Friday's Music Clip: Heather Nova: Higher Ground

This week I came across this great new tool for bands as I was searching for more information on a favourite songstress. I was interested to learn what had become of Heather Nova and her soon to be released new album.I have been following her on Twitter for a little while and she has gone off grid and retired from the "corporate" music industry, choosing instead to go it alone.

In these modern times, with the help of the internet and social networking, this option has become more viable, with bands like OK GO and Radiohead leaving the clutches of the major labels and choosing instead to self publish and self promote. This is a risky endeavour, and requires massive resources, but at the end of the day these artists are able to produce and release their own music their own way, unfettered by the hands of the corporates, whose business interests often have an impact on the creative process. At her website www.heathernova.com there is a sample of her new album which is delightful, and also a link to an interesting site Pledge Music (click here for her link).
At Pledge Music the average internet punter / fan can pledge their support to the artist to help them achieve their musical goal, in this case the release of a new album. There are options for pledging. For example you can pledge €20 for a signed copy of the CD, or €35 for a copy of the CD and your name in the credits (all gone), or you can even pledge €100 for an original signed charcoal drawing, or poems, or handwritten lyric sheets. Everything an adoring fan might desire to own. So far she is at 114% of her goal, and with another 27 days to go the special one of things have all but gone. What a great concept!

So what of Heather Nova?
Now in her early 40's, she has set up camp on an island in Bermuda, living a simpler life with her husband, music producer Felix Tod, and their son Sebastian (born in 2004).

Here is the first single, Higher Ground, from the new album 300 Days at Sea. What is really lovely about this is that it is a multi - use video not just promoting her music, but also the charity Last Mile Operations. This is a charity committed to delivering aid right into the hands of those that need it, rather than dropping it off at a supply depot to be looted first by corrupt governments and local "officials". Kudos again for taking the higher ground and using not only her music, but her videos to deliver an important humanitarian message. This would have not been possible through the normal "corporate" channels.

Healthy living and low stress seem to be working for her, she looks the same as she did when she was 18!

A quick trip back to her breakout tracks, here is a live performance of Walk This World (1994) from Hamburg in 2003:

And another live version from earlier in her career, this time at a festival in 2000:

Here is one of her 2002 songs "Virus of the Mind":

From our old friends at Wikipedia:

Heather Nova (born Heather Allison Frith, ) started life in Bermuda, July 6, 1967 . Her mother is Canadian, and her father is a native Bermudian. Nova spent most of her childhood with her family (including one sister, television reporter Susannah, and one brother, reggae singer Mishka) on a 40 ft (12 m) boat built by her father, where the Friths spent most of 1970s and part of the 1980s, sailing throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean waters and coasts. Since her idyllic childhood, Heather has played over 600 concerts, sold over 2 million albums and has a career of 20 years in the Music industry.

Nova started playing guitar and violin at an early age, writing her first song when she was 12. Her family relocated to New England where she attended the Putney School in Putney, Vermont. Following her graduation in 1983, Nova enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she majored in film in 1989. She also sat in on poetry classes and wrote music to go with her student films. Later, she would forego film study to focus on creating music.

After graduating from RISD, Nova briefly relocated to New York City (where she unsuccessfully tried to interest some major labels in a demo), before moving to London, England, a place she called home for twelve years (she already had British citizenship due to her Bermudian origins). In 1990, she released her first recording, Heather Frith, an EP; she had not yet changed her name. The name change came a year or so later, in an effort to create a name with more buzz.

The new name debuted in 1993 with her second EP Spirit in You and her first full album, the critically acclaimed Glow Stars, after being discovered by producer Felix Tod and introduced to Big Cat label manager Steven Abbott. The success of the album led her to record and release her first live album Blow the same year, which she supported by a tour of Europe. In 1994, she released Oyster, for which she toured for almost two years. Another live album, Live from the Milky Way, was released in 1995. Siren, the follow up to Oyster because of the hit single "London Rain", was released in 1998, after which she joined Sarah McLachlan and others on the North American Lilith Fair, a music festival with only female performers.

After the release of Siren and a world tour to promote the record, Nova took a 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 popular on college radio. Also during this time, she recorded a version of the often covered traditional song "Gloomy Sunday", for the German WWII feature film drama Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (released under the International title Gloomy Sunday). She released yet another live album, Wonderlust, in 2000.

Over the years, Nova has written and recorded over 120 songs. With the release of South (2001), she returned to the international spotlight with an appearance on the soundtrack of the John Cusack movie Serendipity. She also appeared on the soundtrack to the Sean Penn film, I am Sam and sung on The Crow. A collaboration with Swedish indiepop band Eskobar, for a song called "Someone New", led to its music video being played primarily on America's MTV. Storm,  Nova's fifth studio album, recorded with Mercury Rev as her backing band , was released in late 2003 on her own Saltwater label, went top 5 in Germany, followed by a tour during which Nova became eight months pregnant. She quickly followed the birth of her son with her next record Redbird, released in 2005 , again Top 10 in Germany.

In December 2005, Nova released Together As One, an EP supporting the Bermuda Sloop Foundation. The EP was only available in Bermuda shops and from the fan-run websites, HeatherNova.Net and HeatherNova.De.

In 2002, she self-published The Sorrowjoy, a 72-page book of her poetry and drawings. An album of the same name was released in March 2006, which featured Nova reading the poems from her book set to ambient music. The album has only been available for purchase at concerts beginning with the Intimate Evening tour, from the fan-run websites, HeatherNova.Net and HeatherNova.De, and from the official website, www.heathernova.com.

She also collaborated with the German trance artist ATB on tracks like "Love Will Find You", "Feel You Like A River" and the international hit "Renegade".

In 2008, Nova released an album called The Jasmine Flower, a solar powered acoustic album recorded in Bermuda, before touring as an acoustic tour. In the fall of 2010 she embarked on another European tour promoting her The Jasmine Flower album. On this tour, she played four unreleased songs (Save A Little Piece Of Tomorrow, Everything Changes, Burning To Love, and Turn The Compass Round) that will be included on her next album, 300 Days At Sea. This full-band album is set to be released on May 27, 2011.