Written by Lucy Mills
It’s the down-to-earth girls that hold themselves with such subtlety that I’m always quietly admiring and secretly taking wardrobe notes from. Singer-songwriter, Naima Bock, falls into this category.
On November 4th, Miss Bock rolled onto the Glasgow stage at The Hug and Pint for the annual Great Western Festival. She sang her heart out with a four-piece band in a cramped room to eager listeners, equipped with an acoustic guitar and, as I duly noted, some stylish pinstripe trousers. Earlier this year, she toured as a support act for both Fenne Lily and Squid.
Now, the Great Western Festival kicks off another round of touring for the Glastonbury-born artist. Formally a bassist in the successful girl band Goat Girl, she’s now taken on a solo path, despite not always enjoying centre stage.
“The centre of attention scares the shite out of me. I like kind of dabbling in it but not for long and not being responsible for people’s money spending.”
Her tendency to only lightly flirt with the spotlight means a support act is her ideal gig.
“Despite enjoying getting up on stage, I can also prefer to hide. When it comes to doing
headline shows- ahh I really dread it.”
A support act may mean your name is slightly smaller on a poster but, as Bock says, “You
haven’t really got anything to lose”.
“I don’t really take in the juice… or whatever juice it is people get when [the audience] take in the songs really well. I think it’s very flattering, but it doesn’t make too much of a difference on how I feel a gig goes.”
Her Glasgow show was certainly received well. Audience members squeezed together in the basement venue to hear her strong vocals on songs such as the transcendent ‘Giant Palm’ and ‘Berimbau’, a song inspired by her Brazilian roots.
Her music has a soulful quality. You’ll feel connected to something deeply close to you-
something adjacent to nostalgia or that poignant feeling you get when you miss someone.
It makes sense she would record on tape. The music is for the front porch or one of those.
cherished sunny days on some park grass. Her songs shine best when it feels she’s right there with her acoustic guitar and folk vocals, picking away at the strings.
The modern musician struggles to avoid a laptop’s blue light and endless wave files in the
recording process, but Bock’s desire for distance from the screen and a simplified process led her to an A-track tape machine- or for those, like me, who are not read up on sound recording tech- a more dignified cassette tape. The tape machine meant recording could be an intimatemeeting between just her, a guitar, and the tape machine- no other systems or producers in the room.
“I started becoming a bit tired of having to lean on people all the time for help with recording and I just found that what I recorded myself, and it sounds narcissistic, but I found what I recorded on my own I much preferred”. She humbly admits.
“I mean, God bless them and thank you for helping, but I guess I just felt more accomplished when I did it on my own, so I wanted a simpler way to do that without having to delve fully into Logic or Protools or whatever it is— different programs on the computer.”
The physicality of tape with its ingrained sound waves leaves little room for primming and
redrafting, which was part of the appeal for Bock.
“You don’t have any way of editing it, which I enjoy because you kind of have to live with what you’ve done, and you have to really know the song before.”
Her attraction to song writing isn’t perfection.
She confesses, “I’m not a perfectionist and I’m not very patient which doesn’t always make for the best product”.
The polishing of a song, with the tediousness of track-adding and second opinions is really the only part she dreads.
“I found myself getting ground down by that aspect of the song writing process,” she says.
Maybe the frustration is her patience thinning or maybe it’s the distance from the craft she so dearly enjoys. People talk of flow states and practicing art as meditation. Bock couldn’t avoid such clichés when talking about what song writing was to her.
“When I’m in the process of writing it, it feels quite blank. Not in a numb, heartless sense- I zone out a lot when I’m writing songs, which is nice because I don’t get that a lot in my life. I’ve got a very busy mind like a lot of other people”, she explains.
“There’s this happy-sad…” she hesitates. “…or not even happy-sad but there is this healing process that is doing it whilst also feeling some of the difficult emotions at the same time… I
think the word relief just came to me. I think that would be the best description for me in writing songs is some kind of surrendering”.
There’s power to making something so precious out of your emotions and pain.
“It’s also the main thing that makes me happy… There’scertain things that there’s no questions around. There’s no decisions to be made. It just presents itself and you think “Gah, this is fun, and it doesn’t matter if I’m good at it or not or all of these doubts that can surround an artisticendeavour…you just carry on doing it regardless, and [I] probably will always do that.”
Personally, I will take that as a promise from Miss Naima Bock. Her songs will continue to fill our hearts and accompany us for all our self-reflecting or field-frolickingneeds - maybe even the occasional tear shed.
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