9. NicoThe Marble Index

I have memories of Desertshore, walking around Paris in the winter when I was 18, which is the perfect way to discover Nico. It was snowing, I was too shy to go into any of the gay bars, so I decided to just wander around in the cold and listen to Desertshore instead, being beautiful and enigmatic. On a deeper level, if I think of a Nico album, my brain will go to The Marble Index. I can’t do this list without John Cale, as a fellow viola player, and it’s another door that opened for me, production wise, and what I could do with my viola, what I could do with drone, and what I could do with space and sound and organs.

I think of Nico more like a writer or a poet than a singer. I have this trouble sometimes if I’m not thinking about being a songwriter and I write things down, and I’m like, ‘oh, this is going to make such a great song’. Then I actually start to sing it, and there are too many words, too many syllables. But with Nico, she just decided ‘I’m just going to sing’, she found a way to make that work on her music, it doesn’t sound edited to be a song.