The Wrecks' Nick Anderson Stays Out of His Comfort Zone

Nick Anderson has to embrace vulnerability while writing the lyrics that will become songs by The Wrecks, the band he founded and has fronted for the past seven years.

“If you're someone who is willing to be vulnerable and put their pride aside in order to put out into the world very honest, real feelings and be honest with themselves, that’s where real art comes from,” he says. “If you are only writing about things that you approve of everyone hearing, or protecting your image or your one-on-one relationships, what are you protecting?”

The Wrecks play the Fox Theatre in Boulder on Sunday, October 16.



The band’s sophomore record, Sonder, which was written, composed and recorded by Anderson, took a large degree of inspiration from a messy breakup — always a messy topic, but one richly mined by artists. It’s a stylistic departure for the Wrecks and has a more pop sensibility than the rock and roll and pop punk of the band’s earlier output, but still emotional in its tone. Anderson admits he was feeling angsty at the time. He’s looking forward to getting into the studio with the rest of the band for a followup.

“All I did was start writing in minor keys,” he says. “That was the main difference. You’ll find very few songs in our discography prior to Sonder that were written in minor keys — maybe two.”

Anderson says that when he writes, he still has a moment or two where he will ask himself, “Oh, God, should I really say that?” But it doesn’t happen that often anymore, unless he’s crossing into some unexplored thematic territory.

“Do I want to mention someone’s daddy issues in a song and open them up to that?” he muses. “And I’m like ‘No,” but then later in the day, I say, ‘No, I have to.’ There’s still that struggle. Do I want to say something political in a song? There are still those moments.”

Of course, a line could also sound corny, and there can be a fine line between daring and dumb. Earlier in his career, he worried about his grandmother hearing him swear in a song, or his parents hearing personal details from his life committed to song. He feels that hesitancy fading as he writes more and more.

“There is also an art to the balance of why you are being vulnerable,” he notes. “What are you saying overall? In some ways, my favorite writers don’t necessarily check themselves on that. It’s subconscious. By the time you write a song and put it out, people are telling you what it’s about.”

Among other artists, Anderson enjoys the writing of Max Bemis of Say Anything, the Front Bottoms and Modern Baseball. He grew up listening to pop punk, which tends to be fairly direct, lyrically speaking, but he’s also taken inspiration from writers like Kurt Cobain, whose lyrics were largely cut up and rearranged bits of poetry. The original meaning is destroyed, but that type of writing also conveys a lot of emotion. He’s looking for a bridge between the two styles.

“As I grew up and my music tastes matured from the pop punk I grew up on and I started discovering alternative music,” he says, “I wanted to put those two worlds together.”

The band’s latest single, “The Things You Make Me Do,” was released in late September and will appear on the deluxe version of Sonder. Anderson says the new version of the record, which includes three new songs and remixes, is due out at the end of October, but he’s still finishing production on it, so the release date is uncertain.

The song was actually written in 2018 but kept getting pushed to the back of the release queue. “It’s a song we really liked and wanted to put out, but the timing was never right for some reason,” he says. “Whenever there’s a song you really like, it’s more prone to not coming out, because everyone wants to give it a ‘correct release,' and it never comes out.”

Anderson says the song, like much of Sonder, sprang from a contentious romantic relationship in which he once found himself thoroughly ensconced.

“You're confused about what the other person wants from you,” he says. “What they want you to be, how they want you to act. When you're given a little room to breathe, you can do a lot of those things.”

He admits that the contrarian in him often complicates matters. No one likes to be put in a box and have a set of rules declared, especially by a significant other. That kind of toxic relationship usually fails in the end anyway.

“This won’t work unless everyone is their authentic self,” he says. “When you are really into someone, it’s hard to walk away from that. You tell yourself that it will work out if you just do what they want you to do, and it will be worth it. But it’s not fair to yourself and the other person.”

Some people might let their pride or stubbornness get in the way of immortalizing an ex in song, but Anderson found it cathartic. He was carrying around a lot of emotion he needed to shed. Doing so also goes back to his artistic maxim of being honest with yourself.

“If you don’t think about them and don’t write about them, then okay,” he says. “But if you don’t allow yourself to write about them because you are too stubborn or prideful, then you probably aren’t an artist.”

The Wrecks, 8 p.m. Sunday, October 16, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th Street, Boulder. Tickets are $25-$27.50.