Dogs (Nina Nastasia album)
| Dogs | ||||
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| Studio album by Nina Nastasia | ||||
| Released | 2000 June 8, 2004 (re-release) |
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| Recorded | October 1999 | |||
| Studio | Electrical Audio, Chicago | |||
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| Length | 43:53 | |||
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| Producer | Steve Albini | |||
| Nina Nastasia chronology | ||||
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| Alternative cover | ||||
2004 re-release cover art
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Dogs is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia. It was originally released in 2000 by the New York City-based independent label Socialist Records, and re-released in 2004 by Touch and Go Records. Engineered and produced by Steve Albini, the album gained notoriety after BBC radio disc jockey John Peel championed it, giving it frequent airplay on Radio 1.
Written over a six-year period, the album is lyrically reflective of Nastasia's early life growing up in Los Angeles, California, and features sparse acoustic guitar compositions with prominent string arrangements. The album garnered favorable critical reviews, and its 2004 re-release helped earn Nasatasia a cult following.
The majority of Dogs was written over a six-year period between 1992 and 1998 when Nastasia, a Los Angeles native, relocated to New York City with a friend. Prior, she had lived in Seattle, where she taught herself to play guitar. During writing the material that would come to be featured on Dogs, Nastasia was working as a waitress, a job that made her "so miserable" she "spent the rest of [her] waking hours writing songs."
"Most of what's historical on this record comes from my years in Los Angeles," she commented. "New York City has probably not had so much of an effect on what I write as it has on whether or not I write at all. I think that living somewhere else then might have been healthier for me."
Nastasia recorded the album at Electrical Audio in Chicago under producer and engineer Steve Albini; Albini later described it as one of the albums he is the most proud of, as well as one of his personal favorites:
"In the process of making a record, you hear it so many times that the charms of even the best of them can wear off through over-exposure. On rare occasions, records I've worked on have withstood this scrutiny and ended up being personal favorites. Nina Nastasia's 'Dogs' is a record so simultaneously unassuming and grandiose that I can't really describe it, except in terms that would make it (and me) sound silly. Of the couple thousand records I've been involved with, this is one of my favourites, and one that I'm proud to be associated with."
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