BOB KRASNER
CHARLIE NIELAND
The powerful and elegant songs on Stories From the Borderlines, Charlie Nieland’s latest album, resonate with socially relevant lyrics and cinematic details. Nieland believes that staying creative is a form of resistance and that imagination cannot be controlled. This is a value needed now more than ever.
“I think we struggle with how to respond as individuals to what’s going on … and we live in a spectator culture that treats creativity as something other people do,” he says. ” ‘I could never do that’ is how the tech bros want us to feel as we gaze into this void, unable to stop as they data-mine our lives. Staking out your creative space is a foundational way to find a stance that is your own. The possibilities of healing and activism flow from there. It’s a way to participate in the insane world with grace.”
Originally from The Midwest and now based in New York, Nieland has performed for years with his band Her Vanished Grace. He established himself as a solo artist with his 2014 album Ice Age, which was followed by Hopeful Monsters (2016) and Divisions (2021).
He has written songs with and produced music for artists such as Debbie Harry, Rufus Wainwright and Scissor Sisters, and has worked on the music for films and television shows (“The Safety of Objects,” “The L Word,” “NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell”).
Stories From the Borderlines was inspired by Nieland’s deep love of David Bowie, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Cocteau Twins, Love + Rockets and The Cure. He will perform at The Loser’s Lounge’s Bowie Birthday show at White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, Jan. 10.
“I can’t wait for that,” he says. “All the singers bring something new to these songs and Joe McGinty’s band is so good. It will mean a lot to celebrate Bowie as an artist and a human during the week of his birth and death.”
He will also perform at a celebration of Chris Rael’s short story anthology “Guilt Sport” at Howl! Happening in Manhattan on Jan. 31, and play an electric set with his band at Young Ethel’s in Brooklyn on March 7. He and his band will also perform on a bill with The Karyn Kuhl Band and Renee Maskin at Hoboken’s 503 Social Club on April 12.
I recently spoke with Nieland about his life, career and inspirations.
The cover of Charlie Nieland’s album, “Stories From the Borderlines.”
Q: Where did you grow up in The Midwest? What drew you first to New York and now to New Jersey?
A: I was born at the Fort Knox army base in Kentucky. I grew up in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, until we moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when I was in middle school.
I graduated from high school there and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I met lots of artist types and ended up heading to NYC with musician Charlie Clouser after I graduated. It was the place to be in the mid-’80s. Everything from Sonic Youth to Philip Glass to Public Enemy was happening here and I took a music production course at The Center for Media Arts. While that band was short-lived. I ended up forming Her Vanished Grace with my ex-wife Nancy and we made power dream pop throughout the ’90s and early 2000s. Drummer Billy Loose joined in 2003 and he’s been in my life and music ever since. He’s my NJ connection along with Karyn Kuhl, whom I met the same year. She introduced me to Billy while I was producing her first solo album, The Beautiful Glow.
I’ve been a guest on various NJ stages, including Maxwell’s and The Hoboken Music Festival. In 2023, I moved to Weehawken and it has coincided with me releasing my fourth album and forming my band, including Billy on the drums Where I live now is full of light and a beautiful breeze blowing off of the Hudson River, right across from NYC. The Brooklyn world that gave birth to Stories From the Borderlines was tense and wonderfully grimy, but the final stage of work took shape here, and it was the perfect thing to help me bring the album to life.
Q: Did you show interest in music as a child?
A: Oh yes! My parents got me Introducing the Beatles, the Vee-Jay version, when I was 4 and I was obsessed with it. … As I grew up, their record collection became a place of wonder for me, especially Abbey Road, Woodstock and the 1972 orchestral version of Tommy. I played trumpet in elementary school, but I knew I wanted to rock out in a band so eventually I chose electric bass after I fell in love with Chris Squire’s playing. It all rolled downhill from there.
Q: You said in your promotional material that the songs on your latest album “tell stories of growing up, of how we got severed, and how we connect.” Can you tell me a few anecdotes in your songs that reveal this experience of growing up?
