Exclusive: Franz Nicolay Speaks (EP, Too)

Hold Steady mainstay follows up Major General with 10" EP - read the Blurt interview, conducted by A.D. Amorosi, below.

By Blurt Staff

Hold Steady and World / Inferno Friendship Society member Franz Nicolay will begin a two-week tour of Germany and Austria tomorrow with Sweden's Moneybrother. The mustachioed multi-instrumentalist is playing shows in support of his new solo offering, St. Sebastian of the Short Stage, issued by Team Science.

The four-song EP is available in both 10-inch vinyl and digital formats. The label has pressed 500 copies (200 clear, 300 black) and each record includes a free mp3 download for all the songs, plus a pullout poster insert and an exclusive new short story by Nicolay entitled "Paraska Mikhailivna Is A Witch." To grab a copy of the 10-inch, go here. Or if you prefer mp3s, you can take a quick trip to iTunes for a digital version of the EP.

Featuring artwork by Nicholas Gazin, St. Sebastian Of The Short Stage comes on the heels of Nicolay's acclaimed solo debut, Major General. The four brand new tracks include a collaboration with the Dresden Dolls on a cover of Jonathan Richman's "New England," a Watchmen-inspired tribute to a retired superhero, and two songs self-described as "bleeding heart weepies."

Nicolay is currently streaming two songs from the EP on his Myspace page. You can check out tour dates there too.

Meanwhile, about a year ago prior to the release of Major General in the December 2008 digital-only issue of BLURT, we ran an interview with Nicolay. For your reading pleasure, we repeat it (this time, in vastly expanded format) below. Enjoy!

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Franz Nicolay's Words of Wisdom

By A.D. Amorosi

Franz Nicolay isn't just another pretty face with a handlebar mustache that happens to play the accordion. (Franz plays the accordion. Not the mustache.) He's the most debonair multi-instrumental Brooklyn-based composer famous for playing tickling ivories for his pals in the frenetic cabaret act The World/Inferno Friendship Society and the equally fevered-but-poppier The Hold Steady. Plus Nicolay's played a bunch with The Dresden Dolls, recently co-founded the Anti-Social Music (an avant-garde composer/performer collective) and become part of the gypsy-klezmer outfit, Guignol. But Nicolay isn't so busy that he can't finish the solo cycle he demo-ed on his show-sold 2007 CD Black Rose Paladins. Nicolay then dropped Major General on Pennsylvania's Fistolo label with Dresden Doll drummer Brian Viglione and pals from Demander, Nanuchka, and World/Inferno assisting.

NICOLAY: I picked up the accordion after my father's German grandfather brought him one from the homeland in the early 50s so grandson could play him polkas and waltzes. As a good child of his times, my dad rebelled - to the point where he sliced the bellows with a butcher knife to keep from going to lessons. To his credit, he kept the thing around, and I picked it up in high school when I got obsessed with (Dylan's) Basement Tapes.

I never really had an opportunity to play the accordion in a band until I joined World/Inferno in 2001. I joined as a keyboard player, but after two rehearsals, I thought, "You know, this is the kind of band that could really use an accordion". They said yes immediately and then I faked it until I could play it for real.

Most bands, I find, don't know that they need an accordion until they hear it on their songs, then they crave it everywhere.

What kind of man does it take to grow my sort of a mustache? One very secure in his self-image. Who'd've guessed Greg Norton was the straight guy in Husker Du? The mistake most hipster-come-latelys to the handlebar scene make is that you can't just grow it, you have to organize your whole wardrobe around it. It doesn't work with Converse. I'm looking at you, Nick Gazin.

My brand of moustache wax is Cowboy Stache Wax from Montana. I had been experimenting with brands for years - regular pomade; Clubman the name brand you could find it in old-school drug stores. The problem with them, for a performer, is that once you started to get hot and sweaty, they'd melt. My then-girlfriend vacationed at her family's ranch in Montana and picked up a tin at this car dealership-slash-saddle store somewhere in the middle of nowhere and brought it back for me to try. I've been ordering it from them online ever since.

There is virtually nothing that I wouldn't do. As the great John Barrymore once said, "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." And I've made a life where all my regrets are ones of action, not inaction.

