Charlie Nieland | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Speaker 1: Such a great track. That is when Charlie Nyland or Niland. I think it's Niland, but we're going to ask him in just a moment because he is joining us online. Welcome everybody, if you are listening live. Today is Saturday, November twenty two, twenty twenty five. This is Matt Connorton Unleashed and we have entered our number three new Marrow trace of our program this morning from the studios of w n H ninety five point three FM in Glorious Manchester, New Hampshire. And of course you can stream the show from anywhere.

0:26 Speaker 1: Go to Matt connorton dot com, slash live for all of your live streaming options, social media links, contact infosho, archives, et cetera, et cetera. But let's get Charlie in here, because I am dying to talk with him. Charlie, are you there, Hi, Matt, Hey, Welcome to the show. First question, how do you say your last name Niland? It is Nland? Okay, good, I got it right, I thought so, but I wasn't one hundred percent sure. I love that song when and we'll talk about that, and we'll talk about a lot of things.

0:54 Speaker 1: But what a great track. Who is that on the song with you at the end, who's rapping?

0:58 Speaker 2: His name is Spirit Child. He's based out of Staten Island. I've known him here in the New York City area for about ten years for we both are in this thing called the Bushwick book Club. It's a performance series. Oh, I'll tell you more about it when you get to the song.

1:14 Speaker 1: But he's great, sure, sure, yeah, no, he's really good. It's kind of it's one of those things where when you listen to the song for the first time, you don't expect that, but it just it's a surprise, but it's so seamless, like it just fits so perfectly. You know. It's a nice surprise, because sometimes somebody might try to do something like that and you go, I don't know, it seems a little forced or whatever, but that is it just fits in perfectly. So good, so good. Absolutely, And you've got an album let's see this.

1:47 Speaker 1: I guess this has been out for a little while now, Stories from the Borderlines or this just came out last month?

1:52 Speaker 2: Actually, right, yeah, it's just been a few weeks.

1:55 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so this is very new. You've got a new single called Shame. I thought about playing that one, but we'll probably play that one a little later in the show because I wanted to play when I wanted to open with that. It's such a great positive song. But you've done You've done a lot of work. You're you're you've been around a while. You know, you've worked with people like Debbie Harry, Blondie, Rufus, Wainwright, Scissor Sisters. You're a composer, you know, you've done film and television. I really want to know tell us a little bit about your background, and then we'll kind of talk about what we're we'll come back to what you're doing now with your music, But I also would like to know more about you.

2:33 Speaker 2: Well, I'm from the Midwest, but I came to the East Coast and graduated from college and moved to New York City, and then I was in a band called Her Vanished Grace for about twenty five years, and a couple other bands throughout the nineties and into the two thousands. But in the beginning of the two thousands, I kind of stumbled into a situation where I was working on a film score for this movie called The Safety of Objects Okay, and then I started producing it became part of a production team, and that's where I worked with Debbie Harry on her solo album called Necessary Evil, which came out in two thousand and seven, Okay, And that was a really exciting experience, and basically we just continued writing with her after the album came out and ended up having some of those songs be on the next Blondie record in twenty eleven.

3:33 Speaker 1: Oh wow.

3:34 Speaker 2: And since since about twenty thirteen, I've been working on being a solo artist in addition to producing people, and that's where I'm now. This is my fourth album.

3:47 Speaker 1: Oh no kidding, Okay, what do you find most satisfying? I mean, is working on your own music as a solo artist? Is that? I don't know if more satisfying is probably probably not necessarily how you'd want to put it, but you understand what I'm asking you. I mean, do you get what do you get the most from in terms of what you're doing because you've worked in all these different areas well.

4:09 Speaker 2: It's an interesting challenge because I've been in bands a lot of times where I was I did get to sing my songs, but it was in like a group where there was more than one singer, so I was always like the other singer when there's a female vocalist, you know. And so I've been writing songs for a long time and co writing with people, and in the past ten years, I've got involved, as I mentioned, with this performance series called the Bushwick Book Club where each month the book is selected and songwriters react to the book and write a song, and then there's a show where all the songs are presented.

4:49 Speaker 2: And I sort of got involved in producing that, so I ended up writing a lot of songs that way. Yeah, And I don't know, I've just been expanding my circle and getting involved with things like that, and another series called The Loser's Lounge, which is here in New York, where we sing at Joe's Pub with a fantastic backing band. It's it's covers, but it's like there's a theme each for each performance.

