Nolan Taylor Q&A with Jay
Photo by Chris Estes
It’s cold and dim this time of year
I keep waiting
I just keep waiting
Pale panes and wintergreens
Reverberating, the wind keeps saying
To find a place where you can’t be
Cross mountains, plains, and those seven seas
But here I stay in this loveless land
Named only your name
-‘Realize’
Above is an excerpt from the first song that Nolan Taylor ever penned. It’s almost as if the words spilled from him. The honesty that has become his trademark was effortless from the beginning. Some artists toil for years to find a way to write in their own voice and project themselves cleanly onto the lyrics that fill their work. In contrast, as demonstrated above, some are lucky enough to be born with it.
I discovered Taylor’s music late one night, by way of a shaky cell phone video. In it, the crowd was chatty as he approached the stage. When he stepped to the microphone, the audience conceded. Mouths closed. Minds and hearts seemed to open. I sat up in my chair in anticipation as he strummed his guitar. After hearing him sing roughly two lines, I was sold. It happened that fast. I finished the short video and went straight to my streamer to search for any crumb of his music that was available. I devoured the four songs I could find. I lived in those songs for days. I was so impressed, that I eagerly reached out to his management to see if it were possible for Nolan to come play a few songs for us in the lead up to the 2021 Laurel Cove Music Festival. Thankfully, he obliged. Upon meeting him, I discovered that Nolan Taylor’s honesty extends far past his lyrical content. It’s woven into his nature.
It was a balmy 83-degree day in Pineville, Kentucky. That thick southern humidity pierced the air, stamping a thin, glistening layer of sweat on the forehead of every person outside the Bell Theater. As we stood around waiting for everyone to arrive, I saw a tall, lumbering character round the corner with a smile that was visible from 40 yards away. Soft spoken and affable, he introduced himself and exchanged pleasantries with everybody, leaving no one out. He slinked back against the wall and cracked open a beer with us. “Man, I get nervous as fuck before every show. Sometimes a beer or two helps.”, he said with a chuckle. Within minutes he was telling me about his life and his creative process. It struck me that he wasn’t guarded in the least bit. I remember making the correlation between his overall sincerity and the music that he writes, as we stood chatting under the Kentucky sun. Then, one by one, we all filed into the building for the performances to begin.
Backstage, he paced back and forth. His nervousness chomping at him, he quietly gave himself a pep talk. The stage was about to be his, and dear god he wouldn’t waste it. His entire set was mesmerizing, but it was his searing performance of ‘68’ that floored me. It was an experience I’ll never forget. Trust me, if you’re fortunate enough to witness it for yourself, you won’t forget it either.
His cadence begins soft, inviting, barely above a whisper… Then suddenly in an explosion of past trauma coupled with untethered skill, his voice comes at you like a runaway train over your shoulder when your car is already halfway across the railroad tracks. There’s no escaping it now. You’re in this. In that moment, the earth trembles and shakes. The walls crack from the baseboards to the rafters. Smoke curls from beneath the stage, saturating him in a blind fury. At this point, you’re fully enraptured. Then, just as quickly as this barrage overtakes your senses, he deftly switches gears. His cadence softens once more. The earth goes still. The walls have mended. The smoke dissipates. He looks down at the stage somberly, half exhausted from this cathartic release. As he strums the songs dying notes, all that’s left in the wake of this magnetic display is a sense of awe and the knowledge of two undeniable facts. Nolan Taylor is the fucking truth, and he was never nervous about performing. He just knew what he was about to put you through.
So, Nolan, I know you’re based out of Cincinnati now. Were you born and raised there? Where’d you come up man?
Actually, I was not born in Cincinnati. I’m originally from a small town about an hour north of there called Blanchester, Ohio. I moved from Blanchester right at the beginning of high school to a small town called Bainbridge, Ohio. It’s a tiny, tiny town in the middle of Appalachia Ohio. I think I graduated with like, 65 kids.
When did music really come into your life?
Well, I’ve always been a singer really. It kind of goes all the way back. When I was in maybe the 3rd or 4th grade, my music teacher heard me singing to myself when nobody else was around. She was like “Yeah that’s it. You’re in the choir now.”. Haha. From that point on, I was always in choir.
As far as playing instruments go, I’m right-handed but for some reason I play lefty. When I was like 5 years old, I was obsessed with Ralph Stanley. My uncle sent me his banjo. Because I mean what else do you get a 5-year-old that’s into Ralph Stanley? Haha. I started taking lessons and for some reason I just always turned it upside down. Just felt more natural to me that way. Later I taught myself how to play guitar upside down, the major chords anyway. From that point, I really didn’t give a shit about music all that much from the aspect of playing it or making my own. I just always loved to sing. I don’t like to write. Never have. I don’t like my writing.
