Following a North American solo headline tour which included Newport Folk and Outside Lands festivals, acclaimed singer, songwriter, producer, creator, and Of Monsters and Men co-founder Nanna will head to Europe and the UK this fall for a string of international dates. After headlining Iceland Airwaves in her native Iceland November 2-4, she will play two additional shows in Iceland at Græni Hatturinn in Akureyri on November 10 and Egilsbúð in Neskaupstaður on November 11. She will then touch down in Europe for shows in Amsterdam at Bitterzoet on November 18, Brussels at Botanique on November 19, and London at Omeara on November 21. This marks her inaugural global headline jaunt with this solo project. She will be supporting her critically acclaimed solo debut LP, How To Start A Garden, out now via Republic Records.
In other big news, she also just teamed up with Line of Best Fit to share a pair of beautiful live performance videos captured last May in New York. As the story goes, Nanna had been scheduled to make her solo late night television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. As she and her band touched down in NY from Iceland, she found out the appearance was canceled due to the WGA strike. In town with a night free, friends at Electric Lady Studios invited her and the band to celebrate the release of How To Start A Garden at the studio, playing songs from the record and toasting its official arrival at midnight. She and her band delivered special renditions of “Disaster Master” and “Milk,” which Line of Best Fit exclusively premiered this morning.
Nanna recently discussed her new album How To Start A Garden with World Cafe who called the album “beautiful...so lush and layered and everything feels like it belongs somewhere” and noted “the first song, (the) title track opens with a soundscape so perfect that I could close my eyes and feel myself there”. Listen to the full session and interview here!
How To Start A Garden continues to garner widespread acclaim. Atwood Magazine called it, “A fragile indie folk record of fracture and friction,” while Riff Magazine professed, “She captures a magnificent soundscape—rich, warm and subtle—that feels solemn and full.”
Produced by Nanna alongside collaborators Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift) and Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, War on Drugs, Hiss Golden Messenger), How to Start a Garden is a tremendous solo introduction from this highly acclaimed singer, songwriter and producer.
How to Start a Garden was born from a fresh start - a place of starting over. Nanna knew this intuitively when she began to write the songs for her first solo album. In these ethereal yet grounded songs, she sings of being lost and hopeful, remaining calm through apocalypses large and small, with orchestration that feels as organic as a forest while also sculpted and modern.
The albums is written and recorded in between Reykjavik - her cabin in the wilderness and upstate New York. As Nanna wrote these songs, she spent a lot of time considering her neighbor’s lush garden in her native home Iceland, watching him tend it, watching it grow. A garden is a conversation with the seasons—everything constantly in a state of ending and beginning. It seemed like the perfect image for where she was then, and for the shape this album was taking.
“A lot of things had to end for this album to become what it is,” said Nanna. “A long term relationship, my prior sense of home and belonging and security. But it’s also an ode to the joy of new beginnings: new relationships, a new home, new friendships, a new sense of self. The album takes place in this in-between state. I wrote it in Iceland and recorded it between Iceland and upstate New York. It captures a very specific time in my life of curiosity and reflection, when I felt very much in the middle of a surreal new reality and didn’t have a clear path in my direction—like how a snowstorm is somehow chaotic but calm at the same time.”
See full track listing below:
“How To Start A Garden”
“Sputnik”
“Crybaby”
“Disaster Master”
“The Vine / 13”
“Godzilla”
“Blood Clot / Andvaka”
“Milk”
“Igloo”
“Voyager”
“Seabed”
Nanna also released a short film and visualizer for each track on the album. Filmed in Iceland, the short film called “a Day in a Life” follows Nanna as her every day mundane life clashes with surreal parallel universes. For the title track of the record, she and her visual team - Silken Weinberg and Angela Ricciardi - made a adventurous trek into the elements in order to capture the perfect shot.
“We went up to a Glacier called Snæfellsjökull to do the shoot,” said Nanna. “We drove up an icy path to get there in cars that were not meant for those roads. We shot for about an hour and the wind started to pick up. It felt like a storm was coming so we had to leave before things got too scary for us.”
Nanna continued, “I was working on this song throughout most of the album making process, adding little things along the way. I wanted this to be the opening track and have the intro feel like you are entering a storybook - a fantasy. I imagined a garden opening up, little things appearing as you walk further in, but then you are met with winter. As soon as my voice comes in, I wanted it to feel like we are at the very beginning. There is no garden. There is only hope for one.”
