Daily Inspiration: Meet Natalie Nicole Gilbert

Today we’d like to introduce you to Natalie Nicole Gilbert.

Natalie Nicole, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in a musical family, but carving out my own music career took plenty of initiative. When I moved to Los Angeles back in 2006 it was interesting to see how different the music scene is here. Due to so many people in LA working in Entertainment and having jobs that run at least 9 to 7 if not 4am to 10pm with long shoot days, it was hard to get people to show up to a concert at 8pm any day of the week, no matter how stellar the band or playlist.

Over time I came to understand that LA really isn’t a concert town – it’s a studio city. There’s a wealth of great producers and musicians here, but most discovered early on that locally there wasn’t a living to be found in booking endless concert nights. One of my co-writers who lived here for years before I arrived won numerous awards and songwriting contests and had a wonderful catalog of great music. However, she confessed to me that when I hired her to join me for a concert outdoors in Woodland Hills, it was the first time she had ever been paid for a performance during her time in Los Angeles.

What LA knows best, however, is story. Film, TV, a little stage here and there – and thankfully those outlets use music. For indie musicians, that’s really the sweet spot in Los Angeles – finding ways your music can tell or support a story.

I worked in radio broadcasting for many years, which is how I initially transferred out to SoCal. From there, I shifted into work at entertainment law firms and stock music libraries, learning my way around music licensing contracts and royalty accounting behind the scenes. These three roles – radio, entertainment law and film music – really informed ways that I shape my sound as a musician. Directors and music supervisors want songs with the fewest number of songwriters and publishers involved that are easy to clear for film use. Radio and listeners want music with replay-ability – songs you don’t grow too tired of but love to hear again and again. And music lawyers? Well, they love a song with a funny publishing company name, an original title and melody that don’t face copyright infringement difficulties, and anything that meets the needs of radio and film so they can quickly get companies to sign on the dotted line without too many edits or redlines during negotiations.

At the end of the day, though, for the artist it always comes back to the sound and the idea – the little hook or element that sets the song apart and captures your attention in a way that keeps you from getting tired of the song from draft to demo to studio to release to concerts and back again. It’s finding new ways to rerecord a song when it goes viral with various remixes, “Candlelight” mixes, and extended rough cuts that make the fans happy to stream version number seven of their favorite song. The journey of the song from start to finish and the journey of the artist are so closely tied together.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
During my tenure as a musician, iTunes came and went. That’s the number one measuring stick: before iTunes, during iTunes, and after iTunes. Prior to iTunes, music was really thought of as tangible. CDs, vinyl, cassettes, the whole shebang. As Napster came along and disrupted the industry, the whole paradigm shifted. iTunes brought along the iPod and the idea that everyone carried a large library of music in the palm of their hands. Now, streaming is the new normal.

I left radio a few years after the advent of iTunes. Pandora, Yahoo Launchcast, and even iHeart Radio had chipped away at terrestrial radio listeners. Especially after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, it was clear that radio was a slowly sinking ship. So I jumped ship and learned to adapt, building out my other side skills in accounting and contract administration, essentially paralegal and office manager work. It gave me a great opportunity to see how the machine works and apply that knowledge to my own artist negotiations on the weekends. I definitely wouldn’t say it was an easy transition for any of us in the industry. Clearly, even now big labels and music organizations are still feeling the knock on effects of embracing the digital music age too late in the game, still trying to catch up. As musicians, we also have to weather those storms, and frankly if you’re an indie musician, you can handle those sharp turns more easily than big record labels. The most vital element is always staying open and willing to learn.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Mostly soulful ballads and pop, ethereal and pensive songs.

I was just telling a younger musician I was mentoring today that my album I’m most proud of is the holiday album Warm Winter I released a few months ago. Released during Covid, I knew it couldn’t be all glitter and Christmas cheer – it needed to be real and bring some relief and reflection. As such, half or so of the album is songs that aren’t actually “holiday” in nature, per se. There’s a cover of Harry Styles “Falling” rife with violins and a jazz piece great for any time of year (that actually first appeared as an instrumental in the film Passengers, if you listen closely). We also did a mashup of We Three Kings and What Child is This where I took the lyrics of one and sung it over the melody of the other. (So many of those old classics were originally simple pub songs, so you might be surprised how frequently they’re interchangeable.) Most of all, I was so pleased that this one album blended everything from a Latin hymn by Andrew Lloyd Webber to an upbeat R&B flavored pop song. Somehow all of it worked together, and my collaborators on that project were all wonderful artists in their own right. I highly recommend listening through and following all the featured artists.

I’m finally starting to see the industry come around to my way of thinking a smidge, but for a long time I was one of what seemed to be only a handful of artists that really understood that genre is a dead concept. As individuals, all songwriters listen to such a wide spectrum of songs. Questions like “which artists inspired your sound?” are so pre-2000. This is all the more true in the digital music age, where algorithms introduce even young listeners to music that’s similar to what they like but in completely different genres or eras. Harry Styles’s affection for Stevie Nicks is a perfect example of this. I grew up with a pianist mother playing everything from Gershwin to Streisand, a brother who played in a metal rock band, a sister who had ballads from the 70s to the 90s on repeat, and then my own leanings to listen to soul and R&B from an early age. So for me, it’s hard to specify even one genre that singularly influenced me, let alone one to three artists. They all inspire me and all stretch my imagination about song structure.

What’s next?
I’m an optimistic realist, so I confess that with current news about the Delta variant sending whole countries around the world back into lockdown I’m going light on making big plans at present. I believe we’re likely to all be back in lockdown by the end of the year, especially if more folks don’t get fully vaccinated or ease up on protective habits too quickly.

That said, I am working on a new album called Recovery – full of songs focused on resilience and bouncing back after the kind of difficult times we’ve all collectively faced of late. It has originals and covers of songs from Mariah Carey, Billy Joel, and Oh Wonder, for a start. The piano work and blend with beats, synth and strings is really atmospheric – like detox for the soul. It feels really timely and I can’t wait until we wrap this mastering phase so fans and new listeners alike have a fresh audio salve to make up for this long pause we’ve all been on.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/NNGMusic/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NatalieNicole
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/NatalieNicoleGilbert
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/NatalieNicole
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4bVTLb1w7VXW2X33cExu7D

Image Credits:
Main headshot without text: Kim Hardy, London (England, UK) Main headshot with grey background: Kim Hardy, London (England, UK) Car shot: Natalie Nicole Gilbert (Los Angeles) Warm Winter cover: Natalie Nicole Gilbert, Cardiff (Wales, UK)