Interview: NYC Rock Band Nick and the Old Sport Talk About Their New Single/Video "You Saw Me Incomplete"
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““You Saw Me Incomplete” started as a little diddy on the piano with the driving hook - but when I brought it to the band, Keith’s bombastic drum part, Mikey’s dangerous bass line and Brian’s soaring synth sounds turned it into the high energy song it is now.”
Congratulations on the release of your new single/video "You Saw Me Incomplete"; tell us about the song's development and what inspired it.
Thanks so much for showcasing "You Saw Me Incomplete". The song is about regret and accepting that you're gonna regret some things from your past. And that that's okay.
Before the band really got started up I would record Garageband demos of my songs and release them, warts and all, on my SoundCloud. They were very rough and tumble demos as I was "producing" myself for the first time. I would release these demos perhaps a bit too early in their development. They needed more time in the oven so to speak.
I related that to how sometimes when you think back about relationships you realize that, that person you lost didn't see the best version of you, they saw an incomplete version. The relation between feeling like an early, incomplete version of yourself with someone and releasing unfinished demos of good songs found its way into the lyrics of the song, "You saw me when I was not ready yet...you heard me out of tune...you heard me when I did not know the words...you heard me unmastered...when my levels were not right..."
"You Saw Me Incomplete" started as a little diddy on the piano with the driving hook - but when I brought it to the band, Keith's bombastic drum part, Mikey's dangerous bass line and Brian's soaring synth sounds turned it into the high energy song it is now.
As a band, you product/direct all of your own music videos. How did you come up with this visual's treatment and why is it important for you to DIY?
Well most of the band are actors and filmmakers so we have plenty of experience making films for little to no money. The treatment for the video, me in a rush assembling the rest of Old Sport for a gig we're running late to, came from an image I had when I first heard the recorded song. I knew the video had to have quick cuts of NYC intercut with us rushing to a gig which ultimately no one shows up to, thus making our rushing pointless. Shit, ain't that life sometimes?
I wrote up a little treatment and sent it to Keith and he mapped out a shot list and we shot it over two Mondays in Rockaway Beach and the Lower East Side of Manhattan with absolutely no budget. Our good friend Barrett Shuler shot the performance footage of us on the roof.
Nowadays getting your music heard seems to be a very mysterious and seemingly impossible task. What we've found to be the best policy is just to keep creating content on our own and releasing it.
The band is based in NYC, but was founded in Los Angeles. How did you all meet initially and decide to form a band, and what led to you deciding to move back to NYC?
A bit of a strange story. I'll try to be brief. I wrote a little off-off Broadway play in NYC back in 2013 that did well entitled: ELSEWHERE. I decided to adapt it into a feature film. With the help of a great troupe of actors we raised the $10,000 film budget ourselves with 5 donation based theatrical performances of scenes from the script we called "Fundragers" and with an IndieGogo campaign. It was truly independently funded.
We shot the film in LA in the fall of 2015 when I still lived in NYC. The film was about the afterparty for an indie rock band's first big LA show. After the film was finished we needed a soundtrack. We had no more money so I decided to score the film myself, as I had been quietly writing songs since 2002 in high school. I, who had moved to LA in 2016 to pursue an acting career, played the lead singer of the band in the movie. Brian Teague WIlliams, who played the keyboardist in the movie band, had been living in LA for a year. I brought some songs I had composed to Brian and we would spend weekends sipping whiskey and playing my songs.
I met Mike Maio in LA and he was the best musician I knew so I asked him to join Brian and I in recording the soundtrack. The three of us clicked. We released the soundtrack and loved our sound. We wanted to jam with a drummer so we called up Keith Roenke (who had provided most of the instruments for ELSEWHERE) and asked him if he knew any drummers. He told us he had been a drummer for 20 years and had been in several LA bands. We all jammed and knew we had a band.
We played gigs all over LA, highlighted by a headlining show at the Troubadour I put together. Two successful and adventurous tours of NYC/NJ followed and then decided that back home in NYC was where we actually wanted to be.
We all moved into a four bedroom in Bushwick in June 2019, had residencies and shows all over the city and were about to headline The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn before COVID shut everything down.
The film ELSEWHERE went on to win 3 awards at two film festivals and is available to watch on AmazonPrime. The soundtrack is available on my SoundCloud. Links below.
We are very excited to hear your upcoming album "Take What You've Learned and Begin Again"; what can you tell us about the project and is there an overall theme/concept to it?
The album we are self producing is coming along beautifully. Mike Maio is producing it with the help of our friend Diego Ramierez of the awesome band Joudy.
It wasn't intentional, but in choosing the songs for the album and their order, a bit of a theme has emerged. Each song deals with mourning the loss of a relationship cut short. And the flow of the songs resembles something of the stages of grief, until the end of the record when we realize all one can ever really do to move on in life is to take what you've learned and begin again.
Also I see it as a comment on us taking everything we learned about being a band in LA and starting over back home in New York.
As we're doing it all on our own it's taking some time but we're on track to have the full album released in the summer.
With everything slowly starting to open up, how excited is the band to start playing live again? Also, do you have a favorite venue you've performed at, or are they all the same at this point?
We are ecstatic to get back to playing live. We have missed it so much. But we've been doing all we can to perform during the quarantine. We have a series of videos on our YouTube channel entitled "quarantine sessions" which chronicled our stuck at home performances, similar to a Tiny Desk Concert.
Our first scheduled show is an outdoor performance on July 18th at 18th Ward Brewing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as part of The New Colossus Festival. And we are setting up some outdoor summer shows in Asbury Park and Long Branch, New Jersey.
I am also gonna reschedule our Knitting Factory show as our return to indoor shows. We truly cannot wait.
I think our favorite place to play overall has been Troubadour in LA...not just because of the historic nature of that venue but also because we created that bill and had our biggest crowd ever there. It was a special night in a special place. In NYC we've loved our experience playing at Arlene's Grocery in the LES. But honestly just to be able to play anywhere is a blessing and we're excited to see where we head from here.
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