Photo by Nick Futch - nickshoulders.com
Nick Shoulders
Nick Shoulders
As a teenager, Fayetteville, Arkansas’s Nick Shoulders says he went through a period of wanting nothing to do with country music. He beat out his angst as a drummer in punk and metal bands before finding his way back eventually to a music that has long been part of his and his family’s world.
Shoulders, who plays Tuesday night at the Vivarium with his band the Okay Crawdad, says he was “overexposed” to country music as a kid. His grandparents on both sides played and performed country music. His grandfather Pat even recorded gospel and country music around Arkansas in the ‘80s.
Shoulders, whose latest album, All Bad, came out last September on his own Gar Hole Records, says he learned to country whistle from his father, who learned it from his grandfather. Side note: if you Google “country whistle,” a video tutorial from Shoulders comes up first.
In the Pines, Where the Sun Never Shines
“I lived out in the middle of nowhere … I was out on birdcalls and whooping and hollering in the woods with my little friends,” he says. “I was kind of like living country music, but not necessarily expressly interested in it. It was just all around me. In the South, the origins and conditions that create country music are just the air you breathe.”
Even when he played punk and heavy metal, Shoulders realized he couldn’t really escape the music traditions he had been exposed to growing up.
“We were playing some heavy, scary music that was definitely the opposite of grandpa music, but I would still in between songs play fiddle tunes on the harmonica,” he says. “There were just various ways, like my punk band played with a slide on the guitar, where you couldn’t separate us from the material circumstances of our cultural and regional experience.”
As Shoulders grew older, he started to look back at early forms of country music from the ‘20s to ‘50s and found sounds and themes very different from modern popular country music. Artists like the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers and others, opened a new path back to country music for him.
“I was kind of hearing these songs written in a world where there were endless wars and bank failures and crop failures and things were seriously wrong,” Shoulders says. “It was a music coming out of a very particular time period where hardship was everywhere, and it was coming through people’s songs.
“Once I started hearing that, I thought that’s the world I’m living in—with endless wars and bank failures, and I’m suddenly aware that this music wasn’t originally intended to reinforce the power structures that be. It was originally intended to challenge them. Original country music and old country music was in its own way revolutionary, and I think at that point, I started to see myself in the music and started to understand my family’s connection to it.”
And his family was happy to see him return to country music, Shoulders says. “I had a thrash band, and they never saw a single show in like four years of it existing,” he says. “And they travel and come to shows all that they can now.”
He also spent time with his grandparents, who have all since passed away, asking about songs and ways of playing and learning about “a world that suddenly didn’t seem do distant. A hundred years ago felt like a fairly short amount of time all of a sudden when they remembered these old, old songs and songs their parents sang long before them,” Shoulders says.
Let’s Try This Again
Tuesday’s show is a makeup date for the band after canceling last November at the Cactus Club due to Shoulders falling ill after four months on the road supporting All Bad.
Shoulders said the band had been looking forward to returning to the Cactus Club, but he’s just happy to be back in Milwaukee. “I’m stoked to get that far north,” he says. “It’s not something I do that often.”
Nick Shoulders & the Okay Crawdad perform Tuesday April 30, at Vivarium, 1818 N. Farwell Ave. Nat Myers is the opening performer.
