Quarry Island. A small chip of land not far from New Glasgow, NS. It is secluded, sedate, and cradled in nature. Quarry Island is, in short, everything that Brooklyn, NY is not. Yet it is here, in the company of friends, and with the world standing still, that Nat Osborn, a native New Yorker wrote his most reflective album to date.
It was an invitation to a friend’s housewarming that brought Nat to Nova Scotia. He’d never been. He had no expectations but was looking forward to the four days he had planned to visit. He arrived on the 12th of March, 2020. Things were beginning to get alarming in New York as the city started to grapple with Covid-19. Osborn was happy to be getting away.
“Around that time there was lots of fear and anxiety,” says Osborn. “I know a lot of people who were stuck in their tiny apartments watching this play out”.
This could well have been the case for Osborn too, but, as interesting and remarkable stories often do, this one had cast serendipity in the lead role.
Osborn had barely unpacked when it became clear that he was not going to be leaving anytime soon. Borders were closing. Airlines had turned out the lights. For the foreseeable future, Nat Osborn was a Bluenoser.
Fortunately, he’d brought along a couple of pieces of equipment, thinking he may rework some vocals on a project he was producing for a friend, so with time on his hands he took on the ambitious task of writing, recording, and producing his latest album until he could go back home—and, oh yeah, he did a song a week.
That sort of inspiration and output is hard to come by as a musician. Some artists write a song a month; some only a few a year.
“I felt blessed,” says Osborn. “I mean, here was all of this bad stuff happening and I just escaped it. I showed up for four days, and it turned into nearly four months.
“I wanted to do something productive for myself, but especially for my friends because I felt terrible about the way they were having to live back in the city.”
Osborn is grateful for so many things. By comparison, he was in a far safer place, and the friends he was visiting were able to find him a place to ride things out. “They had a barn and inside were all these old instruments. It was incredible!”
Conditions were perfect, and so, with his first Nova Scotia winter as the backdrop, Nat Osborn began writing.
He made a song a week. Songs about hope, and courage; grief, gratitude, and dogs.
“I didn’t second guess myself,” he says. “I let the songs come out just how I was feeling. It’s like a musical diary, so it’s a very eclectic record.”
A record created in a barn on an island in a province almost a thousand miles from home. “One of the best things about all of this is that it forced me to learn how to record better,” says Osborn from his home in Brooklyn. “I had horn sections recorded one part at a time by a friend of mine, and we stacked them up as we got them. The technology is wild. You can do anything nowadays.”
Technology makes the world a much smaller place indeed, but Osborn said that in a place this small, he felt as though time almost stood still.
“Even though I was busy the clock seemed to move so slow. A week feels like two hours in Brooklyn, but it felt like two months here.”
He might want to slow that clock back down again. Almost four months after he had planned on staying for four days, Nat Osborn returned to New York. He returned to the hustle and bustle of his city. He finished off The Quarry Island Sessions, and released it in June of this year, and played some rescheduled European dates.
Today, July 29, sees Osborn back in a fully live environment for the first time in a long time. He is looking forward to it. The people and the energy are something he has missed tremendously. He’s looking forward, but he’s also looking back. Back to a time when life felt it best to put him in a farmhouse in Nova Scotia while the rest of the world raged on.