We watched Charlie Nieland celebrate the release of his new album “Stories From The Borderlines” on the intimate stage at the East Village basement club Berlin, but in another world, his heroic guitar solos would have been right at home bouncing off stadium walls.
His music taste has evolved over the years from his early love of The Beatles, which he inherited from his parents, to the days of listening to 1970s AM radio, to playing (a lot) of air guitar to David Bowie and Yes and “lots of prog rock stuff.”
The bass was the “first instrument I was good at” and his high school band, Aurora, got adept at playing Supertramp, Jethro Tull, Bad Company covers, and, with the addition of a keyboard player, “went kind of crazy” playing tunes like The Who’s “Wont Get Fooled Again.”
Nieland’s years at Hampshire College were concentrated on studying music composition and recording, which was a natural progression as he had figured out in high school how to record himself “using two cassette decks and a DJ mixer and a microphone and just bouncing back and forth between them. Having a recording device has been kind of integral to my musical development.”
College added more influences, such as Elvis Costello, XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees “and other 80s stuff.” He picked up some other instruments too — learning banjo, percussion, piano and trumpet — but, he admits, “my tone is lousy.”
When Midi and drum machines came along, Nieland says, “I was all over it. I know other instrumentalists looked at that and were just like, ew, technology, not for me. I’ve always been curious about that kind of thing, it piqued my curiosity. I was syncing up a drum machine with a Commodore computer.”
Having recently digitized his earliest recordings, which were on cassettes, he’s finding that “it’s really interesting.”
“I hear things that are like, wow, that’s just like me now,” Nieland recalls. “I was attracted to certain things as a songwriter, and as a sort of sound sculptor. I listen to those songs and I’m like, wow, I was really onto something right there. I had sort of created an identity that had a dark melodic quality that, now, guess what? That’s still my kind of my vocabulary that rotates around that.”
Nieland’s work runs from atmospheric solo guitar compositions to a variety of collaborations. The longest one was with his ex-wife Nancy in the band Her Vanished Grace (“Power Dream Pop,” he says), which began as a duo project and ran for 25 years. After producing their own music for a while, he began to produce other artists, which led to his role in producing Debbie Harry’s solo LP “Necessary Evil” in 2007, as well as co-writing some of the tunes (some of which eventually ended up being performed by Blondie).
The experience, he notes, was nothing but positive.
“That was such a great experience,” Nieland recalls. “She’s generous, so easy to work with, so creative. And very spontaneous. It was really a little intimidating at first, but then very quickly it just became something that I felt really enmeshed with. She’s very smart and funny. And very engaged.”
When the band reached its conclusion due to factors such as divorce, Nieland found himself in need of a creative challenge, and he notes, “things were coming apart and I was a little bereft.”
Luckily, Susan Hwang came along and introduced him to the Bushwick Book Club (which she founded), a rotating, creative group of performers who all read the same book and then create a song or a performance piece about the work.
“The book club became this new interesting songwriting challenge because a book is introduced each month, and you only have a few weeks to write a song and present it for the show at the end of the month,” Nieland explains. “And that was a nice challenge to my sort of preciousness about lyrics. Sometimes I would take too long to figure out what the lyrics were, and it really challenged my ability to be more direct with lyrics and tell more of a story. It’s part of the songwriting engine that has continued for me as a solo artist.”
Interestingly, his day job is as an editor of audiobooks, which is how he became part of the team that tackled Barbra Streisand’s memoir, which she narrated herself with an abundance of digressions, but that’s another story!
Which brings us to his just-released fourth solo record, “Stories From The Bordelines.” He notes that it differs from his other solo work in “terms of refinement and theatricality and things I’ve learned about stagecraft and just being centered as a vocalist and learning what I love about my singing.”
“This album is a little more expressive,” Nieland says. “I took my time with this one. The other ones, I think, I produced a little faster.”
He mentions the “multi-style nature “ of the album and further explains that he “let the idea of genre become fluid.”
“I allowed each track to grow into its own sound world, so it’s a kaleidoscope of styles, blurring at the edges,” Nieland muses. “I think art that occurs at the borders of genre is the most interesting. There’s cinematic detail in each track that helps them nestle deeper with each listen. When you discover something new each time you hear a song, you develop a story with it. I love it when it happens to me, so I aim for that kind of experience for whoever is listening”.
Nieland’s cinematic leanings are brought out in the video for “Shame,” in which he throws himself completely into the director Hypnodoll’s concept of a band that exists in several different timelines. In concert, he leaves the glam makeup at home but relishes the chance to “get to really play.”
As for the future, Nieland plans on heading down the dual track of “collaborating with people, which I love, and working on my own.”
“So I want to keep going both those directions at once, and keep performing with different people, because I keep meeting new people — like getting into Loser’s Lounge, which has been such a great new circle of people for me,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot and just met all sorts of new artists, you know? And I want to keep producing different people.”
Charlie Nieland and his band will be playing a benefit for winter supplies for Gaza children at Berlin Under A on Dec. 16. You can follow him online at charlienieland.com and on Instagram at @charlienieland.
