Nina Nastasia looks to a new dawn

Reeling in shock for weeks afterwards, she could hardly imagine wanting to record again, so profoundly had her musical path overlapped with Albini’s since her debut album Dogs. It was the first of seven records they made together, most of them at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and the beginning of a friendship that – without any hyperbole intended – changed the course of her life.

It was Albini who helped her to see her tiny little screw ups as an integral part of her sound. It was Albini who tried to coax her back to music when she had crashed out, drowning in a controlling and emotionally abusive relationship with her then partner – also manager and producer – Kennan Gudjonsson. And it was Albini who was among those who rallied around her most closely after Gudjonsson’s abrupt suicide six years ago – a complicated recovery she documented so devastatingly on 2022’s Riderless Horse, and, truthfully, is still figuring out now.

It seems especially cruel that she should lose Albini too, and within such a short space of time. His death throws the one-of-a-kind Riderless Horse into even starker relief, putting a very final stop to their collaboration. Preferring the term audio engineer, Albini rarely allowed himself to be credited as a producer – and was famous for it too. But on Riderless Horse, it was a label that he took to heart, co-credited alongside Nastasia and an assist from their long-time friend Greg Norman.

“Making that record was extremely special, and I’m so grateful that I had that experience with Steve,” says Nastasia, speaking to BEST FIT over video call as her rescue dog Misha, an Australian shepherd, fusses around at her feet. “He really took on the role of guiding things and putting his two cents in about what worked and what didn’t, and I really appreciated that.”

Almost referring to their friendship in the past tense, she catches herself and smiles, blinking back a sudden tear. “I actually feel like Steve is the one dead person that still feels the most alive to me, and that kind of gets me through. I don’t think of him as dead. He is, but it always feels like he’s still here.”

Some weeks after he passed, shortly after what would have been Albini’s 62nd birthday, a memorial was held for him by the shores of Lake Michigan, bringing together as many members of his community as could possibly make it and livestreamed across the world. Bands reformed, anecdotes flowed, friendships were rekindled, and new bonds were made – what could be more fitting? 

“Community was so important to him and to his wife Heather, and they actively built it,” Nastasia confirms. “The memorial was a wonderful reminder that, even in this very difficult line of work, there’s this beautiful group of people who really want to support each other. It was a remarkable weekend. So many of us were asking, ‘Can this be a yearly thing?’”

Nastasia came away from the weekend with more than just a refilled heart container. Clutched close to her chest was a piece of wisdom from none other than Will Oldham – a ‘student’ of Albini’s since his teens, and later a friend to them both. “Graduation has been imposed upon us,” he said when she talked about missing her teacher. “It’s time to throw our hats in the air and get real, make music with a sense of value, and even purpose.” “That quote really gets me through,” she says, almost tearing up again. “It’s just so beautiful and the timing was so perfect.” 

Granted, purpose isn’t something that Nastasia has been lacking since completing work on Riderless Horse, which despite its heaviness was also silver lined with hope. She describes these recent years as being furiously motivated to make up for lost time (“trying to get my career back”) and finding positive reinforcement in locating strengths within her that she either never knew or had forgotten that she had. 

A major factor in that has been rediscovering her love for community, and especially collaboration, which the dynamic with Gudjonsson had denied her for so long. Forming a new band, Jolie Laide, with members of Canadian rock group Florida BC, she recorded and toured two albums made in quick succession, followed by a string of Bandcamp-only releases over the past year.

She’s been on the move a lot too, relocating cross-country from rural Vermont, where she’d felt too isolated, to Seattle, where she’d once lived in a squat in her 20s and had dreams of being in theatre. She almost went to Maine at one point, just because it looked nice in the movies, but a friend convinced her to stay. Eventually, she says, she wants to move to Ireland, where her grandma was from, but as of now she’s still by the Puget Sound, in the small town of Port Ludlow across the water from Seattle. When we speak for a second time for this piece, she’s out front of her new home, enjoying the mid-May sunshine on a faded plastic lawn chair. It’s two days before her 60th birthday and she’s feeling quite at ease.

“I guess I’m an extremely hopeful, positive person at this time in my life,” she says. “I’m ambitious, but my goalpost has a really low bar. I just want to be comfortable.” She stops herself and laughs. “Okay, in the music industry that’s a pretty freaking high bar, but I just want to have the opportunity to keep going, to keep making records while I still can.”

That newfound hope she speaks of came through strongly on her first Bandcamp experiment, Songs for a World of Trouble, recorded in October 2024 and released last June. Bookended by the songs “Ocean Front” and “North Dakota”, both about finding home, in a sense, and the calm that may come with landing on one’s feet, the record is infused with hope and dreaming, almost as an antidote to the “new nightmare” of the United States post Trump re-election. “The title of the album felt highly appropriate once those results came in,” she sighs. “It’s hard to keep your head straight and in the game and not just want to crawl back under the covers and cry. But it really refers to my own personal world, which felt like it was in a lot of trouble after losing Steve.”

Having wrestled with the grim finality of it all on Riderless Horse, Nastasia returned to the scene on Songs for a World of Trouble’s “A Blazing Fire”, an anguished song of aftermath and ash that cuts to the heart of her fateful decision and the shocking end that followed. In some other timeline, perhaps it could have served as her last word on the matter, but that’s not how healing works. When I spoke to her for the first time for this piece, Nastasia had been tentatively dating, “trying to head towards healthy” rather than going all-in right from the start, but she’s since put all that on pause to give herself more time to really figure out a way through the PTSD that still rears its ugly head when her fears close in.

