Heart to Art Volume II: The Wrecks
Photo by Cloudy Thoughts
[UNPUBLISHED:] First and foremost, we have a question about ‘Otis’ the robot (the band’s original so-called mascot). Who came up with the original idea of ‘Otis’ and why is the fan base considered the ‘Robot Army?’
[NICK:] Wow, it’s been a minute since we really referenced those things. It started with our first EP cover having a little robot on it. That robot is our old manager when he was 8 years old on Halloween. His nickname was Otis, so we named the robot ‘Otis.’ We noticed that no one used the robot emoji back in the day. We kind of used it as a trademark, stamped it at the end of our Tweets. ‘Robot Army’ just kind of came about on its own. We ran with the robot thing because I really liked it. We were able to start implementing it into some of the artwork and I thought there were a lot of cool ways to think about the idea of humanizing a robot. It’s kind of a crazy concept. But back to the robot idea…we kind of went with it for a while and it was fun. As I mentioned, it used to be in all of our artwork with everything being robot-oriented. And then we kind of slowed down with it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Was there a reason that you stepped back from it?
[NICK:] I honestly kind of forgot that we were doing it. Some time had gone by and I stopped doing a lot of the online marketing stuff and I stopped posting on our socials a ton. With COVID and all of this, when we’re back to the album cycle and all that fun stuff, I kind of forgot that we even did robots as a thing. But I mean…maybe it’s better to leave that behind and just let that happen. An end of a little era. An era that our fans would definitely feel too.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Speaking on your old sounds, since you’re saying it’s kind of the end of an era. Let’s go back there for just a minute. We’re curious about your meeting with Aaron on Facebook and the formation of the ‘Coastbound Duo’.
[NICK:] I was 14 or 15 at the time and I was doing a lot of local shows. A lot of acoustic shows. I even had a Facebook page called ‘NickAndersonMusic.’ I was on Facebook one day and I saw a picture of a band that I liked posing with a different band so I clicked on their profile. And I thought to myself, ‘wait…this band has the same amount of likes on Facebook that I do…why are they opening for one of my favorite bands and why am I playing at the library?’ So I added all of the band members on Facebook, messaged all of them, and Aaron was the only one that replied. I sent him something along the lines of, ‘hey dude…I’m just wondering what I’m doing wrong. What are you doing that allows you to play at these shows?’ And he goes, ‘oh I booked the shows from my college, but I listened to your music and it’s really cool!’ So we became friends and he became one of my biggest supporters. In my small farm town, there weren’t a ton of people who liked what I was doing. In fact, they weren’t super into what I was doing. He was someone who was a very supportive person for me. We talked all the time on Facebook. I would do livestreams on Justin.tv and YouStream. He was always supporting me in the comment…he was so nice. Years later, he interned for a guy who would now become our manager and he said, ‘hey, I’m doing this internship in California. You should really come out here and meet these people.’ There were all these things telling me that I had to move to the West Coast. I had to get out there. So I ended up on the here, pseudo-pursuing school and college baseball but actually just being here to do music. I finally got to meet Aaron in person and we started making some pop-punk music (what we were all listening to growing up). I had written some songs even before I moved to San Diego. (Sidenote: I moved to San Diego because I didn’t know the difference between LA and San Diego…I thought they were the same thing. I thought if I was near a beach, I’d probably be near opportunity because who’s near beaches? Important people.)
[UNPUBLISHED:] Wow…and how did that become ‘The Wrecks’?
[NICK:] Eventually I moved up to LA, to Thousand Oaks, where I lived on my manager’s couch. But I still had to afford rent. For a while, I was working at Costco. I ended up quitting that job for the same reason that I quit school and quit baseball. I needed to do music all the time, every day. One day, I was doing a writing session with some local kid in Thousand Oaks. So I asked, ‘how are you here right now and not working? Like when do you work and make money? Because I’m at my job all the time…how and when is everyone else living?’ He told me that he participated in medical studies/clinical trials for cash and that’s how they get products approved for the FDA. Sometimes the studies would just last for a day with a few follow-ups. Sometimes, you’d have to stay in the hospital for a week without being able to leave. I immediately called and signed up. The one I signed up for was supposed to last a week where they would use me to study some autoimmune disease or something like that and I was told I’d get paid $5,000. That ended up paying for rent for a few months and I was able to work on music all of the time.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What kind of music were you writing at that time?
[NICK:] My old manager gave me the idea to write jingles. So I started watching commercials. And I thought, ‘are you kidding me? This is super easy…I’ve never written this kind of music but I understand the assignment.’ So that’s what I would do with my day. Then my money started running out so I had to sign up for another medical study. This one was for arthritis and I still feel like my hip hurts to this day. On the way to one of the follow-ups for this arthritis study, and this is after 5 months of jingle writing, I got a call from my manager that the first jingle that I wrote was landed in a TV show. The fee was going to pay my rent for 6 months so I just turned the car around which is foolish because you don’t get paid for a jingle until like 8 months later. Anyways, in those 6 months, I had started ‘The Wrecks’ because this new indie rock sound that I started writing that was originally for jingles ended up becoming something that I really liked. My older manager tricked me into doing it and told me that I should start a band focusing on the genre because I had a knack for it. I was skeptical. The next day, he approached me with an idea. He said, ‘how about this? I have a rock band in the UK. How about you write their songs and they’ll be the band/they’ll perform it?’ I thought it would be sick being a little ghost rider. But when he showed me a video of them playing one of my songs, I got so jealous! This band is cooler than me and my cooler band…and I wrote that. So I just started a band, named it ‘The Wrecks’ the next day, and offered a spot to Aaron. I was able to fund it in the beginning with the medical study money and the jingle money. I found band members in the next coming months, starting putting out music, and we started touring immediately.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What a unique story! Switching gears to this new song that you guys just released, “Lone Survivor,” how have your influences changed and what does this song mean for the new era of ‘The Wrecks’?
