Hi, everyone! I sat down with Tucker Nicholas, the LA, via Atlanta & Pittsburgh vocalist and producer, earlier this month. I've been a big fan of Tucker's music for a bit of time now, and he's definitely been doing a lot of great stuff. Not only on the solo side of things, but he and his collective, Inner State Media, are building up a great repertoire, too. Tucker has a lot of great stories to tell, which you'll be reading about throughout the interview.
bazzreviews: I know that your first instrument was the saxophone back in elementary school, but when did you first decide you wanted to pursue a career in music?
Tucker Nicholas: I don’t know. It’s always been such a big part of my day-to-day life. Both of my parents were big music enthusiasts, always taking me to concerts and stuff. I would always look up to various musicians and entertainers, they were always so inspiring to me. I started with DJ’ing back in high school by using the small amount of money I had saved up on a deck and some decent speakers. When I got to college, I realized that I wanted to go farther with music. I told myself that if I didn’t do it now, I would regret it forever.
br: Which albums or artists were of inspiration to you?
T.N.: It is always evolving. The way I see it, the more genres you know about, the more well-versed you can be as a producer. I’d say I’m more of a fan first, musician second. I like to try and go around and get caught up with what’s “in,” so that I can apply a lot of different ideas into my music. When I was in high school, it was a combination of guys like Travis Scott, Kanye West and Childish Gambino. A lot of production rap on Acid Rap by Chance the Rapper blew my mind when I was younger, too. When I got to college, I became a lot more dance-influenced. Kaytranada, Sam Gellaitry, and Disclosure are some of the names that come to mind. Recently, I’ve been getting into a lot of Madlib’s catalog and the stuff A.G. Cook and Dylan Brady contributed production-wise to Charli XCX’s new album.
br: Tell me a little bit about the rap collective you have called Inner State Media- How did you meet the members, and what is the significance behind your stage name?
T.N.: When I graduated from high school, I was living out in Central Pennsylvania, and I had a close friend who had moved down to Virginia. For that summer, he invited me and a couple of other guys down to his place for a week in the summer. It was just a five-hour drive, straight down Interstate 81. We were all talking about what was important to us and what we wanted to do after high school. Inner State 81 is also kind of a play on words. Whenever you’re sort of lost in your thoughts, you can always revert back to your “inner state” to get you back on track. For Inner State Media, all of the members are as follows. There’s me, another producer, King., who’s based out in Cleveland, and then the vocalists: Myri@d, Lil Acey, and Yung Wacho. I met all three of those guys when I was at Pitt. They’re all my best friends. We talk every day and encourage each other to stick with this whole thing. As I mentioned earlier, whenever there are times where you just want to give up or are questioning what’s happening, it’s great to have people challenging you to push yourself farther. My whole dream behind ISM is that it will end up being a media conglomerate of some sort. Right now, with the resources at hand, music is the thing that we can do and execute. We’re all happy doing that, but I think that I might want to dabble in areas of multimedia.
br: Tell me a little bit about Wellsfest, too!
T.N.: I joined a business fraternity when I was at Pitt, and Wellsfest was dreamt up by my good friends Sam, Ryan, and James with their other roommates as a party. We wanted to throw it and give different artists in South Oakland a chance to perform and the rest of us a chance to have in experiencing it as a listener. It was completely surreal, because the festival itself was pretty small for a bit of time. We tried to do it semi-annually, but it just became too big. We somehow ended up getting a decent-sized following, and the University shut us down when we had over 2,000 people RSVP to the last installment of Wellsfest. I guess it kind of made its way into Pitt lore. I vividly remember in my last semester there, underclassmen were coming up to me and asking about it. I laughed and said, “yeah, my friend actually started it.”
br: I know you’re a former student at the University of Pittsburgh, but tell me a little bit about your internship with a record label over in England? How did it influence your music and help you sell more cotton candy?
T.N.: Selling cotton candy was my first summer jobs. A friend of mine got me a job out at Hershey Park, and I would work there selling stuff like popcorn, cotton candy, soda, stuff like that. I worked there, also over at a minor league ballpark that was nearby, and at a fair amount of concerts. You made a commission, so it was a pretty easy first job. I signed up for whatever I could- especially concerts- because you could really half-ass the vending and still watch a majority of the show. In terms of my internship over in London, that was one of the best experiences of my life. It was unpaid, and it got set up through Pitt’s business school. My boss there, Paul Tunkin, was really awesome. Honestly, he was my first mentor. It would usually just be the two of us working, so I used that time as a way to ask deeper questions about the music industry. He actually had me on a set opening up for some artists on the label, which was pretty surreal, too. This was when I was first putting music on Spotify, so getting to play shows, learning how to contact PR companies, how to cold email other people, or finding which mailing lists you wanted to be on when I was twenty years old were all super beneficial lessons. Shoutout to Blow Up Records, you guys are amazing.
br: Is it true that you snuck into a NGHTMRE show when you were there, too?
T.N.: Oh, s--t, what a memory! We were in Camden at this pub/stage venue, the bar on the first and stage on the second. I saw the line of people waiting for tickets and I saw he was playing. Needless to say, I was a little curious about it all. I saw some employees drifting away from their posts to close the doors to get to the dancefloor. I had my chance to sneak up there. My roommates at the time were telling me I was crazy, but I managed to keep a low profile and head up to where everyone was. Everyone there was giving me super weird looks like, “huh, how did that guy get here?” With the doors being closed to get in and have someone like that pop in, I don’t blame them. One of the best concert experiences of my life!
br: It seems like live shows are a big part of your image- would you say that you prefer playing live over working on new songs?
