Photo credit: Anna Sacks
Brett Newski
Milwaukee’s Brett Newski is the very definition of a DIY nomadic touring musician. He frequently travels around the globe, constantly looking for new ways to create and showcase his music. But even the staunchest nomads need a dose of stability every now and then.
After touring at a breakneck speed for several years, Newski couldn’t help but feel burned out by the touring pace hew was on. “I had experienced a pretty significant burnout, going out and doing almost 200 shows a year for three years straight, that I had to lay low for a while and rebuild,” Newski says.
Up until that point, he had felt like there was an unspoken pressure to constantly produce and stay active musically. He suspects many DIY and indie artists feel this way.
“You’re constantly in measurement with others and I think that’s BS. You can’t be cranking out stuff all the time,” he says. “You have to go hide for a while, recharge, rebuild, make really good things and then come back and blast out of hiding and show the best work you’ve made over the past year and a half.”
That strategy’s worked wonders so far, with Newski coming out of his self-imposed break more confident both mentally and creatively. In the past year, he’s been very prolific with new music releases, including his latest album Life Upside Down. The album gleans its title from a song he co-wrote with Tommy Shears, frontman of Milwaukee band The Living Statues.
“We like to do some co-writing when we’re in the same city,” Newski says. “It worked out as a title track because it was a song about getting your ass kicked and having to start over and trying to bounce back.
“Some might see it as a coming of age song. It’s a new beginnings song about starting from a clean slate,” he continues. “When everything comes to a head and crashes and burns in your life, the daunting task of starting over seems impossible at the time but you realize it was the best thing that could have happened to you.”
|
|
The song that surprised him most in writing was album closer “So Long,” a song written for his girlfriend.
“That was the first love song I had written in two years, which is pretty weird,” he says. “I was in this phase where I was very transient and singular and lonely but not writing about any kind of personal relationships. More about getting free and bending the old guard of society. So, I wrote that song for her. I’ve been happier since not being a completely aimless, wandering sad bastard.”
Lyrically, he’s focused on writing meaningful songs.
“You have to write a lot of shitty songs to get 10 good ones. I think we’ve got 10 really good tracks here,” he says. “It’s important to bend the rules in making an album and have a great story behind it. Otherwise, you’re just another cluster of mp3s on the cloud somewhere.”
He's had many memorable performances the past year. He and his band performed a pop-up show at the Berlin Wall, covered a David Hasselhoff song in Germany (“we love to cover him”) and did an unlicensed performance at a Walmart, where he was kicked out.
“Just making an album isn’t satisfying enough for us,” says Newski. “We want to explore a second avenue and clown around a bit on the side and make stuff other people aren’t making and come up with bizarre concepts that might turn some heads.”
Newski says he’s hoping to release an all-ages book at some point and is always thinking of “off-kilter ways to make an album.” That includes pipe dreams like traveling to Cuba someday to record an album on his cell phone and flying down to Antarctica to record a lo-fi acoustic album with profits benefiting an organization like EPA.
Whatever the route, he’ll always feel at home in Milwaukee.
“I’ll always want to nomad around and be able to exist in multiple places,” he says. “But at the same time, I do want to form roots. Community is the key to happiness. I want to have a good, friendly, like-minded community and I feel like I’ve found that in Milwaukee.”
Brett Newski and the No Tomorrow play an album release show on Friday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m. at Anodyne Coffee with Miles Nielsen and the Rusted Hearts, as well as Jonah Matranga.
