1. Nina SimoneForbidden Fruit
This was one of the first records I ever bought. It was just a random select at Cambridge Market, I think it was from a cheap bin, and it has turned out to be one of my favorite collections of Nina Simone’s work. It was a very insular, private album for me. I hadn’t listened to it since I was 20, maybe, but I put it on the other day and I got quite emotional: the feeling of being that age again, with no one else around.
It touches on all the things that make her Nina Simone. It’s got a huge variety. It’s weird how at the time, the artist probably didn’t have any say in how these songs were put together. The importance of the song, therefore, is greater than the album for artists from a certain era, which is such a different way of thinking about things. It’s definitely helped with more recent albums that Black Country, New Road have made, because we now make music that comes from three different places, three different people. Sometimes it can be a really forced process to think how they all conceptually fit together, but we accept that they are all songs from the same time, from roughly the same people, and they don’t have to seemingly thematically fit together for them to work on a record.