[NICK:] It’s just a drop in the bucket. In my head, each drop is a different color, there’s a bunch of them, and this is just one of them…if that makes sense. I think that it’s going to blend together to make an ugly color because that’s what happens when you blend together a whole bunch of colors. But, in my head, it’s going to be a gorgeous rainbow, even if it’s actually a gross color when you look in the bucket / the grand scheme of things. I don’t listen to a lot of music, I don’t listen to it for leisure anymore because I work on it too much so I would rather watch shows and movies. Influences are hard to come by. It’ll stem from random songs that I just seem to come by that I start to listen to a lot.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Are any of those shows or movies influences?
[NICK:] Yeah…they could be. I haven’t even thought about it that way. I’m sure they make their way in there. I was influenced most by my own situation, by a breakup I was going through. I was just channeling that and I hadn’t had something like that to channel from in a long, long time. So, for the first time in a while, we have music coming out that has a very obvious direction. You can really feel where the energy is coming from, where it’s going, and what its purpose is, even if the genre is all over. There are all kinds of sounds scattered throughout this single. A lot of bands brag about how they're playing with a lot of genres, but then I listen to their music and think, ‘no…they’re not. You’re literally producing the same 12 indie rock songs…nothing changes here.’ But I’d say that we actually have different sounds on our tracks which is very exciting for us. I’m excited to finally hear it front to back. But to answer that shortly: I’d say the main influences came from my own heartbreak, my own angst/resentment. Things like that, that were building up which drove me to write a ton of music. I couldn’t even keep up with how much I was coming up with and how much I wanted to write, so I just spilled a bunch of stuff out. Now there’s a record which was written and recorded in the last 2 months. (I basically did it in my bedroom, by myself because the guys have been all over. I’ve been pretty cooped up in here, recording all of the tracks.)
[UNPUBLISHED:] Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Kudos to you, that’s an intense process to do so quickly on your own.
[NICK:] Yeah…I think I should finish it in time. I’m either going to finish it or I’m going to hit a breaking point and burn it all down. One of those two things is definitely going to happen.
[UNPUBLISHED:] We know that you described your newest single Lone Survivor as a testament to feeling empowered by your independence in the aftermath of the breakup. We were just wondering what are some ways that you practiced your independence?
[NICK:] That song was created as a way of demonstrating how I’d like to feel. It’s more of a confidence booster. I was channeling that energy for a few days. Maybe that week that I wrote it, leading up to the day, I was hanging out with people more and feeling more in tune with the community. When I went to write the song, it just came out really naturally. I think a lot of the record is me trying to get my confidence back, convincing myself that it is back, and convincing myself that I’m whole again.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Switching gears a little bit, have you played since the pandemic at all? Have you played live at all?
[NICK:] Yeah…we did a small little headline tour for 2 weeks called The Wrecks Coast Tour which was great. We supported the Driver Era on a full US tour in November and December. I really liked that band, they were dope. I think that’s it but it was mostly nothing and then suddenly 2 tours.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the thing you missed most about performing live?
[NICK:] It took me a second to get back into it. I remember after the first show we did back was a show in LA at the Roxy. It should’ve been awesome…and it was! But after the show, I didn’t feel the same. That’s not how I remembered it. I don’t know if it was because our show is so dependent on the energy in the room, people singing in the crowd, and connecting with them. With masks, you can’t really see people singing along. Maybe that, to my psyche, indicated that it was a bad show. I gauge what I’m doing based on how many of the front rows are singing along. If I have the first 2 rows at a headline show singing along, I’ve gotta turn the show up. If I see the first 8 rows singing, I start feeling like I could crowd surf. You know? There’s that energy for me being able to mold the show, like being a DJ. What can we filter out to pump people up? Whether it be making jokes in between songs or changing the setlist/extending the song a bit longer. That’s something that I didn’t have at my disposal after this hiatus. I had to get back into knowing how to do that correctly. But it was great that we got to play songs from our album that people have heard and were singing which was super cool. We hadn’t really gotten to experience that with the new songs. Going back to your question, I wasn’t really thinking what I was missing about it, I was thinking what was I missing? Why was it different? By the fourth or fifth show, it settled in and started to feel really fun.
[UNPUBLISHED:] And did the flower crowns make an appearance again?
[NICK:] Yeah…yeah they did, a ton of them, every show.
[UNPUBLISHED:] When and how did that tradition start?
[NICK:] I think it started at a college show in Iowa. It was really small, maybe 200 people. There wasn’t even a real stage. But someone threw up a flower crown so I put it on! Next thing I know we’re at a large venue, four states over and there’s a flower crown making its way towards the stage. I don’t know how this information spread, but it just became a thing.