Location: New York City
Styles: Folk, Rock, Americana, Pop, Punk, Electropop
Similar to/RIYL: Patti Smith, St Vincent, Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey
CD: The Warming House
Release date: Aug 13, 2014Accolades: Mother Jones Reader Choice Picks for 2011, My Roommate Is An @$$clown Video Screened at Libelula Animation Festival in Spain, Performing Finalist at We R Indie Songwriting Competition 2011Members/Instruments: Emilia Cataldo: Vocals and Guitar, Craig Levy: Bass, Drums, Synth, Craig Judelman: Violin, Jennifer Harder: Trumpet, Michael Hitchcock: Guest Vocals
Production: Craig Levy at Little Pioneer Cider House in Brooklyn NY
Bio:
Nehedar is the project of NYC-based singer/songwriter Emilia Cataldo, who is releasing her 7th independent album “The Warming House” on Aug 13.
On the new record, Nehedar continues to blend her antifolk-rock style with other unexpected sounds and genres, only this time with a deeper Americana influence. The result, is mesmerizing.
The Warming House – which is the artist’s first crowd funded album and was recorded in Brooklyn with producer Little Pioneer (Craig Levy) – takes listeners on a journey spanning down-home fiddling to majestic horn parts to electronic beats, from angry punk to upbeat pop to sad folk to playful country tunes to feminist anthems.
While blending and shifting between genres has always been part of the music of Nehedar, The Warming House represents a true crystallization of her all-embracing, diverse musical style. It is the artist at her most mature and fully developed stage.
Cataldo began performing her original music in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and NYC’s Lower East Side in 2003, and the anti-folk influences from those early years still shows.
She released her first album “Pick Your Battles” in 2007, and has released one album per year, every year since.
To gain a deeper understanding of Nehedar, one needs to understand her eclectic background.
The child of free-spirited, nomadic musicians, Cataldo grew up exposed to a wide variety of cultural and musical influences – treasures she has drawn from to create her richly layered recordings that have always been best described as original.
Her father is a saxophone playing Nuyorican (Puerto Rican New Yorker) jazzman. Her mother was a classically trained piano teacher who liked folk music. Together, they would shut themselves up in their room every night to practice while their six young children ran wild.
The music of Nehedar reflects Cataldo’s fascinating journey through life From the Latin influenced environment where she helped her father run his liquor store as a girl in Miami, to a troubling adolescence in the fascinating midwestern town of Zion, Illinois (which she draws from in The Warming House’s nostalgic title track).
Cataldo left Zion at 17, and traveled with the Rainbow Family of Living Light, where she began learning about her mystical Jewish heritage. That led to her taking on the name Nehedar (which means “wondrous” in hebrew) for her and her band, and Jewish mysticism continues to infuse her work.