Before the end of the month, the wrapping will come off of the shiny new album from remarkably talented singer-songwriter Nell Bryden.
This third release is set to continue the success she has garnered in recent times - with 11 consecutive play listed tracks on Radio 2.
Wayfarer has been called 'seductively dancey' too: "There is a different sense emotionally to where I've been in the past," she said.
"Before, there was a lot of heartbreak, cry in your beer stuff that needed pedal steel all over the place...I don't feel like that now."
Nell begins an extensive UK tour in September, but Milton Keynes fans can check out her talent a whole lot sooner - Nell will be live playing under the IF:Fest banner this Saturday.
Tickets for her performance in the Spiegeltent at South Willen Park can be booked through
www.ifmiltonkeynes.org
Nell found time to answer our On Track questions - and made for one of the best reads so far...
The song that first awakened your musical senses
Jimi Hendrix - Little Wing
I grew up in Brooklyn in a large loft, big enough to learn to ride a bicycle and roller skate in. I'm very close with both my parents.
I was raised primarily by my father who is a painter and sculptor. He did big paintings of Coney Island scenes, and would take me to the amusement parks so he could sketch and get ideas. He also took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and would study and copy master paintings there while I played with dolls under his easel.
My mother was a classical soprano; she and my father separated when I was four, and divorced when I was five. She moved to Massachusetts and I stayed with my dad in New York. Life in Brooklyn until the age of 11 was ideal and I remember it fondly.
When I was 11 the loft we rented was sold by the landlord and turned into medical offices, and we were evicted.
I moved to Massachusetts in the country, several states away, to live with my mother.
It was an unhappy time for me, and I felt like the kids at school were not 'my people' and I was unpopular.
I eventually found solace in listening to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix while driving the country roads in my first car.
It wasn't until then that I really started feeling I could be a singer-songwriter. Janis and Jimi, like they have with so many other angsty teenagers, made me feel I had friends, I had people that were right in my car that sounded immediate, and they got what I was going through.
'Little Wing', which I will have played at my funeral, I just had on repeat one weekend, I couldn't turn it off.
Physical or digital - how do you take your music?
I take it streaming these days, primarily through Spotify. I love the physical aspect of an album because you get a souvenir, and the artwork really adds to it.
But I just didn't have any room for the thousands of CDs I had, and I kept moving between NYC and London so it was impractical
The first time you thought 'Music - this is the job for me'
I've always been a musician professionally, whether I was making money at it or not. I had other jobs but they felt so temporary and inconsequential that they hardly made a blip on my consciousness. It was always music first. I never had a fall back plan because I never planned to fall back on anything else
I took a gab year after high school before university, living first on a drop zone in Arizona to get my sky diving licence (before realising this terrifying sport was not for me).
After that I traveled to Australia alone with a backpack and a Lonely Planet guidebook and had the time of my life meeting other strangers and 'finding myself'. On the advice of some other backpackers I met, I bought a cheap guitar so I could accompany myself on the little acapella 'ditties' I was composing.
I was terrible at it and the guitar was heavy and unwieldy, but the passion to learn how to play had firmly taken hold.
When I returned to the US, I went to a very academically serious all-girls university in Boston. I led a double life, living off campus, and had a golden retriever named Max that I got to keep me company. He came everywhere with me, sleeping under my desk at the political science lectures I went to at school, and hanging out at the folk clubs in Boston where I would play the open mics.
I recorded my first EP, got the taste for recording, and knew I was doomed because it was all I ever wanted to do with my life. I studied English literature, but knew all along that I'd be playing the bars and clubs instead of getting a 'normal' office job like all the other graduates.
After university, my boyfriend of the time and I started an electronic duo, like an aggressive version of Everything But The Girl. We moved to New York together, broke up and then came 9/11
I eventually went to Nashville to record what would become my first album, in 2003, 'Day For Night'. It wasn't very good, and it was a massive flop because I never did anything with it, I didn't even know how to shop it to labels. I thought, I'll just make it and they'll find out about it somehow. Live and learn!
Working as a waitress (and getting fired regularly) and a nanny for upper class dysfunctional families, I became increasingly disillusioned with the progress or lack thereof that I was making in music, so in desperation I followed a lead that took me on a self-booked tour of, firstly, Ireland. Then it extended to England, to Scotland, to Holland. I was lucky to support KT Tunstall in the States and she gave me some leads to follow in her native Scotland.
The Counting Crows invited me to support them on their tour of Ireland and the UK
Your best on stage memory
I wanted to play the Royal Albert Hall ever since I was a little girl, and then in one week last year I played it twice in the span of 72 hours, once with Gary Barlow and once with Jools Holland. I even went back a few months later and did it with the Gypsy Kings.
Dreams do come true, and it was every bit as inspiring as I thought it would be!
And the worst gig you've done
Many gigs when I started out, where I'd be under a TV screen with the football on, in an empty bar with uninterested strangers in a foreign country.
When I started out, I was booking all the tours for myself in the UK, cold calling pubs and clubs in Ireland and England on the way to my nanny job in Manhattan, pretending to be a booking agent representing 'Nell Bryden,' and then quitting my job, packing my suitcase and hopping on a plane to find the next adventure: it seems so scary in hindsight, and thank god I did it when I was young, because now it seems like an impossible expenditure of energy for so little pay off.
What made you take up singing
It was in the family, so it was a question of what kind of music I would do rather than whether I would be a musician
Which one song by another artist do you wish you'd have written
There are so many. Any Bob Dylan songs - Just Like A Woman, or Adele even, Rolling in the Deep, lots of songs keep popping into my head
And one - by yourself - which holds special significance
'Sirens' was a long time coming. It was off the Shake the Tree album, about my experience living in NYC on 9/11.
