“I'm rebelling against what the music industry and social media was telling me to do” | Natalie Wildgoose interview

Songwriter, pianist and composer Natalie Wildgoose has been around the folk scene for several years but first gained attention for her work in the duo Wanderland with Matt Robinson. Following two EPs with that project, she released her debut solo recording, the First Birdsongs EP, in 2023. She follows it up this summer with the beautiful Come Into The Garden, a six-song set recorded on various pianos across the Yorkshire Dales.

Growing up in North Yorkshire, Natalie was surrounded by music and art from a young age and found creativity in the natural world, all of which can be heard in her distinctive sound. “Most of my family are artists”, she tells me. “My grandfather was a piano player and my grandmother was an amazing painter and sculptor. ”

Growing up in the wilderness, “playing with leaves and clay in the water” certainly sounds rustic; it’s an age-old simplicity which Wildgoose echoes with her lo-fi recording methods. “With this record, that sound is coming from a reel-to-reel tape recorder I inherited from my granddad,” she continues. “I found it, and it was beaten up and rusty, so we fixed it, and it came out sounding incredible. It gives the music a timeless quality, so [that] nobody can put it in a specific genre, and it can take some people back to their childhood and other people somewhere completely different. I was rejecting the modern side of production for that reason.”

As well as defying modernity on a small scale, Natalie looked to defy the frantic pace of modern life, with songs that settle in the ear and comfort with an easy tempo and deceptively homely lyrics (‘I lingered, as long as I could before needing breakfast’). “I was really trying to slow things down in every decision I was making”, she says. “In a sense, kind of rebelling against what the music industry and social media was telling me to do. But in a larger sense, my listeners have said that their brains are going so fast, and their thoughts are always so wired… When I released ‘Angel’ and ‘Come Into The Garden’, they were the only songs they could listen to because they helped them calm down, which feels very important.”

Natalie plans to continue this with her next project, which will springboard from funding awarded through the PRS Women Make Music Foundation. “They’ve been amazing already”, she says. “We’re working on another EP, sort of like this one, but we’re going even further into the interests and the concept of it…”