- Maybe An Angel (Bio) -

By: MoonShyn

Walk This World

The first time I ever heard Heather Nova was in December of 1995. At least I think it was December, I’m not quite sure but it was around that time. I was listening to the radio switching from station to station when a particular melody caught my attention.
I listened as the song sucked me into another demention. I listened as the singer whispered and wailed through mystical lyrics and haunting guitar riffs. Her voice was different from anything I’d ever heard before.I was compelled to hit the record button on my stereo. As the instumental and last verse taped I began to wonder had I heard this song before? It had taken on a familiar glow. As though I had heard it a long time ago, perhaps on the radio, perhaps in a dream. As I listened to the last half a minute of this mystery song I wondered: who is this gifted siren...... Maybe and angel?"

Oyster

I soon found out it was Heather Nova, and as I listened to her Oyster album for the first time it sent chills down my spine. There was a message loud and clear through all the addicting melodies as she sang a chronicle of her life. Like most people Heather Nova had good and bad experiences yet no one I’d ever heard before could write about them like she could.

Truth And Bone

Heather writes all her music alone on an acustic guitar. She writes from personal experience. "Songwriting for me is about communicating all that stuff you’re never able to communicate. In day to day life there’s nowhere that you’re real about your emotions, so music can be a place for that". She doesn’t talk about her songs much becouse she believes "a song should speak for itself, that people should apply their own experience to it becouse it’s the emotion within the song that’s important."

Island

Her haunting ballad Island, a song she's been known to dedicate to Nicloe Brown Simpson at concerts, is about her personal battle with domestic violence. "he pulls at me like a cherry tree, and I can still move but I don’t speak about it, pretend I’m crazy, pretend I’m dead, he’s too scared to hit me now, he’ll bring flowers instead"
She hasn’t discussed the experience much except to say that domestic violence is something that "goes on behing closed doors, and it’s often difficult to go for help becouse it’s a situation tied up in all kinds of things - like feeling it’s your fault, being scared and dependent. There’s such a loss of self esteem that you feel you deserve it some screwed up way.”
Heather’s not all depressed about her bad experiences though. As she sings in Blue Black “maybe you got something, but the flowers grew back".

Light Years

Heather was born in Bermuda in the late sixties. When she was ten her father moved the family on a boat and pulled Heather and her two siblings out of school. There was no electricity and no phone. Just a wind generator that powered the tape deck. Heather spent her teen years sailing around the West Indies. Her parents taught her to learn from experience and to live life to the fullest.
Music has always been an important influence in her life. When she was only 8 or 9 she started making up songs. She was influenced mostly by the hippie music her parents listened to. (Van Morisson, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Velvet Underground). Other influences came when "People would come together on someone’s boat in the evenings with guitars"
For a short time on the island of St. Barth she played violin with a band. She loved to sing and soon picked up the guitar when she was 14 for something to back her up. Her first gig was at her uncle’s hotel bar.
Learning from her parents she didn’t miss a lot accedemically, but when she left the boat to go to college she experienced severe cultural shock. "It was more socially that I found it hard and awkward” on the boat, constantly moving around she never had time to make any long term friends. During this awkward time, Heather found solace in the music of Patti Smith and David Bowie, and later on Cocteau Twins and Pixies.

At the Rhode Island School of Design Heather took painting and film clasees (she painted the covers of many of her albums and singles including Blow and Wonderlust) she started writing her own soundtracks to accompany her Super 8 films. eventually she began writting the soundtrack first and then doing the film. One day she wondered into a poetry class and discovered the "chemistry of words". Singing and songwritting was an escape for her. She recorded a demo at Ian Marshall’s Studio on Bermuda, and after looking up the adress on the back of a CD, wend to Columbia Records in search of a record deal. She was disapointed to learn that she needed a manager or a lawyer. Five years later, however, she signed with them. In October 1989 she went to London after the I-Ching told her she should “travel across the water”.

Her first album released under her real name Heather Frith was only a four track EP, released on Big Cat Records. Two years later she released a demo tape recorded on a 8-track recorder with the help of some friends, a keyboard, a guitar and an effects box. She called it Glow Stars. In Europe she recorded a live album called Blow in 1993. Oyster was her first studio album. It was very simple, just "five people in a room playing music". The album was released in 1995. "Live From the Milky Way" followed, it was recorded live and released in the United States . Heather says that she wanted to do something for the states the way she did Blow in Europe.

Walking Higher

"I wanted more music around me, I wanted the sound I could hear in my head. Playing live with a band has totally changed performing for me, becouse I used to be scared of performing. Then when I had the band, I could just comepletly lose myself in the music" Heather says of her recent tours in Europe and the states. She has toured with bands such as Violent Femmes, Pavement and the Cranberries. She often compares her life on a tour bus to living on the boat with her family. "I was obviously made for this lifestyle" she says.

She says this about singing "It’s about coming out on the other side of something. And singing is when I feel most alive and in touch with something spiritial. It’s the most real thing I can do".