The song opened a lot of doors for me, even though I didn't want to write it.
Cher covered it on her latest album and Gary Barlow heard my version on the radio and asked me to open for him on his 30 date tour
If you could step into the shoes of an other musician, living or dead, who would it be and what would you do?
Robert Plant seems like a guy who has lived the crazy rock and roll lifestyle and has come out the other side intact and still loving music and growing artistically
Are there any current musical influences that you might look to
I've gotten more into funk and dance influences on the latest album Wayfarer, with the two young East London producers I worked with
And any genre of music you simply can't stand
Heavy Metal. Makes my skin crawl
Finally, plug your Milton Keynes date - what can we expect
It's always a joy to take on an an album sound that's a new direction and try it out with a live band, plus we'll be doing some of the old favourites from previous albums of course. And I'm five months pregnant, so I've got a baby bump to contend with now, and it's making holding the guitar more interesting by the day
Physical or digital - how do you take your music?
I take it streaming these days, primarily through Spotify. I love the physical aspect of an album because you get a souvenir, and the artwork really adds to it.
But I just didn't have any room for the thousands of CDs I had, and I kept moving between NYC and London so it was impractical
The first time you thought 'Music - this is the job for me'
I've always been a musician professionally, whether I was making money at it or not. I had other jobs but they felt so temporary and inconsequential that they hardly made a blip on my consciousness. It was always music first. I never had a fall back plan because I never planned to fall back on anything else
I took a gab year after high school before university, living first on a drop zone in Arizona to get my sky diving licence (before realising this terrifying sport was not for me).
After that I traveled to Australia alone with a backpack and a Lonely Planet guidebook and had the time of my life meeting other strangers and 'finding myself'. On the advice of some other backpackers I met, I bought a cheap guitar so I could accompany myself on the little acapella 'ditties' I was composing.
I was terrible at it and the guitar was heavy and unwieldy, but the passion to learn how to play had firmly taken hold.
When I returned to the US, I went to a very academically serious all-girls university in Boston. I led a double life, living off campus, and had a golden retriever named Max that I got to keep me company. He came everywhere with me, sleeping under my desk at the political science lectures I went to at school, and hanging out at the folk clubs in Boston where I would play the open mics.
I recorded my first EP, got the taste for recording, and knew I was doomed because it was all I ever wanted to do with my life. I studied English literature, but knew all along that I'd be playing the bars and clubs instead of getting a 'normal' office job like all the other graduates.
After university, my boyfriend of the time and I started an electronic duo, like an aggressive version of Everything But The Girl. We moved to New York together, broke up and then came 9/11
I eventually went to Nashville to record what would become my first album, in 2003, 'Day For Night'. It wasn't very good, and it was a massive flop because I never did anything with it, I didn't even know how to shop it to labels. I thought, I'll just make it and they'll find out about it somehow. Live and learn!
Working as a waitress (and getting fired regularly) and a nanny for upper class dysfunctional families, I became increasingly disillusioned with the progress or lack thereof that I was making in music, so in desperation I followed a lead that took me on a self-booked tour of, firstly, Ireland. Then it extended to England, to Scotland, to Holland. I was lucky to support KT Tunstall in the States and she gave me some leads to follow in her native Scotland.
The Counting Crows invited me to support them on their tour of Ireland and the UK
Your best on stage memory
I wanted to play the Royal Albert Hall ever since I was a little girl, and then in one week last year I played it twice in the span of 72 hours, once with Gary Barlow and once with Jools Holland. I even went back a few months later and did it with the Gypsy Kings.
Dreams do come true, and it was every bit as inspiring as I thought it would be!
And the worst gig you've done
Many gigs when I started out, where I'd be under a TV screen with the football on, in an empty bar with uninterested strangers in a foreign country.
When I started out, I was booking all the tours for myself in the UK, cold calling pubs and clubs in Ireland and England on the way to my nanny job in Manhattan, pretending to be a booking agent representing 'Nell Bryden,' and then quitting my job, packing my suitcase and hopping on a plane to find the next adventure: it seems so scary in hindsight, and thank god I did it when I was young, because now it seems like an impossible expenditure of energy for so little pay off.
What made you take up singing
It was in the family, so it was a question of what kind of music I would do rather than whether I would be a musician
Which one song by another artist do you wish you'd have written
There are so many. Any Bob Dylan songs - Just Like A Woman, or Adele even, Rolling in the Deep, lots of songs keep popping into my head
And one - by yourself - which holds special significance
'Sirens' was a long time coming. It was off the Shake the Tree album, about my experience living in NYC on 9/11.
The song opened a lot of doors for me, even though I didn't want to write it.
Cher covered it on her latest album and Gary Barlow heard my version on the radio and asked me to open for him on his 30 date tour
If you could step into the shoes of an other musician, living or dead, who would it be and what would you do?
Robert Plant seems like a guy who has lived the crazy rock and roll lifestyle and has come out the other side intact and still loving music and growing artistically
Are there any current musical influences that you might look to
I've gotten more into funk and dance influences on the latest album Wayfarer, with the two young East London producers I worked with
And any genre of music you simply can't stand
Heavy Metal. Makes my skin crawl
Finally, plug your Milton Keynes date - what can we expect
It's always a joy to take on an an album sound that's a new direction and try it out with a live band, plus we'll be doing some of the old favourites from previous albums of course. And I'm five months pregnant, so I've got a baby bump to contend with now, and it's making holding the guitar more interesting by the day
