Fodder on my Wings

Recorded for a small French label soon after Simone relocated to Paris, Fodder On My Wings found the artist in a difficult period in her life. Not only was Simone feeling isolated in a new country, but her mental illness was worsening and her family life was fractured. However, she channelled her despair into writing some of her most powerful material, including ‘I Was Just A Stupid Dog To Them’ and the near-title-track, ‘Fodder In Her Wings’, which Pitchfork included in their roundup of Simone’s most iconic songs.

Recorded in 1985 after a break from recording and time spent living in Barbados and Liberia, Nina’s Back features a rejuvenated Nina Simone reaching out to a wider musical audience. Featuring a number of memorable Simone compositions, the band includes horns and backup singers for a unique recording in Nina’s catalog.

Nina Simone's live performances have a power and an intimacy all their own, and those qualities stand out in this recording from Vine Street. It's a stunning form of cabaret singing, dramatic without melodrama, and with roots that reach to Billie Holiday's surprising success with "Strange Fruit." Simone can add profundity to a usually carefree song like "My Baby Just Cares for Me," and the range of the performance broadens with the startling "Be My Husband," a simple pattern reduced to the naked force of a field holler, and the stark hymn "Balm in Gilead." Carefully chosen songs from Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, and Janis Ian achieve new dimensions in Simone's treatments. Her own deeply felt "Four Women" and "Mississippi Goddam" are potent and enduring protests. There's some effectively spare accompaniment from guitar, bass, and drums, but Simone's piano is the essential instrumental voice, from slow barrelhouse to Bach.

Nina Simone was one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic. Simone was a singer, pianist, and songwriter who bent genres to her will rather than allowing herself to be confined by their boundaries; her work swung back and forth between jazz, blues, soul, classical, R&B, pop, gospel, and world music, with passion, emotional honesty, and a strong grasp of technique as the constants of her musical career.