Nerina Pallot: Lessons In Resilience, Rejection, and Finding Her Way

When you write music, does all that from your childhood come up when you're thinking about the lyrics and when you're feeling them?

Definitely.

Whether I'm writing directly about that subject matter, I've written about it once or twice, but I think that sense of melancholy that I think a lot of writers have, I don't know any ...

I mean, maybe they exist, but I've never met a happy writer or songwriter [laughs].

You know? I just don't think people are driven to write from a place of happiness.

So I think I was very melancholy.

Maybe I'd have been melancholy as a kid anyway, but I think that situation, that longing for belonging, I guess, is what made me a writer, and it's imbued the sort of subject matter I go towards.

And then it's compounded by the fact that over the years, you know, I'm 25 years into my career, and I've met a lot of people, a m- a lot of my fans who've told me why they like my music and what it is, and they tell me their stories.

And that, in turn, gives birth to other songs.

So the work itself has become this sort of document, not just of my melancholy, but other people's feelings.

I do think that my family situation is probably what made me a writer, definitely.

I spent a lot of time up in my room, and I felt because I couldn't talk about my family situation at school, I was terrified of anybody finding out that my parents weren't married, which is bananas, but it was a big deal for me as a child.

Writing was where I could tell the truth.

And so I think as a person, I'm quite buttoned up, and I've had to learn over the course of 52 years that it's okay to talk about your feelings.

But I spent a lot of time putting that into the work.

We have read that you said that you're waiting to sort of write or channel your own Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I wondered whether you had feel like you've written that yet, and what that means to you.

And also this idea of channeling songs, sort of ideas in the ether that you kind of pick up and channel your c- creativity.

I've heard other artists sort of speak in, in a similar way.

I'm interested to know what you think about that.

The idea that work is already out there in, like, a parallel creative universe, and those of us who make work are just happy, lucky recipients one day.

I think if you talk to anybody across any creative discipline, I think whenever we make good work, we feel like we had nothing to do with it.

It just is out there, and somehow we tune in.

We're in the right head space or the right sort of emotional space to be receptive.

And I think I've done it once or twice in my life, but the rest of writing often feels like a hard slog.

And I also think that all creative people, we never want to feel like our best work is behind us.