5:17 Speaker 1: Yeah.

5:18 Speaker 2: But I found that these things have helped me kind of find my identity as an artist, as a performing artist, and I'm really excited about it. Now. I enjoy playing full sets of my own music and I feel like, you know, I'm a vehicle for this thing that's coming through me, and so you know, I do love collaborating those Yeah, and I get to do that a lot in production, but when I produce my own music, it does it gets to be It's interesting because I can really take my time in certain parts of the process and just try a lot of different ideas, yeah, and slowly build up layers.

6:02 Speaker 2: I think on stories from the borderlines, there's a lot of that. It's kind of like a musical diary. Okay, okay.

6:09 Speaker 1: In terms of, uh, how you approach how you approach songwriting, I'm curious if do you consciously try to do something that's that's unique and out of the mainstream or does that sort of happen organically because these songs, you know, none of them are anything that you would necessarily hear, Like, I don't know what radio format they would fit into necessarily on commercial radio. You know, they're they're they're different, which is what makes them so interesting. They're very catchy, they're very catchy and listenable.

6:40 Speaker 1: They're accessible, but they're but they're also unique. It kind of reminds me of just a random example, like like if a band like Talking Heads were to exist today and someone asked me, Matt, what would you do with this band? You know, and Obviously, Talking Heads was hugely commercially successful in the eighties. But if someone said, you know, if they were out today and Matt, someone said, Matt, what do you do with this band? I don't. I don't know exactly. You know, I'd want to do like maybe some college radio stuff for them, but I don't know where I would put them in terms of a commercially viable radio genre.

7:08 Speaker 1: And I feel like your music is like that, where it's it's catchy, it's accessible, the songs are great, but I don't I don't know where they fit necessarily, and I'm wondering if that's intentional on your part.

7:18 Speaker 2: I think it's natural, but I do. I'm aware of that definitely. I mean, I think for me, I think the most I think of genre as like a geography. You know, there are certain kinds of music that that's right in the middle of it of a genre, and you're like, oh, that's definitely dance pop, or that's definitely e DM or that's definitely you know, metal. But I think out at the edges of the borders of these genres, it's there are artists who are doing stuff that kind of freely mixes things and comes up with their own hybrids.

7:59 Speaker 2: I mean, and that's where someone like Prince came from, or Bowie or Talking Heads, where like the Talking Heads weren't commercially successful at first.

8:10 Speaker 1: Right, it took a while.

8:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, but now they're remembered because they did succeed as a college rock band. And again that was college rock became alternative. You know, in the eighties, alternative didn't necessarily mean what it meant in the nineties, it was kind of a catch all for stuff that wasn't in a specific, you know, central style. That they often mixed a lot of different things together, and so that's kind of my natural that's my resting place kind of.

8:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've just.

8:47 Speaker 2: There's been times when I've been in bands where we sort of really focused our sound into something that was, you know, the her vanished grace. We called it power dream pop. So we were kind of zeroing in on a certain subset of alternative of post punk and dream pop, and those are still strong influences in my music. But yeah, I think, especially in this album, I just allowed each song to have its own character and its own landscape, and it's kind of like a series of different movies or stories. So my girlfriend said it, it's like they're all different stories, and that kind of led to the title of the album.

9:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, excellent, excellent. I do want to hear more about the Bushwick book Love, because I'm curious if when you when you bring a song into that that forum, I mean, is that is that intimidating it all? Because obviously other people are gonna are gonna have their their their judgments or assessments of it.

9:49 Speaker 2: Well, it's fun because everybody has a different approach. Yeah, and the book for me, I always write a song that can stand outside the busher Club performance. You don't have to have read the book to enjoy it, you know. Yeah, and to relate to it. Usually I use some aspect of the story or a character or an idea from the books. Sometimes it's just one page in the book like sets me off and I'm like, oh, this will be good imagery for this thing that I've already been thinking about. And that's kind of what happened with Wyn And that was part of an interesting an interesting thing that happened where we got invited to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library for a whole week for a residency.

