Natalie Nicole Gilbert – Warm Winter

By starrymag | January 28, 2021

By: Jamie Steinberg

 

 

Q) How would you describe your sound?

 

A I love to describe my sound as being a soundtrack genre above all else. I recognize for some that’s open to interpretation, but for the most part there is a very specific range within film and TV soundtracks – including pensive singer/songwriter tracks but also romantic jazz and driving dance and rock cuts. If you make a Venn diagram of all the genres in my catalog, they all best fall into that pocket of soundtrack sounds. I also used to work in music licensing for film and TV behind the scenes, so when a songwriter or composer, I know how to shoot an arrow straight through the heart of a story moment.

 

Q) Who are some of your musical influences?

 

A) Vocally a lot of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey growing up. On the piano I adore Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Jon McLaughlin. After seeing him live at the Hotel Cafe, Newton Faulkner is the guitarist I admire most. Not saying my skills are equal to him or the others by any means, but if you listen to this gamut of R&B, indie rock, singer/songwriter and lush piano instrumentals it’s not hard to see how my blended sound comes about.

 

Q) How did you select the songs you reimagined on this new album?

 

A) A lot of the strategy for the tracklist came down to what talent we had on our team and how one song would flow into the next. It’s not an easy thing to thread together an album that includes R&B, folk pop, traditional carols, jazz and even a pop opera track. Some of it is tongue in cheek – I know Stevie Nicks and Harry Styles are friends, so I liked bookending the project with a song from each of them so they’re side by side when the album is on repeat play. I also wanted to build to some of the more energetic songs, much the same way you do when outlining a setlist for a live concert. Especially during the COVID era while concerts are largely off limits if not virtual or from a safe distance, I wanted to maintain as much of that concert intimacy and atmosphere and capture that with live strings, vibrant piano, with contemporary percussion and beats sprinkled in. We worked hard at capturing that magic in “Walking in the Air,” “Falling” and “Landslide” especially.

 

 

Q) You team up with a number of talented musicians on this album. How did you come to work with them?

 

A) More than a few I initially met online, either via word of mouth from musicians I know in “real” life or in one case via a Craigslist ad. Even so, I’m quite selective about my collaborators. I love to work with people who not only own their area of expertise, but who are also excited about the music we’re tackling, leave the ego at the door and who are real and authentic. That doesn’t mean we agree on every angle or idea, but it makes it much easier to meld our approaches to bring something fresh to the work we undertake. I think some artists can forget that as fun and freeing as it is to let loose on musical works, they are work. I’m so pleased that each person on the project brought that degree of both creativity and dedication to this project – and it shows in the beautiful music they produced.

Dana Bisignano and I met at a songwriting workshop. Warren Pettey was the Craigslist find. Andrew Joslyn was a word-of-mouth recommendation by a fellow Recording Academy Grammy voter and Jonathan Still and I met due to an initial mistaken identity when I was trying to reach a Jonathan Still online who was a pianist in London, but we’ve since met in person a year or two ago when he was in Los Angeles for a conference. The advantage of being in LA is that even if collaborating artists don’t live here, they often pass through (like Lisa Ramey, who I met on a day she was off The Voice set in LA). Jarrett Johnson is also a fellow Recording Academy Grammy voter I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting in person yet due to COVID, but I look forward to working with him and the others above more in my forthcoming projects.

 

Q) What is your song writing process? Do you need music before you can create lyrics?

 

A) I work both ways. When I start with writing the music or melody first, the lyrics tend to be simpler and shorter so the music can shine; if I start by writing poetry it can be verbose and needs a set of edits to whittle it down to the best and most cohesive segments. If I start with words it very much leads from a place of thought and pensiveness and if I start with piano or guitar it’s much more from the gut and heart. When I co-write with others, I tend to let them take the lead instrumentally and I focus on toplining and lyrics.

 

 

Q) How much of a hand do you have in the production of your music?

 

A) I touch every part of it. I co-produced everything and executive produced the project from start to finish, so I selected the songs, chose the collaborators, recorded and reviewed the mixes and ultimately decided what would make the final cut. Ideally, when I work with great people like these, all of that is made easier because they’ve done so much polishing on their own before they send us their stems and tracks to be integrated into the session. As I get to know their skill sets and strengths, I also enjoy bringing them into that thought process and having them be a second set of ears on some of the other tracks they didn’t work on – I love to brainstorm with them.

 

 

Q) What are some themes you explore on your album Warm Winter?

 

A) So often when we think of winter months we think of a warm fire and gathering with loved ones, but we knew well in advance that it was not the kind of winter we would all be having this year. I wanted every track we chose to acknowledge that – so we incorporated songs about “loving every race” and even a song that was technically written as a funeral hymn for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s father (Pie Jesu). I also included songs about holding loved ones in our thoughts and dreams or running out of things to say because life isn’t a gift box with a bow on it. Songs like “River” and “Falling” and even “Landslide” acknowledge that life is messy, uncertain, disappointing and requires a lot of uphill effort. That seems so counter to most songs you hear in December in January that paint an almost Norman Rockwell-esque image. (Even Rockwell was more focused on equality than many in contemporary times acknowledge or remember; he was the one who also painted the image of Ruby Bridges being escorted by four federal Marshalls into a previously all-white school – an action they took to secure her safety not just on that first day, but daily throughout that year.)