A: I was a daydreamer. When my mom recently sold her house, I ended up with all my old report cards, and that was written on every one. I had trouble reconciling how my little life zooming into space was connected to the whole institution and my family. After a few years of being a good kid, in the third grade I decided to stop doing any homework assigned in class and just hid it in my school desk. They finally caught on, after months of no one noticing. The song “Redshift” (listen below) visualizes my life as a single ray of light, stretching in time until I found my chosen family and loosened the grip of that loneliness — a story of growing up as viewed from space.
The most autobiographical song is “You Fell Down.” I had a childhood friend whom I ended up following to the East Coast to college and the adventure that became my adult life. Jimm wrote rock operas; we both loved The Beatles and I was just discovering that all love songs are also about God. So we packed up the car: two kids driving into the night, crashing into who they were to become. That drive will forever stay with me: a perfect moment of shared potential. As I grew into my wings, Jimm crashed down in a struggle with mental illness that lasted until his death last summer. I was with him, along with two other friends, a few weeks before he passed away and got to tell him how much that time meant to me. He deserved a simpler life but he was a genius trapped in a fog of untreated bipolar mirrors. I learned how hard it can be to reach someone in so much pain even when you love them.
PETER SCHLEIFER
The Charlie Nieland Band (from left, Nieland, Billy Loose, Ronan Conroy, Dan McAssey).
Q: How does music lend itself to exploring your past?
A: Music really is a time machine. It is the most elegant way to reconnect with the most intense transformative times. When we moved from Chicago to Milwaukee in 1974, I was 12 and in the middle of discovering that the adult world was both crazy and full of great music. As Watergate spun Nixon into resigning and I had my first experience with insomnia, my new older neighbor introduced me to Bowie, Yes, Zeppelin, Genesis and so many more. I learned to trust my inner life that summer and the music of that time brings me right back to the feeling, the colors of the walls, the smell of the paint.
Q: What artists or authors inspire you to write music?
A: Since 2013, I’ve been a constant participant in the performance series The Bushwick Book Club. We each write songs inspired by the book selected by founder Susan Hwang for that month’s show. The song “Cease to Turn” is a reaction to Alan Watts’ “The Way of Zen” and Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan.”
“Sentinel” was inspired by the gothic writings of Edgar Oliver. I wrote a song on my last album, Divisions, called “Meta Incognita” after I read an amazing book called “Wayfinding” about how our mind’s ability to spatially locate ourselves is connected to the same functions that control memory and storytelling. That opened up a whole mystical examination of how we move out of our childhood amnesia and into our lives, like Inuit Arctic explorers. There’s a lot of literary inspiration in my songs but I always combine it with something going on around me in my life, like a reporter would. All this gives the songs a texture that makes me happy.
Q: Does a certain mood encourage your creativity?
A: For me, curiosity is the guiding force of creativity. Cultivating that feeling of “what if?” — that mood of “what am I hearing on that little radio in my head?” This always brings me to the next possibility. It’s propulsive and helps me find the fun.
Q: Tell me about Stories From the Borderlines — for example, where does the title come from? Tell me about its creation.
A: The title emerged out of the process. I dove into writing new songs when the 2021 album Divisions was on deck for release that spring. The first songs to arrive, “Today” and “Drown,” were opposites in one sense, but both were keen reactions to the aftermath of 2020. “Today” was all personal loss and “Drown” bathed in the beautiful terror of the world driving into the ditch. I also found myself exploring how to create musical conversations within songwriting, arrangement and production, with details that reveal themselves over time — the kind of things that create a story between you and the song as you listen again and again. “Hey, I never heard that part before!” So as they began to take shape one by one, the songs felt like a series of short stories, and the title popped into my head as I thought about the extremes that we are all feeling as we go through this chaos. Life at the borderlines.
Q: In your press material, you say that your songs are a “kaleidoscope of styles.” What do you mean?
A: I know genre is a necessary way to start any musical discussion, but it gets pretty limiting right away, so I avoid applying that thinking to my music. I think the most interesting stuff dwells at the edges of style. Out on the perimeter. While the stylistic threads of post-punk, dream pop and prog rock are a natural part of my vocabulary, each song emerged with its own blend. They formed like little continents from tectonic plates, with their own color palate and vegetation. As an album, these sound worlds swirl around each other, and when called upon to describe it as a whole, the word “kaleidoscope” came to mind.