I co-founded Anti-Social Music. No. It's not so doggone anti-social. The idea is that the music we're playing - new chamber music - has a reputation as a room-clearing racket. We thought, metal, free jazz, all this extreme music has lost its cachet as parent- and friend-alienator, what if you showed up at your holiday party and put on Diamanda Galas? Or Xenakis? And, while you're at it, come to our show and have a drink or ten.

Our meetings are productive at the beginning and increasingly less productive as they continue - they tend to trail off toward the end. A good meeting - World/Inferno rehearsals used to be like this too - is more like a scheduled drinking bout with friends you'd just as soon be hanging out with anyway, with the added benefit of you occasionally get some work done. Jean Cook is the most likely to bring cake. Pat Muchmore is the most likely to bring a pint of Jack. Andrea La Rose is the most likely to bring ocarinas in five keys.

I don't have the foggiest idea what the The Hold Steady boys or World Inferno think of my solo stuff. They came to see one show I did in Hoboken while we were making Stay Positive but never said word one about the record. One guy just got stumbling drunk and told my friend he was the most famous guy in her cell phone. Not the most communicative bunch, those boys. Terricloth said he always gets emotional when he hears other people singing his lyrics. Hess said he only wanted to hear "World/Inferno" once through, which I said was sort of the point.

I'm not afraid of losing  the momentum THS garnered in 2008. We took a step back already when Tad got sick in October. But I don't think this will affect THS touring and scheduling in the slightest - I'm small potatoes in that organization. I just told our booking agent to go ahead and assume that I'll tour whenever the Hold Steady is off. It's not like I'm the main story in the Hold Steady novel, you know?

The biggest shock regarding how big Hold Steady was came when I got the text from Tad that we'd be opening for the Rolling Stones. They are one of the small handful of bands that still have that "wow" factor.

I was a strange little child - I grew up in almost complete cultural isolation, in a mountain cabin in New Hampshire with no electricity or plumbing. I really didn't hear pop music until about 1989 or so.

I had cassette series of "Lives of the Great Composers" - narrated biographies interspersed with clips of the greatest hits - that I listened to obsessively, and decided I'd grow up to be a Great Composer, capital G, capital C. I'd cover my ears when my dad put classic rock radio on. "Ow, Dad, this is too loud." "Someday, son, I bet you'll like rock music." "No way, Dad!"

I think you're exaggerating how many opening dates we do, but the reality is, being a full-time musician really means FULL TIME. You gotta keep working. It's a strange lifestyle that operates somewhere at the nexus of art, craft, and factory job. You can be precious about it, but you still gotta show up.

I missed the shows where THS opened for the Get Up Kids. I hear that was a culture clash. I'd have to say the Kings of Leon in London was a difficult band to open for - for a band whose press styled them as straight-outta-the-hills Southern boys they sure had the most rock-star attitude of anyone I've ever dealt with. Their security team - they had a bodyguard for each band member - locked us in our dressing room because "The band needs the stairs". And their front row was all bored models. Not very rock, boys.

I'm not surprised theater festival organizations like the Fringe Festival love us. How many nascent theatrical productions can promise an instant crowd of hundreds of teenagers? On the other hand, though, what do you do with hundreds of drunk teenagers in a seated theatre - they don't always think as hard about that.

I believe Major General me fresh perspectives on what I do with THS and W/IFS. And I don't care if it does or doesn't. And I am being selfish. I think it'll help me blow off some steam. I think it'll keep me from playing live with Inferno, probably, this year, just for scheduling reasons. It's frustrating being sort of the George Harrison of the Hold Steady, especially when it's become such an all-consuming time commitment, so it's already good to have another outlet for my songs, which, let's face it, are not always in the main stream of the Hold Steady river. I may have to count the first THS B-sides collection as a Franz Nicolay record.

I never wake in a cold sweat trying to figure out which of my ideas fit what ensemble. It's usually pretty obvious. And sometimes I can treat it like a project, like, "Ok, time to sit down and write three songs for the new Hold Steady record. Oh, only two make it? OK, let me see if I can re-purpose that one and see if someone else will bite. No song left behind!" In theory, it's ideal to have multiple outlets and die with every (decent) note recorded.

I was a average-to-mediocre baseball player and skiier until I moved to New York. I'll kill you at ping-pong.

