Move over Taylor Swift — Peterborough has its own singer-songwriter re-recording her own music and her name is Natalie Hughes.
This month, the pianist will be releasing UnCover Me, the fifth record in her catalogue, and any fans of Hughes might recognize the tracks from her 2003 sophomore release One Girl.
Hughes will be kicking off the release of the eight-song EP with a launch party held as part of the Listen Much concert series at The Theatre on King at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 25th — the evening before UnCover Me is released on all streaming services.
Hughes will be performing songs from the EP, along with other originals and covers she has released over the past two decades. Joining her are musical guests Charlie Glasspool, who has a trumpet solo on the EP, and songwriter Jill Staveley, with whom Hughes did a lot of her earliest shows. Other guests will be announced ahead of the March 25th show.
Tickets are $25 or pay what you can and available online at ttok.ca/upcoming-events/.
The process of re-recording began in 2022, when Hughes realized the 20th anniversary of One Girl was fast approaching. Given the song quality from having recorded the songs two decades ago, Hughes knew the album would not be suitable to upload on streaming platforms today.
VIDEO: “California” by Natalie Hughes (2015)
“It’s such a sad thought to think that these songs were lost in the current age of digital music,” Hughes says. “I thought it would be cool to just go back and take some of these songs and redo them so I could put them up and have them be enjoyed again.”
With nature imagery and vulnerable storytelling laying the anchor, UnCover Me showcases Hughes’ captivating alto voice, with artful piano accompaniment. Influenced by her favourite musicians between the 1970s and 1990s including James Taylor and Tori Amos, and by Canadian singer-songwriters like Sarah McLaughlin and Alanis Morissette, the re-make includes seven of the 11 songs that were featured on the original album.
“I didn’t feel they all resonated with me, so I picked the ones I felt were their own little body of work,” says Hughes. “When I sing them presently, I can still connect with them and it’s important to me that I connect with what I’m saying.”
As a special addition, the EP features a bonus track from her 2001 album In Circles. Titled “Amnesia,” the track is “a very special one” that is often requested by her listeners, and highlights some of the autobiographical nature of her writing.
“It talks a lot about the things that happen to you when you’re a child that kind of play over in your mind and maybe hold you back a bit in your present life,” she says. “You wish in some ways you could get amnesia and forget some of those formative things from your childhood that were maybe not the most positive ones.”
When her brother Thomas unexpectedly passed away at the age of 53 in September 2022, a month before she was meant to start recording, Hughes nearly cancelled the whole project. Though she “didn’t know how to move forward” at first, she ultimately decided to channel the grief into her recordings.
“I was feeling pretty raw and felt like that was actually a good place to be and to make music,” she says. “I’ve always made music from a pretty emotional state. I find that I get a feeling and write about that feeling, so feeling raw while recording was maybe good.”
VIDEO: “Stronger Than You Thought” by Natalie Hughes (2021)
The loss of her brother also made it feel more urgent for Hughes to complete what she had started.
“The shock of losing someone that you’re not expecting to lose suddenly got me thinking,” she says. “We just leave behind whatever legacy of people and art — it’s all that we really leave behind on the Earth — so it felt like a pull for me to leave this thing behind.”
Though her grief did delay the post-production, fortunately Hughes had never set a deadline for the EP release. In fact, Hughes was intentional about not telling anyone — not even her parents — that she was re-recording just so it would not restrict her creativity or add expectations.
“In the past, when I was making an album, anybody who was tuned into my music life would be anticipating it and ask me when it’s going to be done, and I felt I had to commit to a date or I had to deliver because people were waiting,” Hughes says. “I felt like I was trying to meet people’s deadlines.”
“I was reading a book recently by Rick Rubin, a famous record producer, and he very much talks about how there’s a time when you’re really exploring the artistry of what you’re going to do and that shouldn’t have a timeline on it. You might want to slow down, or you might want to go in a whole different direction, and you need to have permission to do that. And then there’s a time when you say, ‘OK, it’s time to set a deadline.'”
With this desire to create something without having to meet expectations, she also didn’t the re-recordings to be influenced by the original tracks. For that reason, she didn’t let producer James McKenty or any of the other musicians hear the original recordings. Instead, she did a very “bare bones” demo of the songs on piano, as if they were all new, and sent them to those involved.
“I didn’t want to influence what people thought and what the people working on it thought it should be,” she says, adding that because of that, the newer versions of the songs are not identical to the originals. “Lyrically and melody-wise, they’re pretty close, but definitely instrumentally we played with things a little bit and I did want some of them to offer a slightly new interpretation.”
The EP launch isn’t the last you’ll hear from Hughes this year, as she has plans to record some of the brand-new songs she wrote after her brother’s passing. Though, as with the EP release, she’s not setting any expectations for herself.
UnCover Me will be available on all streaming platforms beginning on the morning of March 26. Visit ttok.ca/upcoming-events/ for more information on the launch or to purchase tickets.