10:39 Speaker 2: Oh wow, and they have a series where they have a band book Band Book Week nice and usually usually it's writers that come and participate, but since we've done a lot of Vonnegut in Bushwick Book Club, they invited a group of us. It was five us and we spent the week there and at the end of the week we presented songs that we had written that week, all inspired by band books, and we had a concert Oh wow, And it was to make a long story short. I was like, the last one to finish my song. Everyone's gonna got a song going, and I was like, I'm having really struggling.

11:20 Speaker 2: It was a great book I was working on I was working with called All Boys Aren't Blue. It was one of the most banned books in two thousand and twenty two, really and yeah, it's a coming of age story. It's a ya book about being young, black and queer, and it was really a beautifully written book, but at the time there was a strong book banning thing going on in schools. So anyway, I woke up in the middle of the night with the chorus words to that song I just want you to win Oh, and I kind of like just wrote it down in the notes app on my phone.

12:04 Speaker 2: I got up in the morning and I was like, whoa this is this really feels good. And then I'd also been thinking about some other stuff and the song just all like poured out that morning. And we all supported each other in terms of being each other's backup musicians for the concert at the end of the week, and so we started working on my song and spirit Child was there doing his music and I was like, you know, I think this would sound great if you came up with something for this. Yeah, And so the at the show it was a kind of a combination of stuff he had written, you know, in response to my lyrics and freestyled kind of at the same time.

12:46 Speaker 2: And that got recorded and then when I went to record the and it was so great, you know. So when I recorded the album like a year or two later, I asked Spiritual to contribut you to it. And now recently we just at our album release show, he was able to join us live on stage and it was fantastic. It really kicked the room into overdrive. It was so good.

13:10 Speaker 1: I can imagine, yeah, I can imagine, Yeah, that song must go over well live anyway, I would think, because it's got such an energy to it, And you know, I really like the lyrics, and I think you know, you talked about what the lyrics are about, and I think you even referenced this that you know, obviously they're about that book, but also there's relatable themes within those lyrics that anyone can relate to, and and anyone who's ever felt marginalized in some way.

13:37 Speaker 2: Or actually a lot of a lot of.

13:38 Speaker 1: Your music I think is probably relatable for anyone who's ever felt marginalized or ostracized or I mean, I feel like that's kind of a theme. You know, you've kind of you've got everybody's back, you know, you're in terms of what they're going through.

13:54 Speaker 2: Well, I think, in my view and my uh I envision, that we've created identities for ourselves that make it feel like we're all separate from each other, but there's an underlying thing that we're all part of one energy wave. So if all these things that we've taught ourselves about other people and the way we relate to people that we feel are our adversaries or our enemies, actually they become very close to us. You know, we really wrap ourselves up and identifying ourselves in opposition to things, and and if that dissolves a little bit, that's really a solvent for a lot of the strife that's going on.

14:47 Speaker 2: And I just want to be a part of that.

14:50 Speaker 1: Yeah. I notice that, you know, these ongoing sort of cultural battles around gender identity and all of it, you know, which is seems like it's become so heightened in these times, and I feel like the music that you're making is really this is kind of the moment for it, right.

15:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think we can be playful about it. And I understand that a lot of it comes from fear and fear of people that we feel are opposed to us or are you know, symbolize something of an other. But so I'm sympathetic to that. I don't think people should be ostracized because of that. But I also feel like, I don't know, I think everybody has because there's been the systems in place of systematic racism and stuff like that. We all have work to do, but it's it's something that we can all give each other some space to do instead of, you know, being cruel to each other.

16:02 Speaker 1: No, I like the way you say that. I like the way you say that because I think it's important to you know, not everything. I mean, obviously, no one should be ostracized and marginalized and all of that, but I think that there's a difference, you know, fear. Use that term fear, and I think that's an important word to use, because people tend to fear what they don't understand, or what they've never been exposed to, or what seems unusual to them. And you know, not not all of that stems from not all of it stems from hate.

16:29 Speaker 1: You know, some people are just blinded with hate for the you know, the quote unquote the other, and some people are just you know, they're just afraid. And I think music is a great music is a great vehicle to reach them.

16:41 Speaker 2: I think, yeah, I think. I mean, we're only fifty fifty hundred thousand years away from the Savannah, you know, we were. We there's a lot of evolutionary imperatives that were still that created this amazing survival in ste that we have as Homo sapiens. And but those things can really create problems for us too, right, and so we're still we have all these instincts that cause us to be tribal and cause us to to over identify with groups. I mean, at the same time, we have a lot of wisdom that comes through with and I think a lot of it comes through culture and comes through art, and I think that helps dissolve some of this stuff and helps people, you know, kind of forget to be so hateful.

17:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you see reactions with your music? Do you see reactions from advocacy groups and like, is there any any contact from anybody wanting you to get involved with their organizations or anything because of your music specifically?

17:56 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I did. In fact, I when I did an interview with journalist who has a series called on Tyranny, and it was about artists and their reactions to authoritarianism. So I said a bunch of this stuff that I just said, you know, But at the same time, I'm an artist, I'm not I'm getting more engaged politically, just on a local level here where I live in New Jersey. But yeah, that's just I think it's I think getting hand ringing and doom scrolling about the national political and world political situation can be a little overwhelming, and I think if you just get involved on your local level, that's way more helpful.

18:40 Speaker 2: So I've been doing that too.

18:42 Speaker 1: No, that's great. I think that's I think that's great advice. I do want to talk a bit about the song Shame, and we'll play that at the end of our conversation. Actually, I'm probably gonna play both that and Brutalist Monuments because at the end of our conversation, because I love both those songs, So I'll probably just play those two back to back. But but I do want to talk about Shame because officially Shame is the current single.

19:05 Speaker 2: Is that correct, Yeah, it was the second single. Yes, it's the current single led the album.

19:12 Speaker 1: Okay, okay, yeah, I want to ask you about this. This is another great track. There's an interesting line in it too, we eroticize what we despise, and I'm I'm curious about that, and uh, and if you could talk to about the song and you know, in a broader sense about what it's about, what the theme is, and and how it relates to everything that we've been discussing.

19:33 Speaker 2: Well again, I think that this was a song that was written as part of a Busher book club event based around a book called When brook When Brooklyn was Queer, and it was a history of of queer and gay experience in Brooklyn for the past few hundred years, and uh, I was just really struck by. There was a part in the book where they describe how there was a really thriving waterfront scene in Brooklyn in like the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties where in the river on the Hudson River part of Brooklyn or the Gowanis River.

20:18 Speaker 2: Maybe I'm sorry getting lost there, but that there was a lot of drag performing and there was these were kind of like bars and clubs where people would meet. But at the same time, there were a lot of people just came for the culture and came for the entertainment. And then at that time, there wasn't even a word homosexual hadn't really been coined yet and starting around I think it came into use around the time Freud was writing, and after that it became a diagnosis. And after that they started putting gays in jail in the New York area.

21:04 Speaker 2: They even made a special penitentiary for them, did they like, I didn't know that in Brooklyn. Yeah, And it to me that just struck me as like once the name got coined, then a lot of people were able to focus in on that and say, oh, this is the thing we're afraid of. And it just reminded me of now, how there's so much like sort of a fetishization of trans culture. And like RuPaul's drag Race was like water cooler TV. You know, everybody talked about and everyone watched it and found it really entertaining.

21:46 Speaker 2: But then when the transidentities got weaponized by politics, all of a sudden, those same people who are so fascinated and kind of titillated by it were full of like, Okay, let's get these people out of public of public view. And I just think there's a real that my little phrase, we eoticize what we despise Again, it's like we get wrapped up in identification with something that we are opposed to, and when actually there's a lot there's an extreme similarity between what we think of as our shadow, you know.

22:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, So this song is sort of like creates a couple of different identities and the verses one like one person is going to see the entertainment and the other person is the entertainer, and they come together in the chorus where one says, you'll know what you are when I give you a name, and the other says, you'll know what you are when you give me a name, and it kind of goes back and forth, and then at the end it's like, you know, we're basically the same, right.

23:03 Speaker 1: I love that. I love that. Oh. I want to ask you about the video too, because I love the video and I was reading that you worked with Hypno Doll as the director and editor and Alice Teepele as cinematographer, if I have that correct.

23:17 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Hypna Doll is a friend of mine who has been doing my artwork for the past couple albums and has done several videos for me, and we just relate really well. And she came up with the concept for the video of a band that kind of exists in several different time zone timelines. Yeah, and so, and then we had a whole bunch of our friends kind of join us at the end, like the band sort of explodes into a bunch of different identities. Yeah. But we did it. You know, we did it in my recording studio.

23:50 Speaker 2: You know, it was definitely not trying to look high budget, but it the editing is so good, has a great energy.

