Heather Nova
|
|
Heather_Nova-Siren.jpg
Heather Frith ("Nova" is not actually her birth name) was born July 6, 1967, on the Atlantic isle of Bermuda, which also happens to be her father's homeland.
The Friths didn't stay in Bermuda long after Heather's birth, as shortly afterwards they moved onto a houseboat and spent all of the 1970s and half of the 1980s aboard it, coming and going as they pleased up and down the Atlantic and Caribbean waters and coasts.
Heather started playing guitar around 1982 and kept at it until she deboarded the family houseboat in 1987 and moved to Rhode Island to attend the Rhode Island School of Performing Arts, where she majored in film. However she eventually dropped out to concentrate on her songwriting and on playing gigs. Over the course of the 80s she became quite adept at playing the guitar and singing at the same time.
By the end of the 1980s, Heather had moved to London, England, a place she still calls home. Emigration to the UK was not a problem due to the fact that Bermuda is a British colony and citizenship between the two is universal. In 1990, she released her first recording, a self-titled EP. She had not yet changed her name so it was released as Heather Frith. The name change came a year or so later after several gigs in the Netherlands, where, after finding out that the Dutch have an awfully hard time pronouncing "Frith," she thought up a name that would be easily pronouncable in every European language, "Nova," her Canadian mother's maiden name.
The new name debuted in 1993 as she released her first full album, Glow Stars. It was critically acclaimed and adored by her already growing legion of fans. The success of the album lead her to record and release her first live album, Blow, the same year. She took it in stride and began touring Europe to support the album. A year later in 1994 she released what many consider to be her finest outing to date, the emotional yet jagged album Oyster. Another live album, Live from the Milky Way, was released in 1995, and after its release she toured for nearly three years straight, twice joining Sarah McLachlan and company on the North American Lilith Fair, which has always touted itself as an all-female-performer festival. Heather is also a frequent performer at European music festivals such as Roskilde. The long-awaited followup to Oyster was released in 1998, entitled Siren.
After the release of Siren, Heather took a well-deserved break while various television show and film soundtracks licensed some of her songs and her record company (Sony Records/The WORK Group) released various singles from the album, which received only moderate play on America's MTV2, Europe's MTV and Canada's MuchMusic and on mainstream radio, although she was a darling of college radio. Also during this time, she recorded a rendition of the oft-covered Billie Holiday song, Gloomy Sunday, for the German WWII drama Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (the International release title of this film was Gloomy Sunday).
Over the years, Heather has written and recorded over a hundred songs, so putting together an album became more an exercise in selection than actual all-night songwriting sessions. Half the songs on Siren had been written during the Oyster sessions and were frequently played live prior to being committed to a studio session, and most of the songs for 2001's South were written during the lazy days of 1999-2000 while she was on hiatus from touring. With the release of South, she thrust herself back into the international spotlight with an appearance on the soundtrack for the John Cusack movie "Serendipity", a new live album entitled Wonderlust, a couple of music videos, and a collaberation with Swedish technopop band Eskobar, for a song called "Someone New", which also gave birth to a video, which proved so popular that it was actually played primarily on America's MTV, not just MTV2 (which is normally reserved for less-popular songs). In late 2003 came the album Storm, Heather's sixth full-length album, on the WEA Records imprint.
She self-published the sorrowjoy in 2002; it is a 72-page book of her poetry and drawings.
| Contents |
Discography (albums)
- Glow Stars (1993)
- Blow (live, 1993)
- Oyster (1994)
- Siren (1998)
- Wonderlust (live, 2000)
- South (2001)
- Storm (2003)
Discography (EPs and singles)
- Heather Frith (1990 EP)
- Spirit In You (1993 single)
- Walk This World (1994 single)
- Live at the Milky Way (1995 EP)
- Maybe An Angel (1995 EP)
- The First Recording (1997 EP, reissue of Heather Frith)
- London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do) (1998 single)
- Heart & Shoulder (1998 single)
- I'm The Girl (1999 single)
- Gloomy Sunday (1999 single)
- I'm No Angel (1999 2-part single)
- Someone New (2001 single w/ Eskobar)
- Virus of the Mind (2001 2-part single)
Books
- the sorrowjoy (ISBN 0954211502)
External links
- Online Community (http://heathernova.net/)
- Official website (http://heathernova.org/)
- Biography (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?opt1=1&P=amg&sql=Heather+Nova), available from allmusic.com; the same biography (http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/nova_heather/bio.jhtml) is also available from the VH1 website,de:Heather Nova