BOB KRASNER
CHARLIE NIELAND
Q: Can you share who you have enjoyed working with over the years?
A: Originally, I only produced my own music for over a decade. I didn’t think I had the brain space to let other people’s music in. But after working on the score for the film “The Safety of Objects” in 2001, I embraced the idea. I recently listened to “The Origin of Love,” the track I co-produced for Rufus Wainwright on the “Hedwig” tribute record Wig in a Box in 2003, and the adrenaline charge of creating that world of sound came rushing back. Starting in 2006, I co-wrote and produced a lot of songs with Debbie Harry, first for her 2007 solo album Necessary Evil and eventually for the 2011 Blondie albumPanic of Girls. I learned so much about trusting your instincts. Debbie liked to work fast. She was so quick, coming up with lyrics about a conversation you just had over dinner while you whipped up a track idea for her. She liked to keep the fun in play. I loved encouraging her to fill the track with her personality, from little vocal asides to full Buddhist chants. It’s always inspired me to dive in headfirst, even if the idea isn’t fully baked. You figure it out along the way and that’s the actual art.
Q: What inspired the songs “Shame,” “Win,” “Today” and “Brutalist Monuments”?
A: “Shame” is a swaggering kiss-off to the culture that demonizes queer and trans people while simultaneously loving “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” We eroticize what we despise. It pits a voyeuristic john vs. the trans hustler of his dreams in a Roxy Music-style glam rock stomp.
Layers of irony pile on, as I included the little factoid that, according to “When Brooklyn Was Queer” by Hugh Ryan (a Bushwick Book Club selection), the late 19th century Brooklyn waterfront was full of drag entertainment of all kinds. And they left the men who hooked up with each other alone. Until Freud popularized the term “homosexual” and then they put the queer people in prisons built right nearby. “When you give it a name.”
I wrote “Win” (listen below) as part of Bushwick Book Club’s residency for Banned Book Week at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in 2022. I was responding to the YA book “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, a coming-of-age book about growing up Black and queer in America. I was fascinated with the fear of the other that was pouring through our public life in spasms and how it comes from the idea of self-illusion. This imaginary inner space that we’ve constructed in opposition to the rest of the world leads to the corrosive blaming of others who seem to be acting freely to take something away from us, when we’ve all created these identities in relation to each other. Letting go of this special self is the solvent; the path to connect to the flow state that we actually exist in.
“Win” wishes both the young upstart and the fearful white suburban parents who banned this book the same victory. “I just want you to win/Go ahead and take my place/Take a look at my face.” I dreamed this chorus lyric sleeping in the Vonnegut Museum. We all musically backed each other in the performance of our songs at the end of the week, and when I presented “Win” to the group, I knew that my friend and fellow BBC participant spiritchild was going to bring something electrifying to this part-Who, part-Bowie-esque anthem. He did this amazing freestyle rap for the outro and went on to recreate it on the studio recording and at other performances of “Win” in the past few months.
Does our drive to survive mean our undoing? “Brutalist Monuments” envisions our perfectionist streak as a beautiful shining monument to all our big mistakes. Inspired by Brandy Schillace’s powerful book “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher,” the song is a performance vehicle of angular post-punk and sleek dream pop curves. It swerves from a dark meditation on inhumanity as our most human trait to a triumphant swirling unstoppable climb into the unknown.
The song “Today” (listen below) came out of almost losing someone I love and the patience that comes with accepting that we “can’t stop the song or change the station.” It started as a piece that I played on keyboard and sang for a livestream recording. The intro sounds like a magical forest. But as the album took shape, I knew it needed more than my mellotron strings and flutes and I knew that Loser’s Lounge MD/keyboardist Joe McGinty was the perfect person to play on it. He bathed the track in lush Vangelis-inspired analog synth layers and beautiful transitionary swirls. It gave me the perfect setting to finish the landscape with bass and EBow guitar. I was able to find new emotional depths when I sang the song again over all the new parts.
The cover of Charlie Nieland’s 2021 “Divisions” album.
