Spotlight On... Nicole Cassandra Smit

Traversing a multitidude of genres like trip-hop, alt-soul, R'n'B, hip-hop, blues and more, and calling to mind the likes of Nuyorican Soul, Nitin Sawhney, and even Moloko-era Róisín Murphy, Nicola Cassandra Smit's debut album, Third In Line, is out today via Liljekonvalj Records. Fresh from playing our stage at Kelburn Garden Party last weekend, we shine a spotlight on the Edinburgh-based Indonesian-Swedish singer-songwriter. 

The Skinny: You’ve been involved in the Scottish music scene for a while now – tell us how you ended up getting involved in the show Blues! and a bit about what you've been doing since then that has led you to this point?
Nicole Cassandra Smit: It's a common story really – girl meets boy, moves to another country, boy is in blues band, girl meets blues band and starts singing with them! Doing the Blues! Fringe show for the first time was like performance bootcamp and I quickly started taking on more singing jobs and getting involved in several projects and bands. This led to a full-time gigging life playing everywhere from The Jazz Bar to the Islay Jazz Festival. In 2016 myself, Charlie Wild and Alex Palmer formed Smitten and that was my first foray into performing original material. That pushed me to slowly focus on a path forward in terms of what projects to pursue etc, and then March 2020 happened.

You worked with Joseph Malik and Chris Grieve on your debut LP, Third in Line – can you tell us a bit more about the process behind recording the album and how you ended up working with them?
While the world was on pause I found myself with a lot of time to get creative. One of the things that I decided to do was revisit a track that Joseph Malik had sent to me that he thought I may want to sing and write topline for. This was Strong Woman, which Ramrock Records released as a single in 2021. The collaboration was what led Joseph and Chris Grieve to sow the seed of a debut LP for me. We started playing with different ideas for tracks and what I started to write ultimately developed the direction of the album. Away from the original path that Strong Woman had started and into a more conceptual realm.

At this stage, as the plan solidified and I secured funding from Creative Scotland & PRS, Chris and I parted ways with Joseph due to creative differences. As the project moved forward we experimented with recording locations (string quintets recorded at SweetDram distillery), international session musicians (Kameelah Waheed rapping from New Jersey or Luc Klein laying trumpet from Toulouse), unconventional instrumentation (I improvised drums on Role Models and wrote gamelan parts in DAW). It was an organic process of creating and recording based on our workflow.

On Third In Line, it sounds like influences come from all over but it really works as a cohesive record – did you have an end goal in mind when you started working on it? What other musicians were you inspired by?
Yes, this organic workflow was informed by an overarching concept. That was the end goal that I tried to aim for but not force anything through. I wanted to create a narrative that made sense sonically through the different atmosphere every track presents, while lyrically the tracks would have small references to other tracks in the record. For example the theme of weddings appear on Wedding Gown and then in Something Borrowed, Something Blue; the repeated refrain of 'again and again and again' appears in both Lily of the Valley and Dragonheart. I will leave the meaning of this to the listener of course.

A big influence of mine in terms of this way of writing and telling stories is Fiona Apple. I've always revelled in her word play and how she creates such dynamic tracks that move you, literally and figuratively. Another that influenced us while working on the record is Little Dragon, we even got Almachrome, who mastered one of Little Dragon's records, to master Third In Line! I have to also mention that as we recorded a lot of the record at Out of The Blue Studios in Leith, the other artists there, including Young Fathers and Callum Easter, contributed to the overall atmosphere of creativity.

Conceptually, the record explores the three generations of women in your family – can you tell us a bit more about this?
The central idea of this concept is generational emotional baggage. A lot of it comes from the frustration of carrying things that weren't yours to begin with but you need to contend with them in order to relate to your mother, your grandmother, parents and grandparents in general. How you process the amazing things that you have learnt and inherited from them because they've coped through their lives in their own way, but at the same time perhaps correcting your own course so that you don't live your life because of their pasts. That's what I am trying to unpack in this album.

I wanted to first look back to the past through my lens in the first act, revisit my own muddy formative years where I didn't know what my identity was in the second act, and then ultimately re-open my adult self in the third by experimenting and expanding the boundaries of who I thought I had become, and frankly what I found at the end of it is that I am still raw and 'uncooked'. Perhaps this is where the next record might go – to the oven!

Thank you for playing such a wonderful Sunday evening set for us at Kelburn – what does the rest of 2022 have in store for you beyond the album release?
Thank you for having me! It was such a treat to share these new tracks with a new audience. This summer I will be busy with shows for the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues festival as well as returning to the Edinburgh Fringe with the Queens of the Blues and Blues! shows. Afterwards hopefully we will put a tour together to perform the record in as many places as possible! And maybe after a short break, get back to writing the second album.

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Third In Line is out now via Liljekonvalj Records

nicolecassandrasmit.bandcamp.com