Scottish singer-songwriter @ninanesbitt has spent the last year rediscovering what set her on fire in the first place. After a decade amongst the pressures of pop stardom and social media demands, she did something she missed, she picked up her guitar and wrote songs just for herself. The result is Mountain Music, her fourth album and first release on her own Apple Tree Records, a project that strips away the polish to reveal something more honest.
Recorded over just 72 hours at Middle Farm Studios in rural Devon with producer Peter Miles, the album draws from two years Nesbitt spent touring across America, where the folk music of Appalachia reminded her of something she'd always known: Scottish ballads and American mountain music share the same DNA.
For this Live At Mahogany performance, Nina performed three stunning songs that showed Mountain Music's emotional range, from tender empathy to fierce self-advocacy.
🎶
Setlist:
00:00 Painkiller Nesbitt opens with Painkiller, a Joni Mitchell-indebted ballad she wrote in a single morning on her out-of-tune piano. The song explores something she'd been thinking about; how societal expectations around masculinity push men to suppress their feelings, looking for external solutions rather than processing emotions. It's about how we all find ways to cope with pain, some healthier than others.
04:52 The Mountain & The Man One of four songs Nesbitt added to the expanded edition of Mountain Music in early 2025, "The Mountain & The Man" is what Nesbitt calls a lyrical love song about opposites attracting. It's one of four songs she wrote shortly after completing the original album, unable to stop the creative momentum. The track captures that push and pull of relationships where differences somehow create balance.
08:40 Mansion The set closes with "Mansion," perhaps the most personal song of the three. Nesbitt wrote it as a letter to a close friend who couldn't see her own worth, stuck in a relationship that wasn't quite a relationship. To escape her usual chord progressions, she borrowed a friend's mandolin, an instrument she'd never played before, and the song poured out in a single sitting. Using the metaphor of a beautiful mansion with drawn curtains, she reminds her friend (and her younger self) that you're not something someone should just tolerate. You're worth more than that. By the song's building chorus, we believed it too.
✨
Follow Nina Nesbitt: https://ninanesbittmusic.com https://instagram.com/ninanesbitt https://tiktok.com/@ninanesbitt https://twitter.com/ninanesbitt https://facebook.com/NinaNesbitt https://open.spotify.com/artist/7AzjETXRUKNRSJHMW9GIqd https://youtube.com/channel/UCTBBpYejPZ05x9NX40IbObQ
#ninanesbitt #mahoganysessions #indiefolk
