For The Nields, it’s time for `Play’
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sep 10, 1998) -- It’s too easy to forget that as much as it is an art, a business and a livelihood, music is play. It’s why musicians -- along with athletes and actors -- are the luckiest people in the world, because for them, work is literally play. It’s too easy to lose sight of that simple truth, both for listeners and artists alike. Which is perhaps why the folk-rock group The Nields named its new album coming out later this month, “Play.” More than just a mere play on words, “Play” is at once giant a step forward into more pop-based territory for the Pioneer Valley-based group, while at the same time marking a return to The Nields’s earlier, vocal-oriented approach. It is also an ode to the group’s fans, who have stuck with them through thick and thin, and an ambitious concept album -- not so much a rock opera as a rock play. Indeed, the album’s CD booklet is arranged as a kind of libretto or script in two acts, with each song comprising a scene, with lyrics arranged as dialogue for characters (usually named “he” and “she” or “you” and “me”), and with stage directions cum commentary from the likes of philosopher Friedrich Schiller (“Man is only fully human when he is at play”), anthropologist Helen M. Luke (“The natural gaiety and laughter of the child within us is lost in exact proportion to the loss of our ability to play….”) and folksinger Woody Guthrie (“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good”). None of this will come as an inordinate surprise to anyone familiar with past Nields efforts, all distinguished by an acute, literate intelligence matched by a curatorial flair for the perfectly-placed pop overtones. That, plus the trademark, organic mix of sisterly harmonies courtesy of lead singer Katryna Nields and chief songwriter and co-vocalist Nerissa Nields, is the formula that has garnered the Nields a fanatically loyal following of fans and a major-label record deal, albeit with a label that has since gone belly-up. Ironically, “Play” comes at a time in the group’s career when, having gone through some of the worst trials the music business can throw at an aspiring, up-and-coming act, The Nields might well have responded with anything but an album of songs celebrating the playful side of its chosen profession. Over the past year, The Nields -- who inaugurate the new student center at Goodrich Hall on the Williams College campus in Williamstown on Saturday, Sept. 12, at 9 -- have been on a roller-coaster ride consisting of false promises and dashed expectations. They had been promised the world -- or the music-business equivalent, including tour support, plum gigs, heavy marketing of singles and videos -- only to wind up bruised and battered, with little to show for the experience other than battle scars and enough stories to fill one of those whistleblowing, behind-the-scenes looks at the music industry. It was the kind of experience that in most cases would have spelled the end of the group. Having come so close to the brass ring, only to see it snatched from out of their grasp, most bands would have called it a day and gone on their separate, merry or not-so-merry ways. In the case of The Nields, the exact opposite occurred. “We’ve become much tighter with each other, both personally and musically through this experience,” said Nerissa Nields, in one of a series of phone interviews conducted over the past few months and years, ever since her husband, David, and sister, Katryna, first joined forces in 1991 as a summertime lounge act at the Williams Inn in Williamstown. “We’re much more reliant on each other, and self-reliant as a band, tighter and more coherent as a group,” said the Yale University-educated Nields. “There’s just this overriding sense of everything’s okay, and joy, I think, in our music-making.” That joy is evident throughout the 14 tracks on “Play,” the follow-up to the critically-acclaimed “Gotta Get Over Greta,” which will be officially released on Sept. 29 on the Cambridge-based, leading independent label Rounder Records’ new rock imprint, Zoe, with distribution and marketing assistance provided by Mercury Records. The album kicks off with “Easy People,” the first of several catchy, radio-ready folk-rockers, in which the narrator repeatedly asks, “Haven’t I paid my dues by now?” But it’s not a whiny, rhetorical question -- the singer finds peace in her choice: “I choose you to take up all of my time….For you I would give the songs I write.” It’s a love song from the band to itself and its fans. Then, with the next song, “Georgia O,” the album hits the road, and in many ways, “Play” is an old-fashioned road album -- one of those rock ‘n’ roll versions of the old Hollywood road pictures. Since The Nields have spent a large part of the last three years criss-crossing the nation, playing coffeehouses, colleges and rock clubs, it’s not surprising that some of those experiences would wind up in song. “Georgia O” is a brilliantly-crafted composition which works on several levels. At its most obvious, it’s a song about the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (“O Georgia O, I wanna be a woman like you”). But the song opens with the narrator driving through New Mexico listening to an Ani DiFranco tape, wondering what she would say to DiFranco if she met her. DiFranco and O’ Keeffe merge, and in the end, the song is about the cult of female creativity, which presumably includes The Nields. “I wanna be a woman like me,” is how the song concludes, connecting the dots from the hero to singer. “Friday at the Circle K” revisits the pure, adolescent joy in making music, with its British Invasion-style arrangements the perfect match for the song’s giddy celebration of innocence, where “We gather every week to see our own rest stop poet, though he can’t really sing on key.” “In the Hush Before the Heartbreak,” “Snowman” and “Last Kisses” are vintage Nields in the manner in which they explore and dramatize moments of emotional transition and epiphany while showcasing the group’s sisterly harmonies to their most stirring effect. Last spring, when the group was still mixing the album, Nields spoke candidly about the new album.”It’s a wider record,” she said. “It spans more styles than `Greta’ and at the same time there are more songs right smack in the middle….There are more pure pop songs on this album, but then there’s also `Nebraska,’ which is very much almost an alt-country song, and `Tomorrowland,’ which is as grungy as