Meet Nick Best

We recently connected with Nick Best and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nick, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

Let me start off with a content warning, I’m going to be discussing suicide and some similarly sensitive subjects.

I’ve struggled with some shade of anxiety and depression for all of my adult life. It’s been quite debilitating at times and often hampers my sense of purpose both as an artist and as a person. This struggle was dramatically recontextualized a few years ago when my best friend and close partner lost her fight with depression. She was a talented, dedicated, consummate musician and our respective artistry was always a tentpole of that relationship. My purpose in playing music before meeting her is lost to me now; habit I guess. After our meeting that purpose was largely her herself. Beyond playing for just for my own idle amusement, most of what drove me was her. Either jealousy and admiration of her own ability or just the excitement when she would come over and I would show her what I was working on. She was incredibly validating and supportive in this role. So naturally, when she died, my sense of musical purpose shifted wildly.
After this tumult, I actually played more music. I was adrift on a tide of emotions so immense, no combination of sentences has a hope of containing it. So I turned to music, the language that says more than words ever could. In fact, the day it happened I went to a close mutual friend’s house, perhaps the only other person on earth who felt this loss the same as I did, and sure enough we ended up playing music together. It’s just what we do. Without really thinking I’d started playing the first song I ever learned on guitar, my goto comfort song. We broke down when we got to the chorus and were reminded of the loss as the lyrics left our mouths: “How I wish, how I wish you were here…” Funny how that was the song I happened to instinctively play, but that’s the best part of music to me. There’s a real chance I wouldn’t be here now to spin this yarn if I didn’t have music as a tool to digest and express that overwhelming pain.
* * *
A lot of my professional musical experience has been playing in pit orchestras for musical theater, usually on bass. Many of which were for schools, colleges, and amateur theater groups. As a bassist, I’m happy with a supporting role, and quickly found just how supportive I could truly be for some less-experienced performers. I could slightly change my rhythm comping if certain sections tended to rush or drag. I would try to pick notes specifically to help younger ears stay tuned to the chords. As my skills developed I started to pick notes, rhythm, or articulation pointedly to support and emphasize the libretto itself, as if the actor’s words alone carried some preternatural power. If done correctly, not a single listener would ever notice how much I was doing. If I did my job, the audience would only feel better connected to what’s on stage, and the actors would have felt freer and more confident. This process developed into my thesis as a bassist. To quietly enhance the overall product. To give everything to something that most will think of as nothing.

Fast forwards to today-I moved to Nashville and started a band with my friends. This framework for playing my instrument has expanded tenfold as I actually have a spoon in the pot for the music being written. But now there is also something else. Now I know just how viscerally important music can be for someone going through the worst moments of their life, or the best moments. I no longer need to write my parts to support my fellow musicians, and I can devote it all to supporting the messages of the songs. I write my parts specifically to gestalt the otherwise indescribable feelings I encountered when I first heard whatever chord, texture, or passage I’m evoking. Often making choices down to how our singers enunciate a given word, let alone the word choice itself. It gives me continual media for my own emotional expression, it augments the messaging of the song itself and, my hope is, that it might give someone else a tool for navigating their own struggles and tribulations. Someone who may really need that tool.
I have no idea if all this cerebral nonsense has ever made a real difference but I do know one thing: that we have a devoted fan on the other side of the world who has endured through some of the worst illness one can experience and that dear person made a point to reach out and share that they felt our song ‘Retrograde’ helped them push through to the other side. A song that started from a few chords on my bass I originally had played for that lost friend of mine. Chords whose dark, brooding texture helped me express the hopelessness of my grief, and now, apparently, helped someone else feel hope. Hope in contrast to the hopelessness of the struggle they pushed themselves through. And they got through.

The prompt for this story was “How did you find your purpose?” I regret that I haven’t come close to answering it. Rather, this is the story of how my purpose found me.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am a musician doing his best to keep his calendar full. I’d consider myself cross-disciplinary but electric bass is certainly where most of my focus, and most of the gigs, tend to center around. A few years ago I decided to transition from the career as a session player in New York to moving down here to Nashville, Tennessee to see where that could lead. Shortly after moving, I started in with a small indie/alternative band focusing on originals; which can sometimes be a tough sell here in the land of the cover band. But we’ve stuck around because not only are we continuing to write better music by our own metric, but the growing base of listeners seem to agree.
Powers and the People is the name of the group and it’s essentially become a full-time job for all of us. We currently have 8 original tunes published, the most recent being “Hotel Bar.” A few weeks from publication of this article, we will be releasing “Cliche,” a song we’re particularly excited about because it will be the first product from a week of recording at Blackbird studios in Berry Hill, back in June. It took no small amount of luck and privilege for us to have the opportunity to track there and it still feels like we’re just playing dress-up as ‘real’ musicians for that experience. But as these seasoned recording professionals told us, it’s not pretend, and we were there for a reason. The rest of the year (and beyond!) worth of releases will all come from these amazing few days and I think the sheer joy and love of our craft carries through on these recordings. And of course the exceptional quality equipment, procedure, and technique applied will also make itself apparent. So we are all beyond excitement to get these tunes out and shared with our audience. Keep an ear out because we have some good stuff cooking!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Be a good hang. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Be. Nice. To. Be. Around. Being fun, interesting, or even just basically polite will do SOOOOOO much more for your call back than your skill ever will. You can’t phone it in of course, but do not undervalue how far good manners and the ability to read a room will take you. Believe you me, I know being charismatic is not a gift we all just have, and it will feel horribly uncomfortable at times as you try. Be yourself, but be ready to push yourself out there and actively practice and cultivate social skills. Any and every connection you make could be that one that makes the big difference, don’t miss the boat.

