Natalie Nicole Gilbert is a voting member of the Recording Academy with nine (9) solo albums and an additional six(6) singles to her credit, and first appeared on the Grammy ballot in 2013. In addition to her music, she has more than ten years in broadcast radio as a radio host and voice-over talent, and has done national commercials for McDonald’s, Cadillac, Quiznos, and other well-known brands. She built her home recording studio in 2005 when it was still a relatively new practice, and continues to produce and co-produce her own music. She’s also a session vocalist for the Dublin Studio Hub, and film and TV composer with Music and Pictures, whose credits include Law and Order, The Office, and many others worldwide. She brings her extensive knowledge of what is radio ready and what is easiest to license for film and TV to her own acoustic and electric songs.

Natalie Nicole’s style is a hybrid most easily thought of as fresh nostalgia. Her influences range from Whitney Houston and Bill Withers to London Grammar and Sabrina Carpenter. Vocally driven with the storytelling and beat beds you might expect from someone who majored in dance, her vocals are both intimate and powerful. Natalie has called Los Angeles home since 2006. (From Natalie N. Gilbert)

TSM: Natalie, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to do an interview for TSM. It’s great to have you in the magazine.

NNG:Thanks so much for having me back, it’s a pleasure.

TSM: First of all, I’m amazed by all that you do – sing, dance, act, write, and you began performing at such a young age too – singing on stage/screen at four years old! What inspired you to start singing at that early age? And who were your early childhood music influences?

NNG: First and foremost, I grew up with music of all kinds at home. My mom would play classical music and show tunes for my ballet class, and I often heard her practicing music for concerts and events at home in genres ranging from vintage pop to gospel to jazz. My dance teachers discovered I could sing and gave me vinyl 45s of songs from The Sound of Music and Shirley Temple films to sing solo at recitals, so I was often exposed to timeless music at a very young age.

TSM: At what age did you start writing songs? And what was the first song you ever wrote?

NNG: Around age four I think. The first song I remember writing had something to do with a tree and seasons, and I kept singing it over and over to myself in the back seat during one of our road trips so I wouldn’t forget it. I asked my mother to write out my compositions once I started muddling around on the piano around age five or six; we still have sheet music she notated from some song I wrote about boyfriends and girlfriends falling in love.

TSM: What’s your process for writing lyrics? And where do you get the inspiration for your songs?

NNG: I have two main formulas for writing. In the first, I write the lyrics out fully like a poem with a sense of rhythm, but no melody or musical notions. Then I decide if it’s going to be primarily guitar or piano, then create the pace and main chord progressions and try to fit the lyrics to that, cutting lyrics and syllables here and there to tailor to the developing structure. Those are the songs that tend to be very wordy and intellectual, full of ironic phrases; this is the method I used for “Breathing Hope,” “Dangers Surrounding,” and “Here Now,” for example.
 
My second favorite formula, which is easier and much more conducive for collaborations is to start with a riff or a full piece of music, and see what words come to mind when you play the music circuitously. “Say Anything,” “Stop Thinking About Me,” “Luminescent,” and “Sweet Australia” were all written with that simpler method. Songs originating that way tend to be shorter, more upbeat and composed with more two dollar words.

I also have a sort of litmus test for seeing whether a composition is good enough to finish. I tuck the song away for a few months, and I won’t bring it back out again until it comes to mind on its own. If the melody or a lyric phrase pop to mind later in a catchy way, and especially if I’ve forgotten that I’m the one who wrote it, then I’ll pick it back up to polish and finish. “Orion” and “Just a Word” came about that way, and there are many incarnations of both. I would test myself to see how much of the song I remembered on my own without looking back at the initial handwritten scribbles from months or years prior, and would sometimes scrap any lyrics that didn’t have enough staying power to be remembered so long after the fact.

TSM: Tell us a little bit about your dancing and acting background.

NNG: I was cast as Maria in West Side Story for a school production, so my mother decided to enroll me in a prestigious acting school. I did a number of musicals, Shakespearean plays and black box theatre pieces with that company (Walden Theatre), and went on to become a theatre and dance major at Youth Performing Arts School. I was accepted for their vocal department also, but wanted to focus more on the talents I hadn’t exercised as much. I stepped into radio work then for a number of years, and someone who heard me on the radio invited me to come in and audition for the part of the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I also worked with Pleiades Theatre on a period piece (Alison’s House) and a play about stalking (Boy Gets Girl). Around that time I also began screenwriting collaborations with John Cosper, and we produced a few short films, mostly romantic comedies. My growing experience with radio commercials got me picked up for numerous TV commercials and a bit of independent film work. I think many guessed that I moved out to Los Angeles to pursue acting, though it was really just to blend in more with the other creatives and widen the amount of resources I had readily available. Workshops that were $300-1,000+ to attend elsewhere are $0-100 here. Though these days, most workshops are now on Zoom, but it still helps to be local to maintain those artistic collaborations. 

TSM: While you were in college, you landed a job as a radio host. Over the years, you’ve been heard on the air at:  WJIE, Lite 106.9, Oldies 103 WRKA, 101QFL and KDAR. Your voice is also heard around the country on regional and national spots for McDonalds, Cadillac, Quizno’s, as well as videos for the Army, Eppic Films, Site Organic and others. What was the very first spot you did? And what was the most memorable one you’ve done?