23:57 Speaker 1: It does it really does. No, It's I love it, and uh yeah, that's it's so important too. I think it's it to some people. It might sound odd to say this in the year twenty twenty five, but I think music videos are more important than they've ever been, you know, especially now. I mean MTV is apparently going away permanently, but they haven't played music videos in forever. But uh, I've noticed, and I don't know if you've noticed this. People outside the music industry, a lot of people have this perception that music video as an art form is dead, you know, because MTV gave up on it, you know, a couple decades ago.

24:32 Speaker 1: But in reality, because of social media, I think making videos and making a great video, it's a great video, even if it's low budget, it's I think it's fantastic, like like the video for Shame. It's so it's so important as a as a tool to get your you know, people. Still, it's always been the case, at least since I was a kid, and it's still the case today. People listen with their eyes just as much as they do with their.

24:55 Speaker 2: Ears, exactly. There's been a lot of notice that came from exerpting the video and putting up in little bites and then sharing the whole video, but just also just that it had a performance aspect involved all these other people. I mean, but there are other videos that Himnadala has done for me, like for the song Drown, that were more just full of images and stuff. So I mean, I think they're different. There's room for different ways to approach it, but I agree. I want to make some more videos myself for some of the for some more of the songs.

25:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

25:30 Speaker 2: So what's kind of.

25:33 Speaker 1: The future trajectory? Do you have another Is there another single that's going to be coming after Shame or what's what's kind of the short term or even the long term plan.

25:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, that there'll be one more single. I'm trying to decide which one it is. It might be Brutalless Monuments, or might be another completely different kind of song that's called Today that's on the album as well.

25:55 Speaker 1: Okay, but.

25:57 Speaker 2: I don't know. I've put together a really great band and we've started performing and we have another show this month I'm sorry, in December. It's almost December, and I just want to keep playing out and just bringing in new possibilities by putting myself out there and playing the music, and and you know, I'm sure at some point I'll have enough songs to do another release. I might not do full albums. I said that this time. Yeah, I did throughout full album. But I think you know a lot of times people just put on EPs now and they don't have to take us long between releases.

26:39 Speaker 2: That's intriguing to me. Yeah, but you know, I have a besides the next show I have as Charlie Eland for my band, I'm doing a Loser's Lounge performance at the beginning of December where they're doing Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and I'm singing a Beach Boys song I really love called All I Want to Do. And that's really exciting to sing. It's it's really nerve wracking just to sing one song in front of a crowded room, you know, with a great, great band, But it's it's it's taught me a lot about how to breathe and be in the moment, and it's really helped my own performing for for my music too.

27:19 Speaker 2: Oh.

27:19 Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent, Charlie. Where's the best place for people to go online to keep up with everything that you're doing?

27:26 Speaker 2: Well? Is it? Charlie naland website, and I E. L A and d yes and you know, I sell the music through band Camp, which isn't not all people know about that. I mean, of course I'm on streaming all the streaming platforms, but band Camp is a way you can stream and you can also buy the music as a digital release in any form that you like. Yeah, and I you know a lot of my artists friends work on that too, and we all kind of support each other on that. So check out band camp. I'm on band Camp, I'm on Apple Music and Spotify and all those places.

28:05 Speaker 1: Absolutely absolutely well, Charlie Neland thank you so much for joining us this morning. This has been fantastic. I'm actually gonna play I will have time, so I'm gonna play both Shame and then I'm gonna play Brutalist Monuments as well, but both both great tracks. But I really appreciate you joining us. This has been a fascinating discussion. I love your music, and hey, when the next single is ready to go, I definitely want to have you back on if you're amenable to that.

28:30 Speaker 2: I'd love that. Thank you so much, Matt. This has been a total pleasure.

28:33 Speaker 1: Wonderful, all right, Thanks Charlie, we'll let you go, and now I have a great have a great weekend.

28:37 Speaker 2: You too, all right, take care, bye bye bye bye. All right.

28:41 Speaker 1: That was Charlie Niland. And let's play these. I'm gonna play both of these. We're gonna play Shame. This is a great track. Yeah, pay attention to the lyrics and I appreciate I appreciate the song even more now that I know after talking to Charlie, now that I know exactly what's going on in these lyrics and the different characters. But yeah, this is this is interesting, so pay attention. But this is really good. This is Shame by Charlie Neeland.