Nadia Reid is getting her house in order

It’s an image that singer/songwriter Nadia Reid has lovingly adopted for the title of her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness, which heralds not a death but a departure. In the five years since her pandemic-stymied third album, Out of My Province – a title she also borrowed from an author – the New Zealander has become a mum twice over, sold almost everything she owned, and moved across the world, arriving in Manchester with just two suitcases and a car seat. The folksinger biopic is practically writing itself at this point, easing into Reid’s second act.

But let’s start somewhere closer to the beginning, in 2011, when Reid first stepped into a studio as a nervous kid who knew “jack shit” about recording. “I was so desperately young and in pain,” she says, recalling the pocket of winter she spent working on the five songs that would make up her debut EP, Letters I Wrote and Never Sent, written from the ages of 15 to 18. It was shortly after the dreadful Christchurch earthquake that killed close to 200 people, and Reid herself felt cracked wide open, with all the rawness and turmoil that early adulthood brings. She’d not long moved to Christchurch from the edge of Dunedin, the South Island’s second city, full of yearning to “have a really strong, abundant life,” and music was leading the way.

“I had this razor-sharp drive that I don’t think everyone necessarily has, and I think that came from growing up with a real lack of love and security,” she explains, dropping the f-bomb (family) from the get-go. There’s a lot to unpack in Reid’s relationship with her mother, who set aside an acting career to raise her alone, and it’s clear that it has coloured her life in ways that fall some distance short of ideal. We have the language now, in 2025, to talk about generational trauma and its cascading harms more freely, but back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, those conversations were harder to come by. Our parent(s) may have been doing their best with all that they were carrying – their failures and frustrations, and those of their own parents on top – but the rot was not so readily stopped.

It’s something that Reid has reflected on a lot since becoming a mother herself. “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” she reminds me, citing the Carl Jung quote by heart. “My mum was very creative and musical, and growing up I was very aware of what she had sacrificed,” she says. “A lot of that was down to our circumstances, but my upbringing was kind of chaotic. I had to grow up really fast, and because of that I spent my teenage years and my early ‘20s being this really serious person.”

It might seem hard to believe sitting across from her, with her bubbly warmth filling the otherwise featureless corner where our interview takes place, but just one listen to those early teenage songs confirms it. “I’ve felt kind of embarrassed about that first EP because I sound so young and it’s a bit cringey for me,” she says, laughing. “But listening back to it recently, when I put it back on Bandcamp, I was surprised that I actually felt quite nostalgic about it. There’s something in there, and, well, it’s all part of the story.”

There’s more to scratch at below the surface there, but Reid is on another track now, clear in her desire to “unsubscribe” from the tortured artist cliché. Functioning as a red line of sorts, separating the hard emotions she used to fall back on from the softer ones that her new perspective affords – forgiveness, chiefly – Enter Now Brightness achieves her ambition to “find a place for joy” in her songs. The smouldering conviction and self-possession of her first few albums is still accountably present at times, but there’s a new and stirring sense of ease that sails through the record’s ten songs.

“I think, pre-2019, I held a lot of gr-ud-ges,” she says, cautiously extending the word, as if speaking it aloud might let the damn things back in. “But I sort of let all that go as I was getting into my stride of what the hell I was doing, and I had this deep satisfaction that my music was being heard.” She pauses for a second to think. “I don’t want to make it sound like success made me feel happy, but I think the joy was creeping in. Then, in 2019, I got married in a sort of unlikely event to a sort of unlikely fella. I’d spent my whole life feeling pretty burned. I was not expecting joy.”

All this means that, while Reid may never write a takedown like Preservation’s quietly eviscerating “Richard” again, she brings a philosophical richness to contentment that’s every bit as engaging. It’s enough to make you feel almost sorry for the ex-boyfriends she once turned her pen on. “I feel like they really got the brunt of the damaged young woman I was at the time,” she says. “But hey, they weren’t perfect either!”

It's fair to say that motherhood has softened Reid even further than her 2019 thaw, sometimes turning her “into complete mush,” but Enter Now Brightness is not a ‘motherhood album’ per se – not least because it was made in early 2022, before either of her daughters was born. If anything, it’s more about finding one’s place in the lineage of mothers that echoes through time. It’s a series of negotiations, in a way, between two sides of all kinds of relationships, often with a single aim in common: to strive for new levels of empathy and mutual understanding. “Now I can be kind to anyone,” sings Reid on one highlight; “I’m grateful for the grace that is mine,” she sings on another. “Isn’t it easier? For you to watch the eye of the storm.”

