by Joe Gutierrez (@phantomshred)
Singer-songwriter Trevor Nikrant is one-third of Nashville supergroup Styrofoam Winos, along with partner Lou Turner and buddy Joe Kenkel. This past November, he released Tall Ladders, a riveting collection of psych-tinged pop and folk rock tunes, traversing a vast spectrum of settings and psyches. I recently met up with Nikrant over Zoom to chat about his songwriting process, David Berman, and living in Nashville.
photo credit: Linda Parrott
Joe Gutierrez: Where did you grow up? And what did you listen to?
Trevor Nikrant: We moved around a lot when I was a kid and I mostly grew up in the Midwest. Minnesota and Ohio. I guess I started out with my parents' CD collection. A lot of classic rock was what it orbited around, mostly. Church music was also around, like Methodist Church hymns. Elvis’ greatest hits are some of the first songs I remember hearing. The first thing that really grabbed me was my parents’ Fleetwood Mac live album from 1997. That was on repeat a lot. Elton John, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson. I got into Radiohead in high school and then it was kind of a slippery slope to everything else. My youth I would associate with classic rock.
JG: Did you start playing music around this time?
TN: Yeah, I took piano lessons in elementary school and picked up a bass in high school because some friends of mine had this bass that they passed around to everyone. It was like, oh, so and so wants to play rock music now. Starting in middle school. So it was my turn, eventually, when I was like, 14. So, up until then, I had been playing sheet music and whatever the teacher said. Freshman year of high school, I got that bass, and then it was kind of like, Oh, I can just do what I want on here.
JG: And then how did you start writing songs?
TN: I really wanted to play guitar, but there were too many guitar players that I was friends with, and there was this free bass. So that's kind of how I ended up doing that. I kind of tried to make guitar chords really high up on the bass. So I wrote a few little things and I didn't really understand how they were working, just playing with intervals and stuff. I always tinkered around on the piano, too. I made up that stuff on the bass but did more exploratory things on piano. I didn't really feel like I was writing, like capital W writing anything until college. It was always little thoughts and feelings here and there.
JG: What's your process for songwriting?
TN: I gravitate towards starting with tracks, layering instruments for days and recording before there's a song. Like hitting “record” before there's a plan and using what happens as almost a writing prompt, so I'll have the music just come out of whatever instruments are sitting around. Then the lyrics all come together after the fact, or I have them in a notebook, and I match certain lyrical vibes with certain recordings.
JG: Where and under what circumstances was Tall Ladders recorded?
TN: So it was recorded basically over the past five years, if you count the oldest track tracks on there. It was always on days off, or a free afternoon here and there. It was just me at home, from start to finish, and that's why it took so long. There are other tracks that were coming up along the way, were maybe going to be on the album and then maybe weren't. So these nine songs were drawn out of a larger pool of songs, which are always being created whenever I have time. But yeah, it's all at home. Just me. Then I had to finally get it off of my computer and into someone else's ears, and Ross [Collier] came through so spectacularly. He took it over the finish line. It was definitely a homespun thing.
JG: What does your home recording studio consist of?
TN: I've got this tape machine and a computer that it feeds into. So I can go straight to digital or to tape first. As far as what else, have you heard the term “freegan” before? It's like you only eat food that's free. I feel that way about how we acquire gear around here. It's been great, me and Joe had a roommate in college who moved to California and left his entire drum kit here. Now it's on every one of our albums. It's on the Winos album, we play live with it, we've got a wild amount of mileage out of this free thing. We got a free piano from Craigslist. Little gifts here and there from friends. I've got my guitar and amp, which I bought, and it's kinda like my home base. Ross has given us a lot of gear because he works at a recording studio whose owner is often getting rid of stands, old mics, etc., so we've had a pretty lucky trickle of fun stuff from there. It feels really DIY for lack of a better term. I love that tape machine. It was only 300 bucks, and I recorded half tape, half digital for a lot of this album. Which I really like doing.
JG: Who wrote the little blurb about the record on the Bandcamp page? Can you expand upon how Tall Ladders is a sonic and thematic sequel to Living in the Kingdom?
TN: That was LT with some collaboration from me. She wrote it up and then we tweaked it together. The way it was recorded, mainly, is the sonic sense that I was thinking, because Living in the Kingdom I also did by myself at home and then brought it to Ross. He cleaned it up and made it not quite as lo-fi. I feel like it was our specific rapport or workflow that was being made into a sequel by doing it that similar way.
Then thematically, I think it picks up on a lot of the same stuff I was writing about then. Those songs I started right after I dropped out of college and LT and I started dating. So that album came out of falling in love and also falling into some deeper realities of capitalism, just finally being out of school, out of any reason to do anything but just working, working and living and figuring out what to do with ourselves. So I feel like the new one is kind of a psychological unpacking and continuation of the former, at least in its autobiographical moments. I'm also trying to write in characters, in what I think are distinctly American psyches. That’s also a throughline. There's a song "Patriarchal Dreams" on Living in the Kingdom that's a bit of a humorous romp through that, and then "Dead Skin" on Tall Ladders is going for something like a cheaper, funnier version of “A Woman Under the Influence,” that John Cassavetes movie. I think that's what I am attempting, sometimes, that kind of deep psychological tunnel into someone's strange cavernous, corrupted thoughts.
