The Nation of Franz

Arguably best known for his work as a keyboardist in The Hold Steady, Franz Nicolay recently announced that he would be leaving the incredibly popular bar-rock act to pursue other opportunities. The multi-instrumentalist has been a member of several bands, including The World/Inferno Friendship Society and gypsy-klezmer outfit Guignol. We sat down with Franz at his second Tea Bazaar show in the past few months to discuss his upcoming plans.

DEC: How has your tour been going so far?

Franz Nicolay: Great so far. This is night three, and it’s just a short run of shows. After tonight it’ll be down to Richmond and then back up to New York.

The idea is that I would do some shows behind this short story release, though I unfortunately won’t have them until Wednesday, so now I’m just doing shows (laughs). However, I used the time to demo about fifteen new songs on Wednesday, which will become my new record. So I’m just using the opportunity to test these songs out.

Who were you recording with?

I was demoing with Jim Keller, in his studio in Bedstuy. He’s a producer that did the new record by some friends of mine in a band called Demander, and I thought it sounded really good. He was on the last couple of Muse records, and he’s worked with Laurie Anderson and Franz Ferdinand. But this was basically just us banging out these songs.

Are you on tour with any other bands or is it just you?

Just me.

Does that get tiresome?

One of the things about tour is that it’s boring because there is so much downtime, especially if you’re in a van and someone else is driving. But this way, if I’m doing all the work, I’m never bored! Because I’m driving all day, and then I load-in, and set up, and sound check, and then I set up the merch, and then I chill. There’s always something to do.

We heard you recently published some short stories. How’d that come about?

Basically, I’m going to do a series of these chapbooks over the course of the year. There are five stories in the first one, which is out now, and there will be another one in May, probably, and then September, and then I think we’ll anthologize all of them by the end of the year and do a proper release.

Was writing something you had done in the past?
No, I hadn’t dabbled in it before. I always wanted to write, and I kept some tour diaries and wrote for some magazines and blogs. Then this one guy that I did a magazine piece for asked me if I would participate in a reading series he ran, and then he told me about his starting up a little indie press. I’m serious about it, but it’s not as stressful, because first and foremost, I’m a musician.

What are the stories about?

Dead goats, how to get slugs off your lettuce, turning squirrels into beer koozies, stuff like that. Fantastical rural mysticism. It’s on Julius Singer Press, which I believe was Groucho Marx’s real name. The first chapbook is called Complicated Gardening Techniques.

How did the a cappella EP of yours come about?

That was a weird little side-project that we did, which came about in a funny way. I’ve been friends with the Dresden Dolls for a long time. When they first got signed to Roadrunner Records, I got to know the guy who signed them a little bit, and me and him were having drinks at one point and talking and he told me that the guy who runs Roadrunner is apparently this crazy Dutch millionaire. Roadrunner was a metal label basically, and this was their big branch-out, so they wanted to explore this whole punk/cabaret thing. So this guy said, “What if we signed this punk a-capella group?” So I said, “Like the Comedian Harmonists?” who were this German a capella group from the 1920’s who loved Duke Ellington and American Jazz and stuff, and they got in trouble with the Nazis, but before they did that, they made these great records. So that’s basically the idea. Before that we all joked about putting a barbershop quartet together and he’s like, “Well, if you’re serious, I’ll e-mail this guy and see if he still wants to do it,” and sure enough, the next day he e-mailed me and said, “Okay, I got $3,000 for you to make a demo, get back to me in a couple of months, do a couple of songs.” And we did, and they decided not to do a full length record. We got to keep the recordings, and they told us to do whatever we wanted with them. And there they sat for a couple of years. We were going to press them up as a seven-inch giveaway for Halloween one year, but that didn’t end up happening. Right now there’s sort of a lull between World/Inferno releases so I called Jack [Terricloth, of The World/Inferno Friendship Society] up and said, “I have this label that will put this out, so if you still want to do it...” and he said, “Sure.” It was very easy to do because it was already done!

Are there any other side-projects you’re working on now?

Yeah, there’s little bits. Guignol, which is my Balkan/Klezmer circus-y quartet, with Peter [Hess, of World Inferno and Balkan Beat Box], is doing a soundtrack for a film series in Philadelphia called the Diaspora Series. They asked us to do a soundtrack to a twenty-minute short film. We’re not sure what film it will be yet, but it’s looking like this animated version of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” from the 1960’s that this Soviet animator did. There’s also another film project that I may do. The guy who runs the Ukrainian program at Columbia is subtitling this silent horror film from the 1920’s that he wants someone to score, so if I can get funding I’ll do that.

Can you tell us a little bit about the vaudeville theme of this tour?

Well, it’s interesting, because there’s a little more pressure on you if you’re just up there by yourself. If nobody shows up, it’s on you. And if people don’t like you, it’s not like you can diffuse that with a bunch of other people in your band. You end up just sitting there by yourself being like “They hate me, nobody wanted to come out. Shit.” So there’s a little more responsibility to entertain, and there’s this whole history of entertainment in the United States that goes back to British music hall entertainment, but there’s this whole string of people, like a family tree, who maybe weren’t that great at any one thing, but could sing, dance, play piano, etc. A real professional entertainer. I really sympathize with that mindset. I feel like it gets lost today.

Your job when you get on stage is to entertain. Ironically, the people who most fulfill that heritage today are people like Justin Timberlake. He sings, he dances, he’s an actor, he can do funny skits. I like to think that I can aspire to that kind of thing, rather than just being a singer-songwriter, which sucks. I mean, it’s great in a way, but how many mopey guys with a guitar get up and sing their songs? Thousands, millions!

Is this something new you’re trying for this tour, or have you always done this?

This is something I’ve always done. A lot of people who are basically singer-songwriters can manage to transcend this pattern by identifying that you can be really funny and entertaining in your live show, and then you can sing this depressing song, and that really captures the audience’s attention and diffuses the downward pressure. John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) is really good at that. Mark Eitzel of American Music Club does that. Stephen Merritt is kind of a different thing because his songs are kind of funny, and seem to point out that he doesn’t really take the song that seriously.

Do you have staple jokes, or are you more organic about it?

Well, you have to have some idea of where you’re going. It’s like being a stand-up comic a little bit. If you go see a stand-up comic twice in one tour, you have to expect you’re going to hear the same bits. Maybe he’ll riff on them, but nobody is that funny that they can think of something new every night. I try not to do the same schtick from tour to tour, but sometimes it’s gonna happen! A song is only about one or two things. It’s not like I can be like, “This song is no longer about what I said it was about over the summer, now it’s about something totally different!” I can try to come up with a different kind of story with a similar theme, but it’ll be a similar theme. I was always amazed at the stuff that Jack from World/ Inferno could come up with, riffing on certain themes, but it always comes back to a certain tag line or two, and for him, that’s his way of cueing the band. You hear him say a certain thing and you said, “Oh we’re playing this song now.”

How have your past Virginia experiences been?

I was supposed to play Richmond in December but it was the day of that giant snowstorm. We were in Baltimore on the 19th and we were calling the kid putting on the show, like “How does snow affect people’s show attendance in Richmond?” and the kid responded, “I don’t know, it never snows in Richmond!” We were like, “That’s the answer! We’re not coming.” So we turned around and drove to Erik Peterson’s [of Mischief Brew] house outside of Philly and we drove just fast enough to get snowed in the next day. That was fine, because Erik and his wife throw a solstice party every year and it happened to be that night, so they already had all of this hot booze and food, so I was happy to be snowed in.