Nina Nastasia & Jim White
You Follow Me (FatCat Records)

Tracklisting:
1. I've Been Out Walking
2. I Write Down Lists
3. Odd Said The Doe
4. The Day I Would Bury You
5. Our Discussion
6. In The Evening
7. There Is No Train
8. Late Night
9. How Will You Love Me
10. I Come After You

Following last year’s critically acclaimed On Leaving, Nina Nastasia makes a rapid return with this stunning collaborative album with Jim White, the peerless drummer of beloved Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three. Stripped back to just a two-piece (drums, guitar, vocal), this is a fantastically focused record - a taut, raw document of two incredible musicians in deep dialogue, exploring the boundaries of songform to find a rare and striking complement.

You Follow Me is Nina’s second outing for FatCat, and her fifth career album; with each subsequent release, she earns further critical acclaim for the inventive songwriting she merges with a consistently haunting style. Having established a reputation as an incredibly instinctive and distinctive drummer, Jim White has become a guest musician of choice for acts such as Will Oldham, The Boxhead Ensemble, Smog, Nick Cave and countless others, yet this is the first record to bear his own name. His first appearance with Nina Nastasia came at the All Tomorrow's Parties Festival in 2002, just before they recorded her Run to Ruin album. He has been a perennial member of Nina’s backing band ever since, appearing with her around the world.

Of this collaboration, Nina states plainly, "it was Jim's idea." White proposed the concept during recording sessions for On Leaving. The pair played a handful of low-profile gigs together in Brooklyn and Chicago, and there was something so unusual and affecting about the way the songs came out that Jim felt they could make a compelling record. Since she had other ideas for the tunes they had been playing together, "it made more sense to sit down and make something from scratch with our thing in mind," she decided. So she wrote new songs for their collaboration, completing a dozen first person narratives on pursuit (“There Is No Train,” “I Come After You”), being pursued (“I’ve Been Out Walking,” “Odd Said The Doe”) and what comes between (“In The Evening,” “Our Discussion”).

Jim flew back to New York, and the two spent a month with Nina's long-time companion and musical organizer Kennan Gudjonsson developing and arranging the songs. "[Kennan] worked the same way he's done for all the records," says Nina, "like a producer in the old sense” – helping strike a balance between Nastasia’s delicate song-structures and White’s brillliantly expansive interpretations. The three brought the music to friend and engineer Steve Albini to record it at his celebrated Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. Albini’s bent for capturing a bare voice and the tangible depth of drums made for what he calls "a cool-ass record"; what Nina says is "the one I most like to listen to."

With Nina’s extraordinary voice able to swoop and turn on a dime, shifting from a langorous, breathy trail to beautifully emotive peals or a bloodied howl, Jim’s highly inventive playing (the word “drumming” seems inadequate or lazy) is simultaneously loose and lithe, intensely tight, testing and marking out the spaces around things; changing weight from a dissipated shimmer to explosive shrapnel bursts or weird machineflurries – both functional and impressionistic. What results from the meeting is a series of songs that emerge in a process of almost continual invention. They unfurl and stretch out, expand and contract, always fluid and organic – as though the songs themselves were living and breathing entities. The space hewn out is in flux and deeply three-dimensional, an almost-cubist commingling of events, perspectives and possibilities. The more you listen, the more you pick up. With the recordings close-up and visceral, it’s a passionate, emotive album articulating a spectrum (both lyrically and musically) that ranges from driven rage to a loving sensual warmth.

There’s something in the title, You Follow Me - perhaps a sort of anthology of aspects of following - that adumbrates the very relationship of two musicians performing at the height of their powers, somewhere between a duel and a dance, where the leading foot shifts from movement to movement.

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