JG: Do you feel as if the next record is going to make this a trilogy or do you want it to be a separate thing?
TN: Yes, basically. There is an album number three that has been recorded basically the same way, a lot of improvised tracks. They're all a little bit more recent, like over the past two or three years, and most of them are just awaiting my vocals. When me and Ross started finalizing Tall Ladders, like mixing and mastering and stuff, I really purposefully cut myself off from making any new tracks, because I already had this follow up like ready to go. It just needs some more lyrics plugged in. I didn’t want to get too ahead of myself. But yes, there is indeed a third me-recording-songs-at-home-myself album that will complete the cycle.
I’ve also got five or six new-new songs, which I wrote on this nylon string guitar that I bought last year as kind of a pivot to wanting to give recording a rest for a second. There are so many tracks that I'll just never—you know, they're fun to mess around with, but I want to have songs that can exist in the air first and not just emerge from the computer. For the Tall Ladders release show we played mostly those songs; I brought the nylon string. Those songs have much more of a Brazilian harmonic influence going on. Partially because it's a Brazilian guitar, and it just sounds really good to play that stuff on it.
Since the pandemic started, for some reason, I got deeply obsessed with every era and style of Brazilian music. I'm trying to teach myself Portuguese very slowly so I can have a greater amount of respect and everything for all of it. It’s inspired me to get into some different harmonic worlds that I haven't really taken a dive into before. I feel like when I’m making recordings, my harmonic foundation is usually pretty basic, and then all the obtuseness or experimental elements come with how I layer things. It's not like the chords are particularly out there or something. So now it’s like I’m trying to bring that experimentation into the harmonic department. If that makes sense. I'm trying to figure out how I can conjure some of that same sense of discovery and doing something really new and exciting using just a guitar and voice.
JG: How many of the characters in your songs have you actually met? And how many are just created? Are they all based in reality?
TN: I think they're all archetypes. They’re based less on actual people and more on a general ideology. Like the cynical priest in “Christmas With Your New God,” who reaches his breaking point. That feels like a theme that exists outside of my own imagination, which I was trying to manipulate and use to paint the picture. “Dead Skin,” too, all that repression and vanity. Maybe I've encountered people like that, but I wasn’t drawing on anyone in particular. I like to write characters who have this overt righteousness with an undercurrent of, I don't know, “I'm afraid of everything.” It feels very American. It's exciting to write about in a way that brings all that to the surface. But it's not all characters. Those two songs, and probably “We Need You for Our Plan,” are the strongest character songs and otherwise I feel like the mood is more the character in a way.
JG: What's the night class the man asked you to enroll in in the title track?
TN: I don’t think we know in the song what kind of class he's talking about. That guy appearing is supposed to represent a sudden injection of the unknown. Because it's like I, as the narrator, the first thing I think to ask him when he says he has a night class is “how does it feel to get older?” And then he has this really cryptic answer of being touched on the shoulder, and then it's kind of like, boom, the chorus. So that character appearing is just kind of a shot of something mysterious.
JG: That hits on another question I had, which is something that is a theme that kind of appears throughout the record, this idea of getting older or aging. It's some of the lines, "you'll lose your youth/ but we need it more than you do." And the one you just mentioned. And then “She said, "I know, I know, I know I'm still young/but I can feel the air as it's leaving my lungs." What makes you explore that theme in your lyrics?
TN: Well, I think in a general sense, I'm really fascinated by all the different attitudes people have towards getting older. In “Dead Skin,” this woman's kind of like in denial, and showing up in disguise to the music festival and stuff. Then “We Need You for our Plan,” it's like a guy who kidnaps the narrator to suck the youth out of him, [laughs] which I had a lot of fun writing. I like contrasting that kind of thought pattern with this idea of how it's like being touched on the shoulder and it could mean anything. It's a way of exploring my relationship to that and juxtaposing it next to these other characters and their other kinds of attitudes. I feel like that's something from my life, even just being in a music scene. I'm 29 and you know, have met lots of other people in their 20s who are just obsessed with the fact that they're in their 20s and it all has to happen right now. Everything's gonna fall apart if they don't do something great right now.
JG: Yeah, that resonates with me. I've definitely felt that and gotten a lot of anxiety about it in the past.
TN: It's cathartic for me to write that anxiety through a character in a way that draws on that general cultural pressure, having also internalized some of those things myself. Then also having a more graceful and patient meditation on the same thing, in the same album. Then that way, is also coming back to the thematic sequel aspect, like Living in the Kingdom. It was definitely about dropping out of college in a way, which is connected to a lot of the same themes, I think, about getting older and “what are you doing with yourself?”
JG: Am I right to presume that you listen to Silver Jews, and when did you discover their music? Or David Berman? What impact has his work had on you?