related to the above…

2. Be realistic. About yourself, your product, and about the market. It’s fairly obvious to most that being cocky and egotistical will turn most people off pretty quickly, but also don’t fall into the humility trap either. Speaking from experience, downplaying your experience and ability is usually just egoism in a trench-coat and phony mustache. This trap can often be worse than being too self-assured because your perspective clients may just believe you. Worse yet, you may start to believe it yourself, and that is a pit with little opportunity for escape. And always remember, with patience, that the market viability of your product has exactly 0.00% correlation with how passionate you were about creating it. We always say earnestness makes the product better, (in fact, I kinda just did last question), but the earnestness truly matters not at all for the product itself; it really just effects our ability to market it. Be prepared for the possibility that, like for most creatives, success in selling our artistry is very rarely in the particular shade or genre we would actually prefer. Be true to yourself, but also remember to love the process, and be realistic as to if those forms of success are as gratifying as you hoped they would be.

last one is big, and heady…
3. Find the boundary between YOU and the BRAND. You can have a deeply fulfilling and successful life in the arts by just being you, but you won’t have a successful or fulfilling CAREER without a brand. Some of us are lucky, and the brand just is us, so it’s second nature. Some are unlucky, and the brand is also just us, but we lose ourselves to it completely. You need to draw clear borders and actively cultivate these two separate identities if you want your art to pay the bills.
You need to be YOU because if you’re not, you won’t love what you are creating, and eventually you will stop creating. But you have to have a BRAND because if your product is not actively engaging a larger audience, you will be selling only to yourself. ‘Selling out’ or ‘appealing to a common denominator’ are always phrases used to describe those who are selling their art, by those who aren’t. This is the difference between amateur and professional. Neither is the better. ‘Amateur’ used to be a very respected term because it describes those who do their craft purely for the love of it. And if that’s you, that’s beautiful and valid. But if sharing your art and being willing to tweak it in order to get it in front of larger and larger audiences is important, that’s beautiful and valid to. The trick is knowing where you draw that line. Calling someone a ‘sell-out’ as an insult always comes from someone who hasn’t had that conversation with themselves yet. If you want your creativity to be all you do, you need it to take care of your living needs. In order for that to happen, it needs to be a career. And if you want your career to be successful, you must be ready to make changes. Understand that the BRAND is not YOU, but both are intrinsically linked. Allow yourself that discussion and you will find so much more joy in your creativity, whichever branch you end up taking.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Let me start with an honorable mention to “The Mastery of Music” or “The Inner Game of _____” books both by Barry Green. As well as “The Music Lesson” by Victor Wooten and “the Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. These are all tentpoles of music and arts curricula for very good reason but I think I can go a cut deeper if you’re this far into this article.
Read “Measurement” by Paul Lockhart. It’s a book about mathematics, geometry specifically and yes, I’m serious. I certainly do have the type of brain that takes to puzzles and logic well and my mind didn’t rebound off of maths in school as most others do. So I’ll wear that bias on my sleeve. However this book makes no assumptions about the reader’s aptitude, or interest even, and builds up completely from scratch. I recommend this book because it is the first attempt to teach the subject correctly. School children are subjected the dull grey parking lot of rules and memorization because there is so much already built that much of life depends on the context of knowing at least some basics like counting and arithmetic (adding, subtraction, etc.). But it neglects the awesome unimaginable beauty of this subject: because all the defines it deep down is it is a metaphysical universe where the only rule is that there are no true rules. No matter how abstract you get in art, there is always some rule to follow. You can wax esoteric in any form of art but if it carries any label at all, ‘music’, ‘illustration’, ‘poetry’, there inherently is some rule, some box that work fits inside. When you remove all layers of labeling and rigor, all that is left is mathematics. It is the ancestor to it all.

It earnestly breaks my heart how many people say they ‘hate maths’ because of their experience in school and daily life. From counting and arithmetic, to vector calculus and multidimensional algebra, these are all just particular shades in a horizonless spectrum of impossible colors. To say one ‘hates’ or ‘isn’t any good’ at maths because they struggled with trigonometry in 10th grade is akin to thinking you ‘hate’ Lego because you didn’t know you don’t have to just build the Millennium Falcon over and over again. This book sits you down with a handful of random bricks and just says ‘go.’ I’m sure the mathematicians and artists are both rolling their eyes at this point and I am deeply misunderstanding both but I really don’t care. My perception and love of mathematics informs my artistry more than anything ever could. “Measurement.” Paul Lockhart. Give it a try.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://powersandthepeople.com
• Instagram: @powersandthepeople @nicks.best.music
• Facebook: @powersandthepeople
• Twitter: lol
• Youtube: @powersandthepeople
• Soundcloud: /user-112910267 or search for, you guessed it, Powers and the People
• Other: Also on TikTok, I dare you to guess our handle

Image Credits

Phoebe Frank, (self), Alaina Milukas, Marian Matthis, Melody Best