Hello and welcome!

My new album is Balancing Act and if it's not your first time here, you probably already noticed quite a few changes on this website. New tracks,new pictures, etc. So I wanted to tell you a little bit about this new project I'm so excited about.

Balancing Act evolved from an idea of a Russian folk album. I always wanted to record my favorite Russian folk songs, to put my own spin on the familiar, and with my label's blessing I began collecting material. To my disappointment I realized that the majority of what I thought of as "folklore" actually had songwriters, and that wasn't something I wanted to record -- I had plenty of my own unused material. So I turned to my old catalog and found 10 songs that were written in the past 12 or so years. Some of them, I felt, needed extensive re-writing which made this project feel curiously fresh to me, even though the songs were not brand new. The eleventh song was one of those few genuinely folk tunes, a breathtakingly beautiful and sad Russian ballad.

Once I had all the material and started to think about the arrangements, I quickly realized that I wanted this project to be very stripped down, open and airy and I new just the guys who could help me with that. Billy Panda who played some of the acoustic guitars on Cheap Escape, brought with him an array of string instruments -- from mandocello and baritone guitar to high-string and electric -- which gave us an incredible textural variety, complimented by Byron House on upright and Arco bass and my buddy Alex Arzamastsev on cajon and percussion. I played acoustic guitar and sang everything, and my husband John recorded us. We made this album in three days. It was delightful -- to be in the studio with my friends creating something totally different, not always knowing what the next song is gonna sound like.

I hope that you find Balancing Act exciting and interesting. Please look around, listen to the music, read the lyrics, check out the pictures we took (which was also fun!) and don't forget that I'm always on Facebook and Myspace, just hanging out and talking about stuff related and sometimes totally unrelated to music.

Have a wonderful time exploring this site that was created for me by Jonny Kui because the only thing I can do on the computer is type with three fingers!

Love,

N