Singer-songwriter Nora Jane Struthers is a Nashville-based artist who lives with her husband and fellow musician, Joe Overton, and their two young children. Her recently released record, BACK TO CAST IRON, is another album brought to pass under the ‘pandemic umbrella,’ albeit with the caveat that it was also written while Nora Jane was heavily pregnant and expecting their second child. Given those elements, you would be forgiven for expecting a profoundly unsettling and worrisome theme to prevail across the album. The outcome is quite the opposite, with positivity and hopefulness at the core of the song’s subject matter. We spoke recently with Nora Jane about her move to Music City to follow her career dream and the new record.
You were born in Virginia but moved to New Jersey. At what age did that shift take place?
At the beginning of my memory, it was about four years old.
I understand that your father was a musician.
Yes, my father still is a musician. He is a saint. He plays the banjo and the guitar and, during the pandemic, he learned to play pedal steel guitar and is quite good at it, quite an accomplishment for a seventy-year-old to take up a new instrument.
Did you play on stage with your father or just at home?
Up until college, it was just in the living room. I was writing songs, and they were pretty bad. In my teenage years, I would play them at open mics. But in college, my dad and I started playing together at these folky venues in New Jersey and then dive bars in Brooklyn. We named ourselves a father and daughter duo, Dirt Road Sweetheart. You can find some of our music on Spotify. It's very sweet, honest music that sounds like a brother duet style.
I expect that you got your love of music from him.
Yes, my whole musical foundation was bluegrass and folk, and country. And then, as a child of the '90s, I loved grunge and many bands like Pearl Jam. I also loved many women artists coming out in the 90s, like Annie De Franco and Tori Amos. I went to this festival that happened in the early 2000s called Lilith Fair. It was a collection of female artists: Jewel, Sarah McLaughlin and The Cranberries, who toured and played the biggest arenas. Being around all those women making music and writing their own songs was inspiring.
You completed a teaching degree in college. Did you put that into practice?
Yes, I taught in high school for three years and loved it. It was so much hard work. I thought I was working so hard and still broke; I could move to someplace that is less expensive, work hard, and try to be a musician, which is what I always wanted to do.
That led to a move to Nashville.
Yes, I moved there 15 years ago, in 2008. I made my first record in the fall of that year and released it a year later.
Did you integrate easily into the musical community in Nashville?
When choosing a city to go to, Nashville, I only knew one person there. At the time, there was a weekly old-time music jam every Wednesday at The 5 Spot, and it was so much fun. There was a strong community of people my age and older who were excited about music and making music on all levels. I stayed for a week for my first visit. I wrote a song, met a producer, and the song was pitched to an artist. And I was like: ‘This is where I want to be if I'm trying to make a career out of music, this is it.’ So, the move was great, and it was exciting. I made many friends, many of whom are still my friends today.
The 5 Spot is an iconic venue in East Nashville, as is Dee’s Cocktail Lounge in Madison.
I'm thinking about doing my album release show at The 5 Spot. I haven't played an album release show yet in Nashville, so I’m still trying to decide when and where I want to do that, but The 5 Spot would be great for old-time’s sake. But I've also played at Dee’s every two months for the last year. I love it there, too.
For obvious reasons, you didn't get to tour your 2020 album BRIGHT LIGHTS, LONG DRIVES, and FIRST WORDS.
Oh Lord, I think I got to play seven shows. We put it out in February 2020; I think I played two weekends and then we came home, and stayed at home. It was pretty rough.
And that led to you writing the songs for your new album BACK TO CAST IRON, which we described in our review as a ‘series of diary entries.’
That's accurate because, as an artist, I process my life through songs, and it certainly makes sense to me that those would feel like diary entries. I was, at least for some of it, heavily pregnant when writing the songs. I was pregnant a lot of it, although some of it was written after my son was born.
Did that condition work itself into the songs?
Topically, certainly, but the physical condition is in there too. In one of the songs, I talk about my shoes not fitting, and certainly with sleep and how erratic that is when you're both pregnant and have a baby, that’s in the songs. Because that affects the way a person's brain works.
You open the album with Is It Hope and bookend it with Back On The Road. Despite the times they were written, they suggest an extremely optimistic author.
I'm a hopelessly optimistic person. What my husband called me the other day is relentlessly optimistic. That’s not to say that I haven't had my downtimes, of course, but my natural state, my baseline, is an optimistic state. I think that comes through in my writing, and it certainly comes through in my shows when I can connect with the audience. I want them to feel that it’s part of the Nora Jane experience, that you leave believing in yourself and that things will be okay.