I don’t say all this to look down on happy-go-lucky albums at all – even my own album has happier and upbeat songs – but we need both, the joyous escapism of idealistic tunes and the tracks that capture the calm and not-so-calm realities.

 

 

Q) What songs off the album hold a special place in your heart and why?

 

A) I really loved working on “That Will Be Christmas” with Jarrett Johnson and Lisa Ramey (instrumentation/production by Robert Eibach). Jarrett and Lisa are both complete powerhouse vocalists and I’m so elated to have them both on the project; I can’t wait to work with them again.

It also meant a lot to me to include Pie Jesu. The financing for this project largely came from resources I inherited when my mother passed a few years back and she was the one who imbued me with this love for piano music and a musical heritage from a wide range of genres, including arias and hymns, showtunes and wedding ballads. So, for me, this song was a perfect way to include and honor that heritage in an album made possible by her in so many ways.

 

Q) What was the most difficult aspect to creating this album?

 

A) Timing. I think every person who worked with me on the project would agree. All of us were already working on other projects and switched gears to Warm Winter fairly late in the year (taking it up in September when big label artists would be finalizing their early October releases for similar projects). At the same time, that tight deadline is an artist’s friend, I find. It helps you do your best and then let it go, recognizing you don’t have time to needlessly pick it apart or continually fine tune the mix until the polishing is overkill. Particularly with intimate songs like these, you want it to be a little rough around the edges and not feel like every breath was taken out, every string was perfectly plucked and strummed. It needs that humanity. So, though it sometimes felt like a marathon effort, I’m glad all of us weren’t put off by the idea of cranking out a ten track album in really a matter of weeks – including tracks that had as many as twenty-eight tracks of live strings.

 

Q) What do you hope listeners take away from Warm Winter?

 

A) First, they can find warmth even in the midst of dark and cold – that even though they may feel isolated or disconnected while we juggle the ever-changing environment of the pandemic, they are not alone in this moment. Even on those heavier tracks we worked to embroider peacefulness and calm. That was a big reason why I had the violins and cellos added to so many tracks – it adds that meditative and breathing quality. It makes you feel enveloped and held in a way that a piano solo alone probably wouldn’t.

 

Q) With concerts currently on hold, do you have any plans to do some live streaming shows for fans?

 

A) We’re talking about doing a live show with Spin magazine this year. We postponed it in December as my collaborators largely aren’t in my COVID bubble, so we wanted to play it safe during the current Los Angeles surge that’s presently worse than what we faced in March of 2020. But we certainly plan to open the gates to that as soon as safely possible and will keep listeners updated about such on our socials via Twitter and Instagram, as well as Spotify.

 

Q) Who would you most like to collaborate with on a song in the future?

 

A) I’ve long been itching to do something with Peter Cetera – I’m a huge fan of his work both during his time with Chicago and as a solo artist. Working with Lara Fabian would also be a dream come true; when I think of artists with a career that really spans decades, genres and even languages, I’m so in awe of her work. Her power pop ballad “Adagio” – set to the melody of Adagio in G minor, attributed to Albinoni – is a song I love using for vocal warm ups, both in English and Italian. Like “Pie Jesu” (in Latin), “The Prayer” (in both English and Italian) and “Con Te Partirò” (Italian), singing these songs in a language that isn’t your native tongue really helps a vocalist focus on the musicality and dig into the meaning and interpretation of the lyrics that we can often take for granted when it’s in our first language. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in lockdown on Duolingo polishing my French, Spanish and Danish so I can fold that into my foreign language works in the future. My current record is a three-hundred-and-eighty-day streak!

 

Q) What album/band are you currently listening to and why do you dig them?

 

A) Lately we’ve been listening to Melanie C’s latest self-titled album. She’s another artist that’s been unafraid to swing from electronic dance music to an album of show tune covers and a little of everything in between. I especially like “Blame It On Me” – both the original dance track and the stripped down acoustic cut.

 

Q) Why is that social media an important way for you to connect with your fans?

 

A) Well, straight away you can see I don’t use social media the way a lot of artists do. I’m not there for the followers, even though I’ve amassed about thirty-five thousand of them collectively. I’m there for the open dialogue on things that matter today. I spent most of this week addressing the attack on our democracy, which isn’t necessarily something people hoping to purely gain fans or followers would do. If I notice that someone who supports the insurrectionists has followed me, I’ll block them – even if they’re a fan because that’s not the kind of fan I want. I have no problem saying so.

I do try to have regular Q&A’s on my social media with fans to answer questions about songwriting, indie music distribution and various other topics. My average fan tends to be a musician or music curator themselves, so I like to help them explore and expand their careers and opportunities, also. For the most part (unless they fall in the trolling and hostile camp mentioned above), I treat them like we’re part of the same community facing the same things because, the fact of the matter is that, we are – all of us are facing COVID, political unrest, inequalities, economic downturns and distance from family and loved ones. If I plan to write songs that support them through those things in any meaningful way, then I have to be conversing with them, human to human.

 

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?

 

A) Whether a new fan or someone who’s been listening since or before things first caught fire around 2008, I appreciate their support and appreciate the ways I constantly see them working to amplify indie artists. We see those efforts and those fan boosts accomplish things that we and our teams could never accomplish on our own. So, thank you for every stream, share, story and tweet.

 

 

Catch the new Warm Winter album on all digital platforms and through Gilbert’s Website. For more new music from this artist, be sure to follow Natalie Nicole Gilbert on her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.