“I’ve really had to look at everything that happened and try to understand what it was that made me susceptible to it,” she says. “I mean, I was a full and sort-of functioning human before him, but there must have been something about me, some insecurity or other, because I just fell into that hole so easily.”

She compares her recovery to that of an alcoholic, where the daily mantra is not the broad-stroke declaration of “I’m never gonna drink again” but “I’m not gonna drink today.” When it comes to dating, friends have reassured her that she’d never let what happened with Gudjonsson to ever repeat, but how can she be sure, she says, when she doesn’t even know how it happened in the first place? “I’ve always been in very intense relationships that are all encompassing,” she says wryly. “So I kind of don’t want to say that it would never happen again, but I want to be really hyper aware of the potential.”

Sitting in her lawn chair with the bright sun on her face, Nastasia seems content to heed her own advice from “You Can Take Your Time”, a song of forgiveness and resilience that recently resurfaced as part of another Bandcamp-only collection, Seaside Recordings, collecting nine “experimental versions” of tracks from across her first six LPs, from her debut album Dogs to 2010’s Outlaster. Recorded in Brooklyn that same year with pianist Steven Beck and Matthew Szemela on violin, the rearranged songs have a haunting, fond fragility, doubling down on the uncertain kind of beauty and ominous patina of much of her best work. 

Having nixed so many of her memories from that chaotic period in her life – just before things with Gudjonsson got so bad that she vanished almost entirely from music for over a decade – Nastasia doesn’t have a great deal to say about the sessions, other than praising the musicianship (“like walking through a dense forest in a fairytale”) and Gudjonsson’s vital role in the concept and production. Though the space he allowed her to manoeuvre in only shrank with time, Nastasia will always give Gudjonsson his dues in that respect, not wanting to reduce him to just the one dimension defined by his abuse.

“Kennan had a real sensibility for what worked and what didn’t, and he had a good way – maybe not the best way – of directing me,” she says, thinking back across those first 10 years of making records. “I was always pretty comfortable in the studio but it was like I had a watchdog looking over me, putting an insane amount of pressure on me to be flawless.”

Diving further into her archives, more recent Bandcamp gems include a few illuminating outtakes from over the years, including a song where she sings in Russian (“The Sandman”) and a Japanese version of “While We Talk” from 2003’s Run to Ruin that she learnt phonetically from a fluent friend. Fully aware that she’s “a terrible self-promoter,” taking the direct-to-fan route for these low-key releases has turned out to be “actually pretty idyllic” for her, she says. “The real perk of not having as many people pay attention to what you’re doing is that you can really engage with the people who do, and it’s been so lovely,” she adds. “Platforms like Spotify have such a hellish business model for artists, it’s criminal, so it makes a massive difference to be able to put these small releases out on Bandcamp.”

That said, it will likely be a while before we get more music from Nastasia, as she’s in the process of recording a proper follow-up to Riderless Horse for Brooklyn-based label Temporary Residence, who recently reissued her fourth album On Leaving for its 20th anniversary, along with remastered versions of Outlaster and 2007’s You Follow Me, her stark collaboration with percussionist Jim White. Working out of the same studio where she made Songs for a World of Trouble, a short ride from home, Nastasia says she and producer Andrew Rudd are putting tracks down slowly rather than her typical speedrun way of doing things. “Andrew is doing such a fantastic job of putting it together,” she says. “I've lived with the GarageBand demos for so long now that I’m really excited to be adding things like strings and a lot of different vocal parts.”

Though she doesn’t want to give too much away just yet, she can say that the record is a concept piece with a narrative arc that closely mirrors her own experience of psychological abuse, and how it all unravelled. “I decided to write songs that tell that story in a chronological way – the whole story, from the moment we met to the end,” she says. As for how it sounds, well, hold on to your bowler hat and cane because the songs so far have “a kind of cabaret-type feel, quite different from my other records.”

She’s in talks as well to adapt it for a black-box theatre piece, one she could potentially tour with, using actors that work with movement and modern clowning in the vein of Jacques Leqoc, but she can’t say more than that right now. She’s also writing her first poetry book, having previously shared collections of short stories and other writings as companion books to Riderless Horse, Songs for a World of Trouble, and the recent reissues, and it may or may not be ready by late summer.

“It’s quite a new thing,” she says, laughing. “I feel pretty secure in writing songs at this point, I’ve done my 10,000 hours, but I’m not necessarily a poet. But then I think, well, I’ll just get better the more I do it. Maybe the tenth booklet will be genius, but for now it’s just my thoughts or whatever, and I think that’s fine.”

Turning 60, then, doesn’t feel much like she’s running out of road. If anything, her future feels more wide open than ever, stretching out in all kinds of interesting directions. Where limits were once imposed by another and self-doubt held her back, Nastasia’s new decade is all about embracing the true role of an artist – “throwing shit out there” and seeing what sticks. 

“Getting older is really not easy,” she says, “but I always think to myself, ‘Thank god I can say that I’m an artist at this point. Thank god I can express myself that way,’ because I don’t know, man… how would I survive otherwise? Art gives me such a sense of purpose. It helps me to escape.”

This newfound confidence in her creative work, which she credits in part to the “huge wealth of knowledge” she learned from Albini – “I might as well have gotten a Stanford or Yale or Princeton education, learning from Steve” – is really just a joy to see, and I hope I feel the same when I’m 60, still writing profiles for peanuts, still smitten with the craft. I hope I feel the same thrill of the new as well, the same urge to challenge my own status quo. 

“I do think that’s so important as an artist,” she says. “To do things out of your comfort zone, beyond your safety net. I mean, I have been writing the same fucking song for 25 years, but hopefully it's in a different key now.”