DISASTER MASTER TOUR
November 2-4 - Reykjavík, Iceland / Iceland Airwaves Festival
November 10 - Akureyri, IS / Græni Hatturinn
November 11 - Neskaupstaður, IS / Egilsbúð
November 18 - Amsterdam, NL / Bitterzoet
November 19 - Brussels, BE / Rotonde Botanique
November 21 - London, UK / Omera
In other big news, she also just teamed up with Line of Best Fit to share a pair of beautiful live performance videos captured last May in New York. As the story goes, Nanna had been scheduled to make her solo late night television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. As she and her band touched down in NY from Iceland, she found out the appearance was canceled due to the WGA strike. In town with a night free, friends at Electric Lady Studios invited her and the band to celebrate the release of How To Start A Garden at the studio, playing songs from the record and toasting its official arrival at midnight. She and her band delivered special renditions of “Disaster Master” and “Milk,” which Line of Best Fit exclusively premiered this morning.
Nanna recently discussed her new album How To Start A Garden with World Cafe who called the album “beautiful...so lush and layered and everything feels like it belongs somewhere” and noted “the first song, (the) title track opens with a soundscape so perfect that I could close my eyes and feel myself there”. Listen to the full session and interview here!
How To Start A Garden continues to garner widespread acclaim. Atwood Magazine called it, “A fragile indie folk record of fracture and friction,” while Riff Magazine professed, “She captures a magnificent soundscape—rich, warm and subtle—that feels solemn and full.”
Produced by Nanna alongside collaborators Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift) and Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, War on Drugs, Hiss Golden Messenger), How to Start a Garden is a tremendous solo introduction from this highly acclaimed singer, songwriter and producer.
How to Start a Garden was born from a fresh start - a place of starting over. Nanna knew this intuitively when she began to write the songs for her first solo album. In these ethereal yet grounded songs, she sings of being lost and hopeful, remaining calm through apocalypses large and small, with orchestration that feels as organic as a forest while also sculpted and modern.
The albums is written and recorded in between Reykjavik - her cabin in the wilderness and upstate New York. As Nanna wrote these songs, she spent a lot of time considering her neighbor’s lush garden in her native home Iceland, watching him tend it, watching it grow. A garden is a conversation with the seasons—everything constantly in a state of ending and beginning. It seemed like the perfect image for where she was then, and for the shape this album was taking.
“A lot of things had to end for this album to become what it is,” said Nanna. “A long term relationship, my prior sense of home and belonging and security. But it’s also an ode to the joy of new beginnings: new relationships, a new home, new friendships, a new sense of self. The album takes place in this in-between state. I wrote it in Iceland and recorded it between Iceland and upstate New York. It captures a very specific time in my life of curiosity and reflection, when I felt very much in the middle of a surreal new reality and didn’t have a clear path in my direction—like how a snowstorm is somehow chaotic but calm at the same time.”
See full track listing below:
“How To Start A Garden”
“Sputnik”
“Crybaby”
“Disaster Master”
“The Vine / 13”
“Godzilla”
“Blood Clot / Andvaka”
“Milk”
“Igloo”
“Voyager”
“Seabed”
Nanna also released a short film and visualizer for each track on the album. Filmed in Iceland, the short film called “a Day in a Life” follows Nanna as her every day mundane life clashes with surreal parallel universes. For the title track of the record, she and her visual team - Silken Weinberg and Angela Ricciardi - made a adventurous trek into the elements in order to capture the perfect shot.
“We went up to a Glacier called Snæfellsjökull to do the shoot,” said Nanna. “We drove up an icy path to get there in cars that were not meant for those roads. We shot for about an hour and the wind started to pick up. It felt like a storm was coming so we had to leave before things got too scary for us.”
Nanna continued, “I was working on this song throughout most of the album making process, adding little things along the way. I wanted this to be the opening track and have the intro feel like you are entering a storybook - a fantasy. I imagined a garden opening up, little things appearing as you walk further in, but then you are met with winter. As soon as my voice comes in, I wanted it to feel like we are at the very beginning. There is no garden. There is only hope for one.”
DISASTER MASTER TOUR
November 2-4 - Reykjavík, Iceland / Iceland Airwaves Festival
November 10 - Akureyri, IS / Græni Hatturinn
November 11 - Neskaupstaður, IS / Egilsbúð
November 18 - Amsterdam, NL / Bitterzoet
November 19 - Brussels, BE / Rotonde Botanique
November 21 - London, UK / Omera
