Heather Nova, originally from Bermuda, wove together accessible adult pop, rawer rock edges, and the lyrical sensibility of her youthful heroes Patti Smith and Kate Bush. With her debut international album Oyster in 1994 she entered the charts in the U.K. and the U.S.; subsequent releases such as Storm in 2003 and 300 Days at Sea in 2011 regularly placed her inside the continental European Top 30. Her ninth studio outing, The Way It Feels, shifted toward Americana, while the harder-rocking Pearl of 2019 echoed the spirit of Oyster on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Born Heather Frith in Bermuda in 1967 to a Canadian mother and Bermudian father, she passed the bulk of her first sixteen years living aboard a forty-foot vessel alongside her parents and two siblings, turning to song and music for diversion. Repeated listens to her mother’s cassette collection sparked an early interest; by age eight she was composing original material, and at fourteen she began playing guitar. Two years later the family relocated to the United States, where Nova enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Performing Arts, initially pursuing visual arts before redirecting her studies toward film scoring. She later settled in New York City to focus on music and took her mother’s maiden name.
Nova’s stay in New York proved brief; by the late 1980s she had established herself in London and renewed her commitment to songwriting. Under her birth name she issued a self-titled EP that Rough Trade later re-released as These Walls in 1990. Following several years of coffeehouse performances throughout the U.K., her first full-length album Glow Stars appeared in 1993, followed later that year by the live recording Blow. Big Cat Records president Abbo, drawn to the poetic quality of her lyrics, signed her; working with Killing Joke’s Youth, Nova delivered her first worldwide release, Oyster, in 1994. Issued domestically on Sony/Work, the album reached number 179 on the Billboard 200 and number 72 in the U.K., prompting nearly three hundred European concerts over the ensuing two years. Nova then returned to Bermuda for a period of reflection that yielded material for a calmer third album, Siren, released in 1998 and again charting in both the U.S. and U.K.
Although still based in London, she tracked her next record during a Bermuda holiday. South, issued by V2 Records in 2001, coincided with soundtrack contributions to the romantic comedy Serendipity and the Sean Penn film I Am Sam, on which she covered a Beatles song alongside Eddie Vedder, Sarah McLachlan, and Paul Westerberg. The album later entered Germany’s Top Five and received an American release in 2002, the same year Nova self-published the illustrated poetry collection The Sorrowjoy.
Storm followed in 2003, produced with Mercury Rev (credited as the Divine Sparks) and released by Big Cat without U.S. distribution; it nevertheless reached the Top 20 in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden. Her sixth album, the Felix Tod-produced Redbird, arrived in 2005 and peaked at number ten on the German charts. The solar-powered, acoustic The Jasmine Flower came out in 2008, and the maritime-themed 300 Days at Sea surfaced in 2011, charting across several European territories including Germany’s Top 25. Her eighth studio effort, the Americana-leaning The Way It Feels, was recorded in Charleston, South Carolina and issued in summer 2015, entering the Top 40 in Belgium and the Netherlands. Twenty-five years after Oyster, Pearl emerged in 2019 with Youth returning as co-producer to steer its rock-oriented arrangements.
