Heather Nova: Anti-Pop Heroine
Friday April 12, 2002 @ 03:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

by April Labine

She may be a pretty little thing with a guitar, but don’t stereotype Heather Nova. And don't dismiss her as just another girl who can string a few words together and carry a tune.

"I think it’s a shame that when it comes to being a female singer-songwriter, that gender seems to have become a genre," Nova says. "I thought that things like Lilith Fair would help to dispel that but, in the end, I guess that even seems to have become a trend."

Nova doesn’t want her gender to be an issue. She wants her music to speak for itself, and it does. Nova spins poetry from her experiences and weaves it through majestic melodies. Her music is a diary, a confessional, a tapestry of her life. It's as clean and honest as music gets.

"I think it’s important to be real about emotion and be real about life in songs, because I think those are the songs that really help other people," Nova says. "When you take that risk yourself, writing that song and being that open, those are usually the songs that are going to make someone feel less alone because they’ve gone through the same thing."

That kind of honesty comes at a time when popular music is riddled with virginal whores singing candy-coated nonsense, co-writing one or two songs on albums that go multi-platinum. Nova’s beautiful candor couldn’t come at a better time.

Nova says that what she does is almost a different business all together. Pop music and Heather Nova are simply not offering the same thing.

"It’s manufactured," she explains. "They’re entertainers and they’re good at what they do, but they’re not coming at it from the same angle as I am because I am a writer. It’s just different."

Nova says that it's a shame that more songwriters don’t get recognized in the music industry. She thinks that they have so much more to offer young people than what they’re getting from pop music these days.

"It’s important to have good role models," she says. "It’s so important to have self-esteem when you’re a teenager, when you’re a young gir, and I don’t think that some of these pop artists are really encouraging self-esteem. If anything, they’re probably making a lot of kids feel inadequate."

Nova doesn’t want to make her audience feel inadequate. She’s not making a fashion statement or selling an image. She simply wants to reach out to her audience. As personal as her music is, it isn’t a solitary experience. Nova writes her music in complete isolation, but once unleashed onto the world, it's there for everyone to relate to. When she performs, it is her time to share her music with whoever cares to hear it.





"Sometimes I think when you’re singing live and you’re involved in that process with an audience, you almost get in touch with something higher," Nova says. "I sort of feel that it’s not about me anymore. It’s just about soul. The music is creating a connection between the audience and me."

Nova admits that she often feels like a medium for the music. This is why performing is just as important to her as songwriting. To do one without the other would make her craft incomplete.

"Songwriting is something that I need to do emotionally and performing is something that I find physically and spiritually important."

Just this past March, Nova fed that need with a tour of Europe in support of her third album, South. After the old world jaunt she hopes to stay on the road and tour North America for a while.

"I get people saying, ‘Well, aren’t you going to settle down and have kids?’ and yeah, I do want to do that some day and it’s a bit weird that I live my life on a tour bus traveling the world, but that’s what feels good to me."

Nova says that though South was not written with any particular theme in mind, when she listens to it now, she realizes that the album illustrates her struggle to create a harmony between her life and her dreams.

"I think that dreams are important because they keep you moving forward," she says. "But they can also paralyze you if you are too attached to them."


source :http://www.chartattack.com/DAMN/2002/04/1201.cfm