NIC

NIC got a guitar at 11 and spent hours on it making noise, without ever trying to play a song.

Lucy sent Brad Banyas a clip of NIC playing in Suwanee, and that was the whole recruitment. He walked into the McBastard Studio calm, plugged in, and went at the guitar hard enough that Brad spent the rest of the interview comparing him to Angus Young. NIC had run the full one man setup exactly once before, two weeks earlier. The episode was recorded for Salty's Live Music on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast.

His older brother and sister both played guitar around the house without ever writing anything, and his mother raised him on sixties and seventies rock. NIC now plays guitar, bass, drums and sings on his own recordings, then writes, records, mixes and masters them and loads the parts into Ableton so he can perform them alone. He got his own studio space at 32 or 33, the first time he could build what he was hearing in his head. He wrote his first song, Evergreen, at 16, sitting outside looking at the stars, and says the melody and the words arrived together, word for word. Namaste came out of a joke about hippies and a loop pedal, two chords and a simple bass line that turned into five and a half minutes of prog rock reggae. He wrote it because he wanted something that would make a room move, which is what he had taken from Bob Marley, Sublime and 311. It is still the song people who knew him from the old band shout for.

That band gigged more than 180 shows a year for a couple of years and came apart around 2014, when the rest of them stopped wanting the work. NIC took it hard, got a job, had kids, and did not play a gig for about seven years while people kept calling to ask where he was playing. In 2019 the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media cut its prices on online classes and he signed up. He was working 40 to 50 hours a week, drinking coffee at nine at night, staying up until two and getting up at 5:30 to do the coursework. He graduated with a 4.0. He also ignored a lot of people who told him to stay a guitarist and leave the production to somebody else.

Two weeks before this episode NIC told his low voltage employer he was done. He had savings, a couple of months, no next job lined up, and a plan to record and be around his kids until January. The moment he keeps returning to happened at Suwanee. A man he had never met walked up in tears after Evergreen and asked someone to tell him he had changed his life.