Sadie Nix – Taylor Case (That Means You)

Brighton (UK) based has just released her debut single, Sadie Nix – Taylor Case (That Means You). We’ve been giving it our ears here today at the Send Me Your Ears studio.

We love the message in this song. After years of what Sadie describes as “mediocrity”, she is making a stand and forging her way with a new career goal of making music her life. After years of people pleasing and making others happy, Sadie is more than ready to take the world by storm.

Taylor Case (That Means You) is a well written song with a wonderful message. Sadie’s voice is beautiful and has some lovely country twang in it (pretty impressive for a woman from Brighton UK!) together with some really superb head voice control. Sadie is clearly taking her career goals very seriously.
The song starts with just vocals and piano and we fell in love with it at this point. Sounding a little like Taylor Swift or perhaps Faith Hill, this feels like the kind of song to put on in the truck as you drive off into the distance and start your new life. The piano playing is lovely and if this is Sadie playing (we’re not quite sure from the promo) then kudos to her. It suits her voice well. Some lovely strings, panned slightly left, help fill out the sound a little.


At about 2 minutes into the song, it takes a totally different direction, with programmed drums and some heavy bass sounds. Whilst we agree there’s a need for development in songs, we feel that this song was doing well as a stand alone piano and vocals track and the very dominant electronic snare sound distracts the listener from those gorgeous vocals.
From this point onwards, for us, we felt the production let down what is otherwise an absolutely stunning piece of music. A dip around 50-55Hz plus a shelf reduction around 80Hz will help balance out a lot of the boominess in the low end. There’s a slight honkiness about the way the vocals have been recorded (not the voice itself – no, we love this!). A dip around 800Hz will alleviate this. And finally, the only brightness and top end in the track is the sibilance in the vocals thus making for a slightly less bright mix with a dominant frequency.

We don’t know how long Nix was writing before she released this track, but for a debut single, this is a very solid start. We can imagine her being well received on the folk/pop scene around Brighton and strongly suggest that she works hard on getting some live shows booked in. This is a real talent that’s gone to waste for far too long. We hope to hear much more. BBC Introducing will love Sadie Nix’s story – we hope she makes sure they get a copy of her music and biography!