T.N.: I love all the different aspects of musical performance. I love being in rooms and seeing where the energy goes. I did a really cool show with some friends when I was living down in Atlanta for a bit, and it was a really fun experience. There were a lot of technical difficulties during that show, so we all had to kind of scramble to whip something up. To the audience, that might look like you were actually preparing from the start, but I don’t think they know that our heads are moving at a million miles an hour. It’s such a rush, and it can lead to things actually going better than expected.
br: Can you describe your process for making a song?
T.N.: I try to switch it up a lot. I don’t want my methods to be super calculated or predetermined and have myself getting tired of it. Since I’ve moved out here to LA, it’s just been me sitting out on our deck and making new beats. I’m moreso trying to just take in the environment right now. Everything out here is so foreign to what I’m used to. It’s crazy to be looking across the street, and bam, there’s a palm tree.
br: How does your process differ from when you’re writing for yourself and writing for other people?
T.N.: Sometimes, you don’t know how something is gonna end up. It might be a beat that would work better under my name, or it might be one that would work well for someone else who might hit you up wanting to collab and I send it their way. Other times, it might just be me going into the studio specifically making stuff for x artist or y artist. Like I touched on earlier, I don’t like to map out for who I’m making stuff for. What happens is what happens. Sometimes, you might make something completely out of the blue and it ends up working really well in your favor.
What’s more important to you- lyricism, or production value and instrumentation?
T.N.: It’s really done on a case-by-case basis. If I end up crafting a really melodic beat that makes me feel a certain emotion, then yes, I’m going to focus more on the production and how it sounds. If I’m doing a beat that’s got sample chops on it that has a more moody vibe, I might write some deeper lyrics for the track. There’s no right or wrong answer, you don’t always have to make fun, playful stuff nor do you have to make stuff that’s really dark and deep. I try to keep a happy medium of both.
br: What are some of your favorite songs you’ve made over the years? Are there any fun stories behind them?
T.N.: I have a couple. I’ll start with “Shibuya” that is going to be on an upcoming project with Myri@d. That song has a cool story behind it. I think it happened about two years ago. What’s great about Artists for Spotify is that you can see all the playlists your songs are on, and one of my songs happened to be on the mix of some fashion designer over in Tokyo. I followed him on social media and sent him a message, thanking him for playing my music. He got back to me and said he wanted to send me a gift. This wasn’t just any ordinary gift, it was so incredibly generous. It was a jacket, a shirt, a bag, and some other posters and lookbooks. It was the first time I had something like that happen to me, and that day, I wrote the beat for the song and the general idea for the hook. Myri@d was my roommate that year, and he has a talent for rapping and singing, but he wasn’t really pushing himself enough with that. It goes back to what I said earlier about ISM, we’re always pushing each other to reach our highest potential. It took a while to put the song together, but our friendship got a lot stronger after working on it. Another cool story was about the song, “Cry Baby.” I did that with my friends, Bella and Vontae down in Atlanta. It was actually kind of funny how we all came to work together. I was living on my buddy’s couch in South Carolina before moving to Atlanta last April, and I matched with Bella on Tinder. She followed me on Instagram, and when I looked at her account, I’m like, “why the f--k is someone with 200,000 followers just casually following my account?” She hit me up and asked if I wanted to work on a song with some of her friends. One of those guys happened to be Vante, who’s actually one of the most talented songwriters I’ve ever met. For the beat, someone I knew from Pitt, Gib, who makes music as Mailroom, actually sent me the guitar pack I ended up using for that beat.
br: If there was one song you could rewrite or delete from your discography entirely, what would it be and why?
T.N.: I’ve been considering taking a lot of my earlier stuff off of streaming. It’s not as polished as some of my stuff is now. I don’t know if there’s a specific song, but the idea is still swirling in the back of my mind.
br: Knowing everything you know now about music, what is one thing you’d tell your past self?
T.N.: Be persistent. Some people will reply. Keep a good spunk to you.
br: I know you just released a few singles recently, but are there any other projects in the work that you can talk about? T.N.: I have a concept for a dance EP that I want to do after that Myri@d project. I don’t know how long it would take to form, so it’s not fully fleshed out quite yet.
br: What do you want people reading this to know about you and your music?
T.N.: I am always trying to push musical boundaries. No two projects from me will sound the same. It goes back to the question about my influences you asked at the top of the interview, how I try to be savvy in multiple genres to change things up. I think I also want you all to know that I am a voice of change and positivity in the world. I want to help people unlock that part of themself they are wanting to let out. I’m a big advocate for doing things that ultimately change your life from being unsatisfying to then making you happy. Follow your passions, no matter what.
br: What music goals do you have for the future?
T.N.: I want to end up on Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat story, I want Charli D’Amelio to dance to one of my songs on TikTok, I want to win a Grammy and not even be there to receive it, and I want to be the first person to perform in front of aliens if we end up on another planet.
I'd like to thank Tucker for sitting down and doing this interview. If you guys haven't heard anything from him or his crew yet, definitely go do that! In the meantime, hope you guys are all doing well. Keep your eyes peeled for more bazzreviews content coming soon!
To check out some of Tucker's music, head over to https://open.spotify.com/artist/0PTnrHjEmqUdaEQlZB4WPS
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