Narzra Ahmed chats to Irish singer-songwriter Nell Mescal about her first headline tour, which kicks off in Nottingham...
With just days to go before Nell Mescal takes to the stage at the Bodega Social for the opening show of her first ever headline tour, LeftLion jumped on a Zoom call with the singer-songwriter while she was in her London home to ask what fans can expect from the tour as well as how she uses song-writing as a tool to help her express difficult emotions.
The anticipation for the Nottingham show is very real. Nell tells us, “I am so excited. I was so gutted when we had to reschedule it in October, because I was sick and so getting to go back out and doing it feels really good. I am really excited.” The setlist will be full of newer tracks and different versions of ‘old’ tracks. “I play guitar now, on tour, which is cool. It’s the first time that I’ve been doing it this year or in the past few months. My band will be there. Some of the arrangements are a bit different which is exciting.”
In some ways, Nell, who has provided tour support for HAIM, Dermot Kennedy, Florence and the Machine, Pink and Gwen Stefani (to name-drop a few), isn’t sure what will happen on this tour, because it’s the first time she’s hitting the road on her own. “I’m buzzing. I haven’t done a headline tour before so I don’t know what to expect just as much as you guys.” She laughs. “The [track] I love singing live the most is Homesick, just because I feel like a lot of people connected to that one. It’s a lot of fun to sing.”
The [track] I love singing live the most is Homesick, just because I feel like a lot of people connected to that one
Touring with such superstars over the past summer was “the craziest few weeks of my life”. These shows filled Nell with confidence and were so affirming for her in realising her dreams and what she wanted to do with her career, These shows made her feel very positive about how she was doing. “I am doing the right thing and I am where I am supposed to be,” she says these were thought she experienced during the shows. “It did change my life…”
Some artists shared their musical advice with Nell, however she spent a lot of time observing how they worked on stage and with their teams and picked up tips this way too. Meanwhile, Florence Welch had more general life advice for her. “You need better friends,” is what she was told by the Dog Days Are Over singer, due to the fact that Nell would speak on stage about “some bad friends that I used to have” during her set. She’s all set for friends now and says she has good friends. She also says she is “okay” now.
Having left school around the age of sixteen to pursue a career in music, Nell moved to London in a whirlwind. She found it "emotionally difficult and very strange” but things seemed to happen so fast that there wasn’t time to process how “scary” it all was. On the other hand, all the excitement made it “the easiest thing ever."
This meant that feelings such as homesickness took a while to seep in, with Nell even saying that initially she didn’t feel homesick. “A few months after, when I was slowly going through, my brain was like, 'Oh, I live in a different county and I live by myself with people I don’t know. I am so homesick and I have no friends.’” This inevitably led to one of her penning one of her singles, Homesick.
Things are looking much brighter for Nell now. She very recently joined presenter Mollie King on Radio 1's Future Pop show (Thursday 18 January) as they played her previous single Teeth and Nell’s new single, the emotional Killing Time (which has been chosen as Mollie’s ‘Future Bop’).
Nell says the single was one of the last tracks to be written for a new body of work which she hinted she will be releasing soon. It is a very emotional track. “It’s about moving away. I moved to London when I was eighteen and it’s about that experience for me and looking back on stuff that shaped me negatively from the past and wondering if your old friends actually cared about you or if they were just killing time until you left. It’s a dark one but I feel like it’s a bit of a bop.” We agree!
I moved to London when I was eighteen and it’s about that experience for me and looking back on stuff that shaped me negatively from the past
On the radio show, Nell also announced that she has a brand new EP, titled Can I Miss It For A Minute? on the way. Killing Time is one of the first singles from the EP, which will be released on 3 May 2024. “I worked really hard on [the EP] so I feel excited for people to hear it.” Nell also speaks about how she has honed her song-writing so that she is more open in her lyrics, in a sense. “I feel like a lot of my songs are trying to move past something while also recognising that those moments that were really hard were real, really important,” she explains.
In the past, she has discussed general feelings, such as being homesick, in her music. With Killing Time, however, she is able to pinpoint a more specific memory and the other tracks on EP promise to be just as emotional. Nell described them as “hard-hitting” but she mentioned not wanting to make her fans cry “too hard."
Sometimes releasing new music so soon after writing it isn’t advisable, but Nell is confident that this was the right decision. “I am really excited about [Killing Time]. I was working on a lot of songs. I needed one more…Eventually, me and my guitarist Charlie were drinking wine and we started playing around with the guitar and immediately, I was like, ‘This is the first song. I can feel it.’ As soon as I wrote it, I wanted it out in the world.”
Nell’s brother, Paul Mescal, is a Hollywood actor, which means some people find her music through being fans of Paul’s work. You may have seen him in the lockdown hit Normal People, in the tearjerker Aftersun, or in All of Us Strangers - for which he has been nominated for a BAFTA award. Does this attention bother her? Not at all. “It’s hard to know where people came from, but also it doesn’t matter. If you came for something else and then realised that, actually, you are on board with this stuff that I post and the stuff that I make, that’s just like… Everyone finds another artist through someone else, do you know what I mean?"
“All my favourite artists, I found through people that I followed so this is no different. It just happens to be my brother. I am such a fan of his so it’s no surprise to me that a lot of people that love him have stuck around, because if he wasn’t my brother I would be watching all the movies he’s in anyway, because he’s just so talented,” she sweetly adds. “It’s kind of cool. I am one of his fans so it’s cool that they follow me and that’s exciting. I don’t really care as long as they stay for the music. I don’t live for the thirst comments about my brother in my comments,” she says, candidly. “But I can see when people are genuine and actually enjoy the music.”
Nell Mescal performs at The Bodega on 23 January 2024, you can buy tickets here.
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