What? Dude, you gotta be fucking with me!
Man! That’s just one thing, I guess. Writing is tough for me. I mean I can write. I write songs constantly. I just tend to hate them. Pretty much every one of them.
That’s surprising. I can see why you may be self-conscious about the writing maybe, because your songs are BRUTALLY honest. But I think that’s what makes your writing stand apart. Don’t doubt your writing man!
I appreciate you saying that. Performing is really hard for me as well. I hate it before I go on stage. Once I’m on stage, I’m good. I get in my groove and it’s fine. But man, everything that happens before that is the worst. To the point where it’s almost like I’ll talk myself out of shows before they happen sometimes.
Damn man. That is crazy to me.
I think that part of it is that my musical style is so different from most of the artists that I play shows with. If I’m playing a show with like Cole Chaney or Morgan Wade for example, I just can’t help but wonder if the folks that came out to see them will care to hear my stuff. If they’ll give a shit.
I can understand that. But trust me buddy, they give a shit!
Ha! I appreciate that man.
You mentioned Ralph Stanley. What other artists did you listen to early on?
Well, that’s about the only bluegrass influence I had back then. I mean my favorite band in the world is The Grateful Dead. I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember. I was always into jam bands. I loved the way they could take a 3-minute song and stretch it into a 10-minute song that you really feel for the entire 10 minutes. I’ve always loved songwriters, so John Prine of course was a big influence on me. I listened to a lot of things. My dad was a HUGE music fanatic. So, from the get-go he was kinda showing me everything. He showed me all the great classic rock artists at an early age, deep cuts and everything. I was surrounded by… I mean for fun we would literally drive around and listen to music for hours at a time. I grew up with music all around me. I really can’t remember a time in my life that I ever didn’t love music.
With all that music around you, did you have any idea that you’d be making music one day?
I would daydream. I would sit around and just imagine what it would be like to be the one playing in front of millions of people. Just imagine what it would feel like to be fronting the biggest band in the world. I don’t know why. It was just a thing, I guess. Everyone wanted to be a baseball player or a football player. I never wanted that, even though I love sports. My dream from when I was a small kid all the way up til’ I was an adult was to one day be making music for people.
When you play a room full of people now, how does it live up to that childhood dream?
Honestly, even just walking out to play music for 10 people is the wildest experience of my life, because those 10 people want to be there. The reality of that dream really set in for me the first time I walked on a stage, and I wasn’t playing cover tunes. I was playing my songs, and people were there to specifically see me play my own songs. That show, I mean there may have been maybe 20 people in the whole place. But it was wild to me that they cared. They weren’t calling out requests. They wanted to hear what I had to say. To this day I get cold chills just talking about it. I still think its wild. I get nervous every time.
You’ve only been playing music professionally for a few years really. What were you doing before? What led you down that path?
After Highschool, I was working kinda shitty jobs really. Just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I was gonna go to college to wrestle, but I blew my knee out, and they dropped all of my offers. After that happened, I just kind of bounced around. I thought I wanted to be a mechanic, but it didn’t make me happy. I worked with disabled people which was great, but I thought the industry was just shitty. I auditioned for The Voice because friends always wanted me to try it, and I actually got sent to California and made it kinda far. Met some great musicians out there that I’m still friends with today.
Once I got voted off that show, I came home and within a week I’d written ‘500’. I only had maybe 2-3 songs before that. I just started writing songs like a madman. Within the first year I was pretty much full-time. But for the last 3 years or so I’ve been a full-time musician. I just never looked back.
I like asking about that transition. From working a regular gig to making music. The answer is different for everyone.
It’s a hard transition to make. Everything is on you, really. It can be terrifying. Hell, I sit around and doubt it regularly! It’s really hard for me to actually continue to do it because I just feel worthless some days. I feel unfulfilled sometimes and wonder if I should be doing more with my life. It’s a really weird thing for me, personally. It’s a scary thing for me, just knowing that I’m not guaranteed a career in this. So far, it’s working out for me well, and I’m very thankful. But there’s always a doubt in my head that I guess comes down to lack of confidence, getting nervous before shows and stuff like that. It’s one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.
I think self-doubt is natural. Most of us wonder (to some extent) whether what we’re doing with our lives is worthwhile.
