About Nell Bryden
Nell Bryden is an American singer-songwriter.
Bryden was born in New York Hospital and grew up in an artist loft on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights. Her parents divorced when she was five, and she lived primarily with her father, Lewis Bryden, a painter and sculptor, until she was 12 years old. Bryden then moved in with her mother, Jane, a classical soprano and professor at Smith College in Western Massachusetts. Bryden graduated from Amherst Regional High School, and deferred going to college for a year to skydive on a drop zone in Arizona, study Italian and opera in Manhattan and eventually travel to Australia for three months of backpacking, where she bought her first guitar. A classically trained musician , Bryden dreamed of becoming an opera singer before hearing Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin for the first time. Bryden attended Wellesley College, where she graduated with honors. It was during this time that she began performing her songs live in the Boston folk and rock clubs.
Bryden was living in Greenwich Village in New York during 9/11, an event that had a "profound" effect on her. The following year, she recorded an album called Day For Night in Nashville with producer Fred Mollin, and toured the US to support the album. Disillusioned with the music business, she travelled to New Orleans to write a new album, inspired by the jazz, roots and blues influences of the Crescent City. Bryden began recording with producer John Hill, but after the project ran out of money they returned to New York with a half-finished album. Two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, displacing many of the musicians on the record and destroying much of the town.
Bryden began touring the UK and Ireland by self-booking her tours, playing up to 250 shows a year abroad, opening for artists such as the Counting Crows and KT Tunstall. After coming across a Milton Avery painting during an attic clear out , Bryden auctioned the piece and received a substantial amount for it. She then used the money to re-record her album, but this time around bringing on board Grammy-winning record producer David Kershenbaum.
The resulting album, What Does it Take, came out on 12 October 2009 on Cooking Vinyl in the UK and Ireland.
In 2008, following a chance meeting with a US Army colonel at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Bryden flew to Iraq to play for the Armed Forces. Her second tour there in 2009 was documented by Susan Cohn Rockefeller for her film Striking A Chord.
Shake The Tree was recorded at Metrophonic Studios, outside London, in the summer of 2010. Bryden collaborated with British guitarist and songwriter Patrick Mascall, with whom she began writing songs that reflected their mutual admiration for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris. By the following autumn, they had amassed forty songs.
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