Heidi Curtis is stepping into the limelight — and honestly, it’s about time. Since the age of 16 she’s been writing and performing songs in her North Shields home, and 8 years later is ready to finally start sharing them with the world. After honing her craft through major support tours in arenas across the country and finding her identity through various iterations of her back catalogue, Heidi is ready to step up and embrace her career beginnings proper with debut single, ‘Undone’.
“The overall drive and commitment to writing hasn’t changed,” Heidi says of her lengthy gestation period. While she is just now preparing her world debut, her music has been no secret to those in the North East; locals, friends and family have watched her bloom from early open mics to a full-band set-up rocking local venues, a full-fledged artist slowly but surely manifesting in front of their eyes.
“The last five years has been amazing for honing my craft, but also for inner development of myself,” she specifies of her desire for preparation. “Now that I’m stepping into the industry, I already have a better understanding of who I am and what I want to be. There have been points where I’ve wanted to start and go ahead, but the wait has been totally worth it now that I’m here. I’m so glad that I was patient.”
Once songwriting efforts were once again allowed out of closed doors following 2020, Heidi quickly bounced back with a succession of massive live shows in the years to follow. From becoming the first artist to kick-off post-pandemic gigs at Newcastle’s Gosforth Park, to opening arenas and supporting era-defining artists, a lack of released material has never held her back from thriving on stage.
“The wait has been totally worth it now that I’m here.”
“To be stood alongside some of those amazing names at such an early point in my career, it really was getting thrown into the deep end,” she admits. “I was so excited about it and learned so much just from the overall professionalism and also the standard of songs, it showed me where my songs had to be. When you watch someone like Sam [Fender] or Ben [Howard] play, you listen to the records and hear them live in front of a massive crowd, it puts it all into perspective.”
At the time, these wildly generous opportunities were not to serve Heidi’s commercial success as a way up the touring ladder, but simply gave a chance to reflect and observe the artistic foundations on which careers should be built.
“The most inspiring parts of watching these really successful artists, with huge career spanning 15 years or 50 years, was understanding that you have to be super authentic as an artist and hold your songs to a high standard. You have to constantly be aiming towards getting better. The quality of the music but also your identity as an artist has to be there.”
So, no pressure for the debut then, right? “For a new artist, a lot of the pressure can be on the first release, the first single, first album. But instead, I’m thinking: where do I want to be in 10 years’ time? Always thinking ahead seems to be the common practise for a lot of these artists and that’s easy for me. I’m a bit of an overthinker, really.”
Sonically, the music wears its influences on its sleeve; Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Jeff Buckley are clear touchpoints, but the most common denominator is that elusive timelessness in the songwriting (as well as great vocals). “I’ve always been really in anything that’s old, vintage, whether that be like music, objects, people,” Heidi suggests. “I can talk about anything old and whimsical and magical all day.”
A great voice is wasted with nothing to say, but ‘Undone’ shows Heidi Curtis opening the floodgates on material that has been finely crafted but withheld from public consumption until today. With her live set list constantly rotating as old tracks were discarded for the next and newest improvement, the choice of tune to kick things off was not haphazardly made. Nostalgia and melancholy have always echoed through her work, but the maturity of the songwriting has only developed year by year, song by song to forge material she deemed as worth your investment.
“At the time I wrote it, which was about a year and a bit ago, I’d just experienced my first big loss,” she recalls of her debut single. “My Nana had passed away and we were really, really close. That was my first experience of really losing somebody I really loved, and it made my whole perspective on life just completely shift. The songs at the time were super inward, emotional, and I felt a little bit like I’d stripped myself of everything I’d known before, it had all changed overnight almost, everything that made me me. I started to think about the rest of my life a lot more.”
“Out of nowhere amongst all of these depressing songs, ‘Undone’ just suddenly came over my shoulder. Out of the grief, a momentary lack of identity and self, ‘Undone’ came through like a voice of confidence, and almost like from a future version of me. It was so strange and so odd, and it kept on coming through in these little bursts of song.”
Chipping away at the track over the course of a month, the tune became a catalyst for self-realization. As she says, “it helped me deal with the change of what I was going through, and it gave me focus on the person I really wanted to become. So it’s like my own personal redemption song. When I sing the song, I tap into the energy of who I’m becoming. I celebrate every person I’ve been and every person I’m going to be.”
“Just being able to chat with people about my music… that’s going to be so surreal.”
And so, Heidi Curtis’ life work begins, with ‘Undone’ as just the first domino. “Sonically and visually, it feels like it blew the doors are open, and everything’s spawning from this singular place.” Heidi declares: “It felt like a matriarch, a leader song; it made me feel untethered, free and wild, like nothing’s impossible. It’s powerful, it’s driving the rest of the material.”
As for the other material in question, there’s certainly no lack of it. Having initially started recording her new era with now Mercury Prize-recognized producers Joe Atkinson and Dean Thompson, she soon stepped out of her circle and comfort zone to record with Damn Hume at Hymn Studios in Wales. After a few tracks, though, she was already confident enough to take the reins herself.
“To produce myself felt like it really mirrored the coming-of-age attitude throughout my music. Taking the final step of recording and producing alone after all that support, it felt like the perfect story. It’s the perfect amalgamation of a journey throughout my material and you can really hear that the songs are going through it.”
To date, only very few have heard any of the next steps of this journey, including those who recently attended a sold-out hometown headline show at The Cluny. “In the room the other night, it was so beautiful because it was like my own show,” she beams. “There was no outside stress about time or about backdrop. I could curate the whole thing to be exact, as if everybody was in my room, my dream kind of environment.” With a velvet, moody sheet covering the walls, a “witchy” aesthetic adorning the room and a 13-track setlist teasing what is yet to come, it’s clear that a new page is truly turning.
“This is going to be a whole other world,” Heidi says of having a track online and free to the world. “People are going to be able to actually listen to something every day if they want to and be able to engage with it and share it, or put it on their playlist. I’m really, really looking forward to that.”
“I’ve really sat on these songs. I think me, the boys [in the band], and my family are the top listeners of the songs. The idea of strangers listening to them and loving them is the most exciting part about this week. It’s a good reminder, because you can get so much in your own head about the build-up. I’m like, am I doing enough? Just being able to chat with people about my music, though… that’s going to be so surreal.”
Heidi Curtis’ debut single ‘Undone’ is out now.
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