TN: Yeah, big time. Especially reading “Actual Air”. It is just so astounding to me every time. I wish I could unpack it in a literary way. I don't really know the language for poetry and form and structure and all that but the way he cycles through images. I mean, titling a poem "My Life at Home During Banking Hours," I wish I could pinpoint what it is about that. I feel like it's so perfect and that resonates so much with me, definitely like a mystical mundane thing is going on that I love. It's the observatory stuff, the way he makes observations.
JG: Now how did you first come into contact with his work?
TN: I guess I had heard things here and there, and then I bought Starlite Walker when I was still in a record buying phase and really loved it. There's that weird ass song “The Moon is the Number 18” or something right after “Trains Across the Sea”. I was just blown away by that because that song is so beautiful, “Trains Across the Sea,” and then they get so weird, and then back to a country song. I guess another thing I really was drawn to was his relationship to Nashville because when he was here, at least to us in scrappy little bands, people just trying to figure themselves out, it's like, “David Berman's around here somewhere, like isn't that wild?” Like this town's full of big industry weirdos, but somewhere there's a guy who we can get behind. The way that would come out sometimes in his music was exciting, it felt like something was possible, like it was possible to write about this place, I guess, in an interesting way.
JG: Yeah, I was wondering what influence the city of Nashville has had on your music.
TN: Great question. I feel like it's made my music more confrontational than it maybe otherwise would be. Especially early on, coming from a Nashville music school and not really feeling like I was using my own voice at any point, and feeling surrounded by marketable songwriters and shreddy session people. So at least from the beginning there was a lot of like, I want to write something that people in this formalized music world think is really weird or really bad. So there's a confrontational element that is brought out. Lots of people and lots of my peers have had this same reaction, and we form little camps of like, alright, we're gonna play the real music over here [laughs]. So there's a certain us-against-the-world mentality that Nashville brings out for sure.
JG: Totally. What's kept you there?
TN: Well, I feel lucky to have found the community or communities that I want to be a part of here. It turns out there is an abundance of people who actually keep it all alive in a creative sense. So that’s the main reason, all my friends and neighbors. It's just really fun to play, and be in a community with so many people who are involved in such a range of music, you know, people who play gigs for this or that, or tour with this or that person, and also play bars in their own weirder bands or their friends’ bands. Any one musician can just fly across this spectrum of playing wildly different music with different people all the time. It's exciting that it's all in one place.
JG: What have you learned about yourself as a musician in the past few years?
TN: I have definitely learned to trust my instincts and to not get hung up on if something is gonna sound corny or rehashed or something before it comes out of my fingers, you know? I’ve learned to listen to my own playing. Definitely learned a sense of trust in playing with other people. With the Styrofoam Winos, it's been totally life changing, in a number of ways. So learning to trust myself in a context where I'm trusted by others and I trust them also, it's been a time of reaffirming the fact that I'm doing this.
JG: Why do you make music and why do you choose to share it with people?
TN: I would say that I make it in the first place for a cathartic experience for me, personally. The sharing of it is like, part two of that. I feel like it’s humbling to share an artifact of my personal catharsis with the world and think that it will be beneficial to anyone. I think that what music has done for me is something that I want to participate in. I didn't release anything I made for so long because I felt like it wasn't reaching that cathartic personal thing yet, but eventually when it did, I felt like more of an obligation to humble myself enough to share it. Maybe it's kind of a reach saying that putting my name on something and selling it is a form of humility, but, [laughs] but it does feel like-
JG: It's really vulnerable, you know?
TN: Yeah, and it's only because I've put enough of myself into the creation of it that it is a humbling process to share it. So yeah, ultimately, I share it because I feel like it's the responsible thing to do. Like if I need the catharsis enough to make it, then it could be cathartic in a different way for someone else to listen to that, who's maybe had a similar experience or encounter with something that I’m writing about.
JG: Who are some of your favorite musicians making music?
TN: First one that comes to mind is Wendy Eisenberg, for sure. Their songs and guitar playing have been blowing me away. In Nashville, there's JayVe Montgomery, who makes solo music as Abstract Black, and also plays with a group called In Place. He plays a bunch of woodwinds and electronics and all kinds of stuff and I’ve seen him play in a lot of different contexts and it’s always a revelation. Ziona Riley is an incredible songwriter in Nashville. Josephine Foster. Michael Hurley. Little Mazarn. Let’s not forget Hermeto Pascoal.
JG: What's next for you?
TN: Well, there’s a tour coming up next month that I’m super excited about. It’s a release tour for my friend Anne Malin who has a truly amazing album coming out on Dear Life on June 17th. I’ll be playing drums in her band and also opening up the shows with a solo set. All the details for that are in our various places on the net. Beyond that, Winos are improvising album #2 in various sessions. Joe is living in Iowa City for the next year and a half because his partner’s in grad school up there, but whenever he's back, we've been trying to noodle around. So that'll be coming. The Lou Turner album, which we all played on, is coming soon. My own recordings of course. And what else? Just trying to find new sounds.