antyhing on `Greta.’” Indeed, if the album and the band as a whole can be considered to have a theme song, it’s “Tomorrowland,” the last track on “Play,” which for a while last spring was in the running as the title track. “It’s about us,” said Nields. “It’s the most autobiographical song we’ve ever written. It’s sort of a love song to our fans.” The song is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, new-wavish self-portrait. “You and me and she and he and he,” it begins, a picture of The Nields themselves, assuming “you” or “me” is a guy. In the song, the band travels to gigs on a boat -- a sly wink to fans who know that for several years the group travelled in a white van named Moby. The band’s gigs are booked in out-of-the-way places by a guy named Stevie -- yes, the band once had a booking agent named Steve -- who although he has little time to devote to them personally, always puts a bright spin on things: “I was just leaving, but I got you a gig in the only club on this world,” he tells them. “We agree to be happy happy happy and we will be completely in control,” the song continues, thereby wrestling with that perennial issue that all bands face -- who will determine the course and content of their career? Turn the clock back to spring ’97, when “Gotta Get Over Greta” is released by Guardian Records, an imprint of EMI International, at the time one of the six largest record companies in the world. Guardian picked up “Greta” about a year after it was first released by the New York-based independent label Razor and Tie. After a little tinkering with the packaging and the addition of a few new tunes, the record was re-released with all the typical promises that major labels bestow on young bands. Nields herself picks up the story from here. “Last September we were in the middle of our big tour to support `Greta,’ the record company tour where they were supposed to be pulling out all the stops, and nothing was coming through,” she said. “And then one day they called us up and said, `We’ve got the greatest gig. You need to cancel a couple of shows in the midwest and we’re going to fly you out to California and you’re going to do this gig for Seventeen Magazine and it’s going to be great and Seventeen is going to write about you and feature you.’ “At that point we were so, I don’t want to say desperate, but, wondering what the heck the record company was going to do for us. So having faith in them that they were going to do something, we figured, well, this has got to be something. “So we cancelled this great gig that we had in St. Louis and flew out to Palo Alto, where we ended up playing at the Bloomingdales Mall in Stanford, at the Polo/Ralph Lauren jeans section, for an amateur fashion show with teen-age, fifteen-year-old amateur models, on a Saturday afternoon modeling Polo/Ralph Lauren’s fall collection. “And there was this little stage set up for us and we sang `Taxi Girl’ and `Best Black Dress,’ ironically. There were probably about fifty people there and they were all these disgruntled Palo Alto teen-agers, either friends of the kids modeling or the losers of the modeling contest. “The people there -- the woman from Bloomingdales and the woman from Seventeen -- were just the fakest, most vacuous people I think we’ve ever encountered. The one from Seventeen was sort of like the last-minute fill-in for the announcer for the fashion show. Before every outfit that came out, she’d say something like, `Now here’s a chartreuse parka, perfect for wearing by the slopes of Aspen after you’ve had a hard day at the slopes, you can sip your caffe lattes in you new parka, LETS CHECK IT OUT!’ And she said that in the most grating voice in front of each item. “Then about two weeks later, when we were driving through Utah, and we were just south of Salt Lake City -- I don’t know if you’ve been out there, but we’ve been to the Rockies a lot, and it’s always really really clear and beautiful -- for some reason that day, it was a blue-sky day, not a cloud in the sky, but there was so much pollution that you couldn’t even really see the mountains. They were right in front of you but it was like they were covered with this film of brown. “I’ve seen that kind of pollution in L.A., but I’ve never seen it in the Rocky Mountains. Apparently it’s very common in Salt Lake City on some days, but I didn’t know that, so I was totally shocked and appalled and depressed, just really depressed. It was a really tough tour, and I just thought what is this world coming to?” It was for Nields, needless to say, the nadir of her whole career. But the band was soon to learn that the reason that so few of Guardian’s promises came to fruition was that the label -- indeed, much of EMI’s American arm -- was self-destructing. By last winter, the whole place shut down, and The Nields, along with fellow Guardian artists such as Joan Baez, Catie Curtis and The Kinks, were left with no direction home, like complete unknowns. At the crossroads where other bands would have thrown up their arms, tossed their instruments and said enough, The Nields simply got stronger.
Undoubtedly it helped that The Nields are more than just a band that has
been together for four years -- they are literally a family. Nerissa’s
husband, David, plays inventive guitar, writes songs and occasionally sings. “It made us really look at ourselves and say what are we about and what do we want,” said Nields. “What do we care about? How famous do we want to be? Do we care about that? “What we came out of this realizing is that we have the opportunity to be an historic folk-rock band that lasts forever through the sheer joy and love of the music. Not through having a top-forty hit, not through selling millions and millions of tickets or albums, but just through the sheer love of the music and the love of our fans. “It may be that it turns out with this next record that it’s a big break for us, but we don’t care as long as we’re able to complete these cycles of making these albums, touring behind them, selling enough to make ends meet, in order to go back into the studio to make the next one. “I sort of feel like we’re farmers. We just want to be able to keep the seasons going, to keep the crops growing and build slowly over time.” [This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Sept. 10, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]
Note: These links will launch a new browser The Nields Homepage
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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