Did that track sequencing come naturally to you?
That's a tough question to answer. Initially, I had a different opening song. My first sequence was Back On the Road first and I presented that to my producer, Nielsen Hubbard. He said that he’d hate to put Is It Hope so far down in the sequence because the intro in that song is so strong and in case some people didn’t get that far with the record. When I was in the studio singing that first verse of Is It Hope, it felt so magical to me. I knew when I had done that take that it had to be the opening track. In a way, once Neilson gave me that perspective shift, ending with Back On The Road made sense because the whole record is about me not being on the road, and I couldn’t wait to get back out there. It just seemed to make a lot of sense.
I particularly love the lyrics in the song Something Wild when you say: ‘Because you can’t make something wild grow in your garden.’ What is behind them?
The song's first verse is based on my mother, and the second is about my experience. My mother loves Queen Anne's Lace. It's a weed that grows on the side of the highway all over this country, in all parts. It's related to the carrot and the person in the same family. My mother was an avid gardener, and she would always pull over and dig it up, put it in her beautiful soil at home, and it would always die. It wanted the rocky, craggy highway soil. The second verse is about motherhood and a tolerance for mess and uncontrolled actions of people. To a certain extent, it's about control. And being aware that there are many beautiful things that are not only within our control, but they should not be within our control and just allowing them to be wild and beautiful.
Children They Need You (All of the Time) is a beautiful country song whose title speaks for itself.
Thank you. I love that song. It just tickles me wherever I get to play it live.
I have always wanted to write a song with parentheses in the lyrics, so mission accomplished.
You mentioned your producer, Neilson Hubbard, earlier. You’ve worked with him on your past three albums, haven’t you?
I have. A lot of people that I know operate on the basis that you make three records with a producer and then it's time to move on. This was my third record, but I don't know if I was ready to move on as I love working with him. He's so laid back and smart and has such great taste. He is flexible but firm when he really believes in something and he's just so much fun to be around. I love the records I've made with him; every record I make with him is a notch above the last. Part of that is my own personal development and growth and hopefully, I’m getting better and deeper, but it is also his personal ability to magnify that.
The songs were written during an unprecedented period with COVID-19, pregnancy and your child being born. When you went to record over a year later, was there any temptation to revisit the songs or include others?
There was no temptation. I did have many more songs from that period that didn't make the album. That was part of the fun of making this record, going into the studio and with all the work tapes I had sent Neilson. I didn't always know what we would be tracking on any day. I just left it up to what I felt like playing that day. There were a couple of other songs that are really good songs that I'll probably never record. I won't go back unless I relate it to this album in some way.
The album has been getting great reviews. Do you read your reviews and if so, do you approach them with trepidation or curiosity?
I do read them. I'm always curious to read reviews. I know what I've made and how I feel about it. It's interesting to see how other people relate to it and what others take away from it because what I'm going to take away from it will always be different. That's the whole part of making art; it's going to be different for everybody.
Your husband, Joe Overton, features prominently on the album, playing pedal steel guitar, banjo, and adding backing vocals. Is having two professional artists in a marriage supportive or testing?
It's just so supportive. If you knew Joe, you wouldn't even need to ask that question because he is the loveliest, laid-back, calm, easy-going, even-keeled kind of person that it's lovely to be around. I bring to the partnership decisiveness, grand vision, and other things, and he is great at just making things happen. There are so many fantastic musicians here in Nashville. What I love about Joe is that he sounds like Joe on every instrument, and he has a unique voice. I'm just crazy about it.
How do you balance motherhood with your professional career as a recording and touring artist?
Because my children are young – I’ve got a two-year-old and a four-year-old – I am looking at this as a season of life to be at home mostly. I love playing live shows, and I don't know how many I played last year, but it certainly wasn't a high number. I play one solid weekend a month and usually bring the kids or at least one kid with me. Sometimes, I do the shows without Joe. I did a weekend in Texas this summer where I flew with my two-year-old and played some shows solo, which I wasn't comfortable doing years ago. Being a mother has increased my flexibility, which is good. At the moment, it’s mostly a season to be home. I take the gigs that I know will be fun and that pay. Later in life, if I want to tour a little harder again, maybe I will, but this isn't the moment for that.
Interview by Declan Culliton