NNG: The very first? Hard to say. Probably something for an in house client at WJIE. I used to call radio stations when I was a teen and request songs, and they’d often put me on the air; I recorded a few of them on a cassette and labeled it ‘my first promos’ as if I expected to have many more, though I had no way of knowing that would be the case. Once I became a regular host on WJIE a few years later (somewhat by chance after responding to a part time help wanted ad for another station), I got a few phone calls asking me to come record a commercial for this production house or that client. I was treated very differently as a DJ than a voice-over talent. At radio stations, the onus was on me to do every turning of the audio dial, or add every music bed or audio element that needed to be mixed in. When I arrived to do VO recordings at production houses I was asked, “Would you like water, soda or coffee, Ms. Gilbert?” Then I got to sit in the vocal booth with no responsibility but reading the script over and over. It was relaxing to let someone else manage the recording gear instead of doing ten things at once. Music recording studios are similar; after doing so much of my own production and tracking in my own home studio, it’s always a relief to go into someone else’s studio and just sing. It also helps me speak the language of the engineers or producers since I know more about the tech aspects than someone who hasn’t produced their own audio.

TSM: You are also a writer – articles, short stories and poems. What are your favorite subjects to write about? Do you have a preferred type of writing?

NNG: Though it’s generally less marketable, I love writing poetry. It’s so free of rules and has so many uses. I also like that it can be so easily turned into a song or a larger piece. Poetry enables you to put your full vocabulary to use with few boundaries, and I love that it engages the mind and can keep one sharp and articulate. It’s sort of like creating your own word puzzle.

As for favorite subjects, I love to write about transitions. Seasons of change are the times I feel most compelled to write – as I notice the pattern of things passing away and new opportunities arising. Songs like “Here Now,” “Can’t Take This Anymore,” “Say Anything,” and “Lay Down and Listen” were the result of such seasons, and at times they feel like anthems of strength or resolve during times of flux and stress. I write them for myself as much or more as for others.

TSM: Can you share a short piece of your writing with our readers?

NNG: Sure. I dug through my online writing archive and found this short poem I wrote in 2009:

Fabric
My shoulders pressed down
by the here and the now
vexed by the future
perplexed with culture’s vultures
What you already know
may be more than you show
But disclosure may
not change the outcome
When you’re tired of
the lies that they sell
trying to counteract
with the truths that you tell
to yourself while
your mind’s still awake
the covers can’t cover over
can’t make you safe
They’re just the fabric that covers your eyes
Daylight streams in
while the screams weigh in
tires squealing against
the pavement
when the traffic dies down
all that’s left is the sound
of your pulse and
the breath in your lungs
Just for today
let that be enough
To cover your eyes
From the daylight
piercing the night
from the inside
‘you may not
need this world
but this world
needs you here’
not merely to stand
but also to steer

TSM: You also own and operate On Time Talent voice over studio, where you produce much of your own music. What inspired you to create On Time Talent?

NNG: A few things. After 9/11, the radio station where I was working had a number of budget cuts. I was doing morning news then, and as one of their newest hires I completely understood why I’d be the one to let go. Reporting during such sad times was very stressful. The 9/11 tragedy hit advertising and radio station budgets hard, so it was difficult to find work in my field right away. So, I created On Time Talent as a voice-over agency initially, partnering with some radio friends and shopping our voices to local production houses for commercial work. I came up with the company name because I loved this clock graphic, and timing is always urgent with commercial audio; clients always want the audio files yesterday. After a few years of recording for clients on site, I asked a friend from high school to help me piece together a home recording studio. I’m certainly not an audio genius, but my experience working in broadcast studios prepared me well for essential recording at home.
 
I find recording at home to be such a different experience. It enables you to be more picky, to do as many takes as you want without worrying about the hourly studio budget the way you do in a commercial studio. That freedom can be both a blessing and a curse, though; I’ve seen many fellow songwriters get stuck in a mode of forever tweaking a song and never releasing it after fiddling with it for months or even years. I have a number of audio scraps I’ve set to the side like that myself. On the other hand, it also enables you to record things you would never waste time recording in a public studio on someone else’s time – like the a capella opening to the candlelight version of “Breathing Hope” or the all-voice-no-lyric track “Celtic Bee.” 

TSM: Tell us about your latest album release Don’t Blink and the inspiration behind it.

NNG: This is my thirteenth studio album, and it’s so different from all the others. I’ve been on a long hiatus from music due to deaths in the family and work obligations. You can sit back and feel like you have so much catching up to do, or you can choose to embrace that wait and delay and say “what have I learned in that window of time?”
 
It’s especially powerful to me because I’ve done the reverse of what many indie artists do in their career, as most start with recording covers and then develop their sound and eventually do originals later. All twelve of my prior albums were a chalk full of originals. I love songs from so many genres that my mom and family introduced me to that. I’ve always wanted to cover, but I always knew that if I did so I wanted to do it properly with everything properly licensed for release. With all the years I spent behind the scenes working radio, entertainment law and music licensing, I didn’t want to disregard those business aspects. Now that I’m back in school full-time, I finally have the time and resources to sit down and give these songs – both originals and covers – the full fleshing out they deserve with live strings, full jazz band, or textured electronic stylings, depending on the era. It’s also been a delight to take some of those songs out of their original acoustic sphere and blend them with beats and synth, or take an electronic song and make it more acoustic. I also just love taking a song originally done by a guy, and putting it in a female voice which automatically gives it a different tone and meaning.