“I am not the doer, I am the conduit,” sings award-winning singer-songwriter Ny Oh from the quiet sanctuary of her Topanga Canyon cottage.
Born Naomi Ludlow in Worcestershire, England, Ny Oh moved to New Zealand at age two, where she grew up and stayed until age eighteen. Although music always felt instinctive to her, she attributes her love for music to a hospitalization at three years old for a broken femur. Over many months, her physical healing process was enhanced by a Fisher-Price toy cassette recorder. Using the adjoined mini microphone, Ny treated patients and staff alike to spirited renditions of Aqua’s Barbie Girl from her medical bed. “I found that I wasn’t lonely when I sang,” she recalled.
Musicality was an inherent part of Ny Oh’s childhood home, where her flutist mother sowed the foundations of musical education with violin lessons, and soon expanded to a wider repertoire of instruments including piano, guitar, vocals, and percussion. “My type of musicianship is my ear,” Ny explained. “My ear is the musician. I’m good at learning.”
Childhood favorites evolved from Aqua to Britney Spears to Paramore, and her musical world broadened. New Zealand singer-songwriter Brooke Fraser, who released her first album in her early teens, inspired a twelve-year-old Ny Oh, instilling in her the confidence to write songs of her own. The two would go on to co-write Ny Oh’s lead single Aperture off of her debut record Wildwood. As her range of musical inspiration progressed from modern pop to The Beatles, Jonathan Wilson (with whom she later toured), Father John Misty, Solange, and Joanna Newsom, she realized that the bulk of her favorite music production centered in LA, planting a seed of desire to experience a bigger city.
Ny Oh’s early young adulthood centered in London where she played in Jonathan Wilson’s band, straddling her ambition with the relentless realities of gigging at clubs, while struggling to break out of the songwriter circuit.
One night, after a performance with Wilson’s band in Los Angeles’ Fonda Theater, Ny Oh was approached by producers and bandmates of superstar Harry Styles, who offered a position in his touring band. Ny was, by her own account, in disbelief, and told them so. “I couldn’t imagine myself doing it,” she shrugged. “I had a very strong self-identity of being a down-to-earth songwriter, and I wouldn’t dare desecrate the image of myself with pop music.” Besides, an offer like this in Los Angeles felt too good to be true.
Six months after the tour ended, she received an email from Styles’ producers, who’d managed to track her down in London despite her dismissing their offer and giving them a fake name (“Nigel”). They extended the invitation once more.
“If it comes around again, six months later, then it’s the universe encouraging me to do this. So I said yes.”
Thus began a radical transformation in her career, hurling her onto the international stage and into an intense four years on the road. Ny Oh found a cabin in Wildwood, Topanga and made LA her home base shortly after joining Harry Styles’ Love On Tour in 2019. Later that year, his album Fine Line was released, the tour for which the pandemic delayed to 2021, and midway through its run, Harry’s House arrived in May of 2022.
Performing on guitar, piano, and backing vocals for four years changed Ny Oh’s previous view of pop music that had her initially hesitating to join the band. “Behind a lot of what I didn’t like about pop music was insane production,” she said. “But behind Harry’s production is really great songwriting, great songs, great lyrics, and when I had to learn his back catalogue to play, I realized this is actually awesome.”
In one of her final performances with Styles in 2023, he invited her to be the opening act at her hometown show in Aotearoa, New Zealand. A cathartic and climactic evening, Ny Oh showcased her original songs for a screaming audience of family, friends, and unfamiliar faces, and played the rest of the night in Harry’s band. (Her solo performance EP from that night, Live in Aotearoa, is available for streaming.) “It was Love On Tour for four years, then I peaced and loved out of there,” she laughed.
Wrapping up the Harry years, Ny Oh relinquished the mythical intensity of touring and returned to her canyon cabin. The first year home was an era of rejuvenation, a chance to sleep after the physical drainage and exhaustion of life on the road. A space for deep, undistracted creation revealed itself. Her first studio album, Wildwood, was born.
“It wouldn’t have happened the way it did had I not done the tour. I’d been wanting to make my first album for a long time, but I just had a feeling, I hadn’t learned the right things, I wasn’t prepared or confident. So being on that tour was the final boost, realizing ‘Okay, I’m ready now.’” Ny Oh recalled observing Styles’ and his bandmates’ commitment and dedication to maintaining healthy vessels of themselves, to have the stamina to do the job, which gave her confidence to do it herself. “A lot of my musical education prior to joining his band was my own curriculum. I wouldn’t have had the time and space to process and write the album without the Harry gig, so I’m really so grateful for that. It changed my life.”
Making Wildwood fulfilled another long-held dream. At nineteen, Ny Oh had written in her diary that she wouldn’t make her first record until it was with Jonathan Wilson, and a decade later, her vision became reality. Wilson produced Wildwood, and together, they recorded eighteen songs in six days alongside musicians she had met through touring and the LA music scene. It was a process rooted in the pure flow state of creative exposition.
“The album itself is minimally-produced, because I like to write songs that give space for the musicians playing them to add their own source,” she said. “I love listening to live albums that have not really been edited too much. It was important to me that I did all the vocals live with the band. They may not be perfectly in tune, but I wanted that feeling, rather than the polished thing. I like the roughness of certain things.”
The record effortlessly shifts between singer-songwriter intimacy, alternative folk, and gentle psychedelia. “Aperture,” co-written with Ny’s formative influence Brooke Fraser, unfolds in warm acoustic layers, while “Bloom Baby Bloom,” written the same day it was recorded, is a glowing anthem to healing and personal growth, earthy and lush in the bridge’s vocal dissonance. “Conduit,” an ethereally woodsy track, is the grounding foundation for the whole album’s energy, a letting go of the illusion of control over life’s drive. The last two tracks bring it home, with “Time,” which Ny wrote on tour as a promise to herself to pull through, and “Marie,” a soulful ode to her grandmother.
The title itself is rooted in the place that inspired it. “I pay homage to the places that inspire the songs, the places that hold me while I’m inspired by different things. I’m very grateful for Wildwood, the piece of land. It’s a special part of the canyon, because it’s where the river flows out to the ocean, where all the creeks meet, where the wildlife meets the people, it’s so beautiful.”
Recorded and produced as Ny Oh entered her thirties, Wildwood is, at its heart, a record about self-acceptance. Each song captures a lesson, a transformation, or a moment of clarity from her twenties; and rather than centering romance, she purposefully aims away from the trope of love songs that sweep mass media output.
“I felt like I lost myself a little bit in the Harry thing, after all I did was work for four years straight. So I was rediscovering my identity, the things that made me happy, because I’d forgotten. Things like getting a cup of tea and driving down to the beach. The little things. I was really observing ‘I’ve landed here in Topanga, what is my life? Who am I?’ I guess all my albums will be harping on that theme somehow, because we’re always looking inward to externalize things. I’m really glad I snapshotted my 20s like that.”
The record earned Ny Oh Best Folk Artist at the recent Aotearoa Music Awards, affirming what Wildwood had already accomplished: a deeply personal debut and homecoming whose strength roots not in spectacle, but in honesty.
From New Zealand to Topanga Canyon, Ny Oh’s style is worldly, unique, and vivid, a coalescence of deep reflection and looking forward. “Bloom baby bloom, set your colors free, I want to know what the sun sees…”
Ny will be playing with Noaa Lark at Healing Force of the Universe in Pasadena on Friday, August 14 at 8:00pm, and is hosting a small Topanga show on Sunday, August 16. Follow for updates @lookitsnyoh.
