon Iver tracks is that they’re quite abstract, but lyrically, they still evoke such a feeling. I think when you’re maybe not ready to talk about something in a song, you can still talk about how it made you feel. I was just trying to create images that felt like what I was feeling inside. I’m also using a completely different part of my voice. It’s very soft and we’ve got a doubler effect on.” **“Hard Times”** “After going through quite a lot personally before making this album, I felt really lucky to have someone to go through it with me. I’ve been with my partner for nine years now and he’s always there to get me through things, which is lovely. But the song isn’t necessarily about us, it’s more about the outside world and me going through things, and how having that person there to go through it with you is a really comforting thing. When I was younger, I always thought relationships are like Disney but \[in reality\] you’re both going to have ups and downs. Some people will run a mile when things like that happen. You know they’re legit when they stick with you through the good and bad.” **“What Will Make Me Great”** “The album was only going to be 11 tracks. Then I wrote this song over Christmas while we were mixing it and Peter really liked it and he was like, ‘Just record a live take of it.’ It’s the opposite end of the spectrum \[to the rest of the album\] in terms of how raw it is, but I think the lyrics sum up what the album is about. The chorus lyric ‘Maybe this pain is ruining my life/Maybe this pain is what will make me great/In time’ was me listening back to the album and going, ‘That experience that I went through was so difficult and so painful, but actually I’ve created this album that is my favorite thing I’ve ever done, and maybe this is what needed to happen.’ It’s a song with perspective.” **“Parachute”** “I had the chorus and outro of ‘Parachute’ for months and I just couldn’t write a verse. I was adamant about finishing it myself because everything apart from one song was solely written alone in one room and I really liked that. Then Peter was like, ‘Just get in a room with Pat \[writer/producer Patrick James Pearson\] and write it.’ Pat played the piano on this album for me, and he’s also a great writer. Just through chatting with him, I discovered it was a love song. Originally, it was just about being introverted and feeling like a bit of a weirdo, but it’s really about finding that one person you can really be yourself with. If you’re taking a leap, they’re going to be the parachute to pull you back up. I wrote it about my boyfriend and it feels very, very honest.”

Mountain Music represents a genre-shift for Nina Nesbitt, a record that showcases her vocals more than her previous pop-oriented records ever did.

Nina Nesbitt doesn’t have to prove herself to anyone. With a billion career streams to date, a slew of high-profile collaborations, and a co-sign from