Q: Tell me how you have evolved over time as a producer.
A: I’ve learned that music production isn’t just about gear. It’s about talking and listening. It’s a sacred space of creativity and everyone needs to feel heard to bring out their best. If someone in the room makes a suggestion that I think isn’t going to work, I always say, “Yes, let’s try it.” Sometimes what I think is a hare-brained idea turns out to be the most perfect thing. If it’s not, I can step in and say, “OK, let’s try this instead,” and the artist is happy to do it, because I heard them. The trust that accumulates in moments like that make it possible to act as a film director would: not telling people what to play, but saying, “Hey, let’s break that idea up into answering phrases.” Then everyone can see the shape that you are bringing to their vision, and they don’t forget that.
I learn new ways to make this happen with each project. It’s wonderful to assist in making musical dreams into reality.
Q: Tell me about a few songs that reveal what is on your mind these days.
A: I wrote a song for the Bushwick Book Club’s December show called “Bring Back the Light.” We have this primitive reaction to The Winter Solstice. On one hand, we revere this simple matter of physics — a cycle that gives us the experience of daylight becoming less and less, till it hits that pivotal moment and becomes more. Purely via the view afforded by our orbiting eyes. Knowing that, we all still say to each other, “Gee, it feels weird that the Sun goes down so early,” filled with the ancient anxiety that it may not come back.
At the same time, we super-charge the moment with ritual get-togethers that are fraught with meaning and tension in equal measures.
The book was called “The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales From Around the World for the Winter Solstice” by Carolyn McVickar Edwards. Lots of the stories in the book reminded me of this meeting of family and cosmic tension. Animal and human. Each time to try and get the Sun back, even if it’s symbolically.
I found out that I was the (show’s) opener, so I decided to write a kind of overture. I laid down on the floor with the guitar plugged in and looked up through the window while the late afternoon sky turned to evening and let my fingers fall on the frets without looking, and this darkly hopeful song poured out.
Q: How has our political climate infused and impacted your music?
A: I’ve allowed myself to react more confrontationally than I used to. Songs like “Shame” and “Brutalist Monuments” take the bull by the horns and say, “I love you, but fuck off.” The world is becoming less civil, yet all the info is there, in our neighborhoods and at our fingertips. How to accept the complexity, how to tolerate ambiguity and find the rudder to chart a course towards love. We will still make horrible mistakes, but the mistakes will lead to the better way. They are the only path, and we have to forgive what we think of as our personal enemies even as we violently disagree. It’s all that’s left to do.
Q: Can you describe any hopeful song?
A: “Win” is really my most hopeful song. I saw a lady on the news explaining why she was afraid that they were going to teach her child about critical race theory in Texas. You could hear the fear in her voice and see it in her eyes. That’s who the song is for, as much as George M. Johnson as a child. You’re fighting against a mirage — your identity is as imaginary as mine. This is how it begins.
Q: Any stories about working with your bandmates that you’d like to share?
A: Billy Loose and Dan McAssey were integral to the making of this album. Before I recorded, most of these songs went through a rehearsal stage with both Dan on guitar and Billy on drums. I did phone recordings of the practice sessions. Eventually I programmed a foundation drum part for each song and added one guitar or bass and a scratch vocal for Billy to drum with. At the end of “Brutalist Monuments,” the song kicks into double time and Billy always made it explode in rehearsal. But when we were tracking over my recorded parts, he just wasn’t getting to the same place. Everything was still set up and the next morning, when we started, I plugged in whatever guitar was there and jumped up and down, playing the ending with him, and it was the magic ingredient.
For the end of the song “You Fell Down,” the rehearsal version had evolved into an intense shoegaze guitar dialogue between Dan and me. I knew it would be great for the fade-out. I’d recorded my part and was ready for Dan to come in to record. He didn’t remember what he’d done so I played him the phone version and we pieced together the answering phrases. Then we kept going and he made it lose control, twisting the delay knob till his guitar part flipped over like a carnival ride. It was magnificent for the long fade, where something really cool happens as the track is receding into the distance, leaving you wondering what happened but never quite knowing.
For more, visit charlienieland.com.
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