Biography
Born Bermuda, 1968.
The teenage years of singer-songwriter Heather Nova were spent with her family sailing around the West Indies. Home was a forty-foot boat with no electricity, no TV and no official schooling, and they sailed wherever the current took them. Her time was spent learning the guitar and listening to the collected works of Neil Young and The Beatles. At 19, she moved to Rhode Island to study film, before heading to New York in search of a record contract.
London was next; going everywhere with her guitar, playing wherever possible, she eventually meet up with Youth (ex-Killing Joke), who released GLOWSTARS (1993), a collection of her demos, on his own Butterfly label. Sounding as delicate and fey as All About Eve, the album didn�t establish much of an identity, but through continuing hard work Nova managed to land several high-profile support slots, appearing with the fledgling Cranberries, and Bob Mould. And here, armed with only a guitar, she excelled.
Nova came into her own when she released her first �proper� album, OYSTER, in 1995. Passionate, exquisitely sultry, and drenched in a lyrical poetry, the Youth-produced OYSTER placed its author somewhere between the confessionals of Jeff Buckley and the other-worldliness of Tori Amos. One track in particular, �Island�, caused a stir: it exposed the emotional undercurrents of domestic abuse, and on stage she dedicated the song to Nicole Brown Simpson, the murdered wife of O. J. Simpson, which provoked mixed reactions from audiences, not least in Los Angeles.
Nova continued to tour heavily throughout Europe with the likes of Neil Young and Pearl Jam for the rest of the year, and this helped OYSTER sell well over 400,000 copies. At the beginning of 1996, she found herself a �priority act� in the US, a term which basically means that the record company (in this case, Epic) are going to make �it� happen. Her release, SIREN, appeared in 1998 and WONDERLUST, a live recording from her Siren tour, was released this year. |