Dresden Dolls? We've been friends for an awfully long time - I think I saw their second-ever show in New York, at a cabaret night my friend Professor Jef used to run, for maybe thirty people, then my girlfriend hit on Amanda - or was it vice-versa? - and it was buddies thereafter. We share an aesthetic, musically and sartorially. They're serious and focused people. And I think sometimes it helps them to have a neutral third party as a foil. One time I flew to Paris with them to play one song on one show, a showcase for European promoters - their label boss had happened to see me do the Jacques Brel song "Amsterdam" with them at a coffeeshop at Bennington College, and said, "Bring the accordion guy. I'll pay for it." Same guy who funded the Inferno acapella project, incidentally. I shared a bottle of champagne with their manager and never really got on top of the jetlag.

Viglione is someone I always knew wanted to do a record or six with. He and Yula are the greatest rhythm section that never happened in a regular band. Both of them are among the most extraordinary musicians I've ever met - on any instrument, without obvious effort, and with an unerring generosity and fierce drive for perfection regardless of circumstance. We would watch the Dolls and wonder if Amanda knew what she had in Brian. Still sometimes do.

One singularity I wish someone had on tape was myself, Terricloth, and the Dolls doing Kurt Weill's "Tango Ballad" at Bowery Ballroom five years or so ago. What a performance. Jack and Amanda were born to do that song.

The last book that inspired me to madness was Good Night, Sweet Prince, a biography of John Barrymore by his boon friend, my favorite writer, the fantastically purple Gene Fowler.

The biggest differences sonically and spiritually between Black Rose Paladins and Major General is that Paladins is demos for the record: one-take solo run-throughs of the songs so I'd have something to give the band, and something to sell at the shows. Major General is the proper record. That said, I'm keeping BRP available in digital form because there are a few songs that didn't make it on Major General, and because I'll be touring without a band and maybe people who see that would want to hear the songs done that way.

I knew I wanted to start doing solo shows again - if only so I'd never have to turn down a gig again.

I knew that if I ever did a record my dream band included Brian Viglione and Yula. Jared was kind of the x-factor; I knew him from Demander but I knew his band mates way better, and it wasn't until we did "Jeff Penalty" that I realized the kind of spark he could be. A very strange fellow.

In regard to "Jeff Penalty" - sometimes a great band is about more than who's standing the front of it.

Major General. I knew I had limited time to make a record, and wanted to turn that into a virtue by trying to capture that elusive moment when really talented musicians are just figuring out their part on a song they don't know very well, but before it's really crystallized. We did two day-long rehearsals, a chaotic show at the Brooklyn DIY warehouse Death By Audio, and three days of tracking and feasting - the studio has an apartment upstairs, so we could stay and cook a proper family-style dinner each night. And mostly, we got it.

In the future, Major General will be a signifier - if it's Franz Nicolay, it's just me; if it's Franz and Major General, I'm bringing a band. I can't promise Brian, Jared, and Yula; everyone's got a lot on their plates. But it might be a woodwind quintet. Or barbershop. Don't assume I'm kidding - you should hear my demo for "Two-Handed Handshake".

Everyone always likes the pre-reknown band better, you know, "Oh you like The Hold Steady? Lifter Puller There's always a reason one band succeeds in one way while other bands succeed in others. Nothing ever burns down by itself. Every fire needs a little bit of help.

On "Do We Not Live in Dreams" I think this might be cribbed from Wordsworth. I was on a Brazilian music kick when I wrote this; I was learning all those Jobim chords.

You can be whoever you want to be, sure, but some roles fit better than others. Excess is not excessive when it is conceived in principle. Except when it gets excessive. That's "Confessions of an Ineffective Casanova."

"Note on a Subway Wall" is the saddest story ever told. We will never run into one another on trains.

Dexys Midnight Runners is one of the great underrated bands of their generation. My string parts are my homage to "Celtic Soul Brothers".

Some of these songs were old songs that I rewrote the lyrics to, because as a 31-year-old sometimes you can't sing the lyrics you wrote as a 22-year-old. This one I felt I had to leave alone in deference to the old me who took himself so seriously. You can't get that back, you know?

"This World Is an Open Door" is a reminder to myself. Somebody once said 'I don't get it, what's so special about hardwood floors?" Clearly you've never gone apartment-hunting in New York.

Am I really "Done Singing"? Not ‘til they pry the banjo from my frozen claws.

My last words for 2008? Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?