The Making of Jenna Nicholls

Jenna Nicholls was raised on the radio. In a house outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania she devoured both classical and jazz stations. She burned out a cassette of Nat King Cole and watched Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire musicals on loop.

“There’s a groove, an old Hollywood sound that I group up with. There was something about that format that I really liked. Irving Berlin, Gershwin. It was such strong stuff. It was melody writing, when melody writing actually meant something.”

On Wednesday 21 February, Jenna Nicholls releases her third studio album Radio Parade, and the East Village darling has never been more herself. It is the ideal moment to talk to her about life, art and the new record.

Jenna never intended to be a songwriter. “My dad was the singer, I wasn’t a singer. My dad was a very gifted talent. He would sing in church and was a painter. He played guitar. I drew pictures.”

Jenna started drawing at the age of two. “I was always more visual,” she admits. “I took a lot of lessons. Carnegie Mellon had an art program that I sort of made my way all the way through. I went to Governor’s School for the Arts. My whole life was painting. I went to school for painting.” (You can see two of Jenna's paintings below).

But at college, she found the art critiques to be brutal. “It got to the point where I could draw a line this way or I could draw a line that way – and somebody was not gonna like it. And I wasn’t old enough to say ‘I don’t care if you like it’ because I did care, very much so. The joy had left the room and so I did too.”

On a weekend home from school, she grabbed one of her father’s guitars.

“I was listening to a lot of Indigo Girls at the time, as you do in college. And there was a song they had that had only four chords in it. So I would sit in my dorm room and play those four chords over and over again. And before I knew it, a day had gone by.”

It was the start of something unique…

Carnegie Hall With Glen

After college, Jenna serendipitously met Dublin native and Grafton Street regular, Mark Dignam, who lived in Pittsburgh.

“Just from hanging around Mark, I really saw what it meant to be a songwriter who stood up on stage and told stories,” she recalls. “I saw what he learned on Grafton Street. He introduced me to Karl Mullen who booked Club Cafe at the time. Karl was having a little get together at his house, and that was the first time I was in the room when a guitar got passed around. I sang a Neil Young song and then Karl invited me to do a gig. I had to write an entire set in two weeks and I had never written a song before.”

Still, Jenna didn’t take the whole thing too seriously.

“It was great. But it was more of a hang than anything else,” she says. “My writing sucked for a lot of it. I mean, I wrote some horrible, horrible songs. But I was much less afraid when I started. I didn’t have any ambitions so I would just write a song at the bar and then go up and sing it. It was magical.”

It was Mark who eventually lead Jenna to New York. “He was playing this new room in Manhattan called Rockwood and asked if I wanted to come up. On the street before the gig, we met Brendan.”

At the time, Brendan O’Shea was working at ‘The Scratcher’, a bar on 5th Street and an Irish harbour for the artistically afflicted. A formidable songwriter himself, Brendan took a shine to Jenna. “He was cute,” she says with a smile. The two quickly fell in love and so began Jenna’s life in New York. She moved into Brendan’s apartment in the East Village and her talent bloomed. She became a songwriter. And she became a good one.

Jenna’s reputation in New York is immaculate. Her sense of style and flawless vocals are dependable showstoppers. Her talent has been embraced by many of Ireland’s finest. Michael Brunnock, Mick Maloney, Brendan O’Shea, Mark Dignam - Jenna sang on all of their albums. She was a serious contributor and vocalist on Mark Geary’s Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving. Glen Hansard took her to Carnegie Hall.

“Oh that was crazy,” Jenna remembers. “Glen was going to do The Late Show for his Jason Molina EP and he ‘rehearsed’ by doing a secret gig at The Scratcher. He called me up on stage towards the end of the night to do a song. After the gig, Glen said ‘So what are you doing Monday night?’ He was doing a David Byrne tribute at Carnegie Hall and asked me to sing with him.

“That was an amazing night. Glen and the band were so welcoming. I got a little teary, thinking about all the amazing people who had been on that stage. It was humbling. I wanted to give him something as kind of a token of gratitude, so I knitted him a hat.”

She smiles. “I think he liked it.”

Wanting To be Ginger Rogers

Jenna’s new album, Radio Parade, is most definitely an homage to her radio beginnings. It is jazzy, bluesy, packed with fat brass and has a drip-drop, delicate cadence. Produced by New York’s musician’s musician, Mark Marshall, the entire endeavour is sophisticated, simple and gorgeous.

“I was definitely the least talented person in the room,” Jenna remembers. “And that’s how I want it. Because of the Dixieland vibe on this record, and because of the calibre of these musicians, we went with their first instincts. That was very important. If it went beyond three takes, then we knew it wasn’t working.”

Jenna’s remarkable single ‘Home’ is an homage to the home she grew up in outside of Pittsburgh.

“My parents called me and said that they sold the house. It was going to be a couple of weeks, but I wasn’t going to be able to say goodbye. So I wrote a song on my ukulele, bawling at my kitchen table. It’s a break-up song, just with a house.

“We recorded that song a couple of times but Mark [Marshall] was like, ‘You can do better.’ So he turned off all the lights in the studio. And I just thought about my family. I lived my whole life in the space of recording that one song. It was something only Mark could have done.”

And then there’s ‘Piggy’, a brassy, witty song about collecting money in a piggy bank. That one is for Jenna’s mom.

“My mom has this sort of dreamy quality about her,” Jenna says. “She’s a writer. She’s a teacher. When she walks, she glides rather than steps. She’s a very elegant person. When she’d do the dishes, she would stare out the window and sing. So then I imagined this piggy bank, somewhere high and far away, that was just hers. For all the places she would go if she didn’t have all of these annoying kids around her. For her escape.”

Jenna pauses and smiles to herself. “I mean in the end, we all just want to be Ginger Rogers,” she giggles. “But who has that kind of time?”

Interview by: Margaret Miller