That’s true. It’s tough for all of us, I guess!
There’s not a lot of your music out there just yet. But in 2020 you dropped the 3-song Sonic Lounge Studios Session EP. How did that release come about?
Ha! That was actually pretty random. I was in Ohio, tracking a couple songs for a pop-rock project I was doing at the time. It was called Easy Rugby. It was a cool project that an artist from Cincinnati asked me to be a part of. So, we were just tracking some songs in the studio just said “Hey man we have a couple extra minutes. Why don’t you get in there and sing some songs?”. I mean it was 11 in the morning and I had just walked in for the day. I just jumped in there and ran through 3 songs really quick. When I was done, he said “Sounds great man! I think we should mix these down, and you can have them.” He had them to me the next day and I had them released about a week later. Totally a random-type thing. At the time, those were pretty new songs too.
The first time I heard ‘Double Life’, I remember thinking that it just had to be autobiographical. Such a detailed description of that predicament. Haha I gotta ask, did you make that one up?
Wow. Haha That’s wild to me! Actually, yes. ‘Double Life’ is about an old band mate of mine. He was going through some real heartbreak. He was in love with a married woman, and she just couldn’t love him back. I wrote a song about it because I felt bad for him at the time. Just everything he was going through.
The first song you ever released, ‘Realize’, had that vibe to me as well. The first time I heard that one I just knew that there was no way it was fiction. Those lyrics cut so deep, dude.
So, ‘Realize’ is a song I don’t play. I don’t like to play that one too much. That was the first song I ever wrote.
Really? That’s a surprise.
The first one, man! I wrote that song when I was just out of high school. Nobody really asks me about that one. It was basically a combination of everything bad thing that had ever happened to me up to that point in my life. I had no idea that I could even write a song before that one. That was my first attempt.
Damn. That’s crazy. Jeremy Pinnell and Arlo McKinley have that same type of honesty their work and they’re from Cincy as well. Is that style a product of the Cincinnati scene? Who were your influences up there, locally?
So, I didn’t actually move to Cincinnati until about 3 years ago. I kind of got lucky getting into the scene that I did, because of Alexis Faye. I had a video go viral and JJ Waters reached out and asked me to play a show with Abe Partridge at Jewel City Barber Shop in Huntington, West Virginia. It was my first show outside of Ohio. Alexis found me there and wanted to manage me right away. She gave me that push into the Cincinnati scene.
Prior to that, I was playing shows around Chillicothe, Ohio. Tyler Childers used to play Steiner’s Speak Easy in Chillicothe. I played the same venue before he did, technically haha! It was called The Thirsty Fox, back when I was playing there. Tara Gillum bought it and renamed it. She got Tyler and Colter wall and all those guys to play the circuit out there. But anyway, the local influence on me was a good friend of mine named Zac McFadden. To this day, I cover his songs every time I go on stage. He’s the number one reason that I cared about playing acoustic music. He’s from my hometown of Bainbridge, Ohio. I played football with his brothers. He and his family saw talent in me. They heard me singing music all the time and just said, “You’re playing shows with Zac.”. They booked shows for me to open for Zac all over Chillicothe. I started writing my own songs because of him. He’s a guy that everyone should know of. He writes the best songs I’ve ever heard. I started playing folk music specifically because of Zac. Look up Zac McFadden and The Speakeasy Band on Spotify and check him out!
What’s the future looking like for you, Nolan? Is there a full album on the horizon?
Absolutely! I have a full production album coming. We actually recorded it in Spring, 2021. Last year, I went down to demo some songs in Louisville to pitch to Thirty Tigers, because they had interest in me. That’s where I met the producer of my record, Britton Patrick Morgan. Patrick heard the songs and grabbed me. He said ‘Lets record the album. Who cares about pitching it? Let’s just put a fucking full-length album out!”. We went down and recorded it with Dave Rowe in his home studio. Just a great space. Dave used to play upright bass for Johnny Cash. I had Sean Sullivan engineer it. Sean is mastering it as well. He’s worked on Sturgill Simpson records and Tyler Childers records and lots of others. He’s incredible, man. It’s a full-length album, and we hope to have it out by the end of the year. I’m really ready to see what the world thinks of it y’know. Been a long time coming.
Well Nolan thanks for doing this, dude! Pumped for the record and it was cool as hell getting to know ya man!
Oh man, I really appreciate you wanting to do this! These types of things still blow my mind haha. That people want to talk to me about my music. Its wild to me! Thank you, man.