Reid likens this shift in perspective to the kind of spiritual housekeeping that some women experience while pregnant, an emotional sweeping out of unresolved relationships and other fruitless baggage. It’s something she first read about in Alicia Keys’ memoir More Myself (“I couldn’t put it down!”) and stuck with her throughout her first pregnancy. “I think I got myself into quite a good position, emotionally, before my oldest daughter arrived,” she says. “There was nothing particularly magical that I did, but I remember things just became a little bit clearer.”

“I grew up with the notion that having children is really hard, and that it ruins your career,” she says, going back to her relationship with her mum. “Then, when the baby came, people would say things like ‘Enjoy your sleep while you can’ and ‘Get ready to want to kill your husband’ – it felt like the suffering Olympics, and I had to undo all of that thinking.”

Another quote she holds dear comes from a recent piece by Laura Marling, who wrote, in relation to her latest album Patterns in Repeat, “The pram in the hallway is not, as it turns out, the enemy of art.” That assertion was first made in the 1950s – by a male critic, obviously – but Reid isn’t having any of it. “I remember thinking in 2020 that if I had to choose between music and being a mum, I would probably choose music because I don’t want to give this up for anyone,” she says, “so what Laura said really hit home for me.”

In saying that, she’s very aware of her own privilege, in that she has “an exceptional co-parent” who can shoulder half the work. “Not everyone gets that,” she says softly, perhaps thinking of her mum. “It’s not a given.”

Before Laura Marling there was also Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand whose compassionate leadership style and ‘love is action’ perspective on policymaking made her a star on the political world stage. She shone particularly brightly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of the Islamophobic mass shootings in Christchurch in 2019, but it was her fearless approach to daily life as both leader and mother that Reid looked up to in particular.

“Watching her premiership unfold was really inspiring,” she says. “Seeing her take her baby into the UN General Assembly in New York was very meaningful to me, as someone who really wanted a career and wanted to be a mum.”

In a very Kiwi twist, Ardern seems to return the appreciation. The two first met at Coco’s Cantina in Auckland, over a decade ago, where Reid was working as a “rather clumsy” waitress and Ardern was a customer. Later, while she was still Prime Minister, she attended one of Reid’s shows in Wellington, right as venues were starting to open up after the first lockdown – and she even bought merch in the form of a pair of pink and green socks. Then, when Reid gave birth in 2022, Ardern was one of the first to give her positive reinforcement: “Almost no one else in my life was saying, yes, it’s challenging but in a good way. You can do it. You can have both.”

It's within that 2-year timespan that Reid’s impressionistic new single “Moment By” belongs. Written for Enter Now Brightness but kicked off reluctantly at the last minute, she describes it as “sort of an ode to that time.” Reid and her husband spent the pandemic living in the peaceful North East Valley suburb of Dunedin, surrounded by nature and choruses of birds, and taking daily walks with their dog Joni (yes, she’s a fan), and, on one of those days, “Moment By” was born.

With references to Reid’s childhood as a Steiner school pupil (“We were looking for arrows”), the 2020 election year (Ardern won in a landslide), Dunedin’s Lindsay Creek, and the ‘love is action’ principle, it’s a product of a very specific time but, she hopes, written in such a way that it can unlock a more universal feeling in others, even if it takes time. Hell, she’s not even sure what it all means herself. “I’ll spend the rest of my days trying to decipher writing, catch songs, chase meaning, and try desperately to unlock parts of my childhood and teenage years that have been completely wiped from memory,” she says, writing in her newsletter. “I want to remember everything.”

When I catch up with Reid a few months after our first meeting, she’s buzzing from a recent trip to Westminster to meet Ardern at a signing for her newly published memoir, A Different Kind of Power. “I said to her, ‘I know this is cheesy, but we’re all really, really proud of you,’ and she said, ‘Well, I’m so proud of you. Don’t stop. Just keep going.’ Then, as I was leaving, I felt really overcome with emotion because seeing her was a reminder that we do need people to look up to, and I haven’t really had many people like that in my life.”

I expect that’s not a position that Reid’s own daughters are likely to find themselves in 30 years down the line. It’s early days, of course, but so far so good. “I don’t have a lot of childhood memories of the kind that we are making with the kids now,” she says. “We have a very gentle household. There’s a lot of silliness, a lot of joy, and it’s beautiful to see."