The growlers brooks nielsen wife

Interviews

Plenty of words could describe the one-on-one interview I had with The Growlers frontman and alternative musician Brooks Nielsen, but the only one best chosen for this situation would be “starstruck.” After parting ways from the band in 2020, the tropical cowboy from La La Land ditched all publicity and hunkered down to focus on what truly matters. “I wasn’t ready to get interviewed, but we’re past that now,” says Nielsen. “I think it’s time to get back out there.” Now, with his tour on the way to promote his new solo album A Ride I’m Waiting For, it was about time to shed some light on what’s been happening. So Nielsen reached out to me personally (after a few months of email exchanges) to give SLUG Magazine and his fans the inside scoop on his music, family and future projects. Yeah, we’re pretty much best friends now. 

Throughout his life, Nielsen had a calling with music. His earliest inspirations would come from surf and skateboarding films, harkening back to Southern California roots. In the search for his own sound, he would jump from friend group to friend group. “To the stoners, the punks, the greasers … I didn’t want to claim one scene,” says Nielsen. In his early 20s, Nielsen would form the band The Growlers, concocting a psychedelic blend of garage blues and whitewashed surf rock. “A few years after high school, I started [The Growlers]. I’m surprised that this barely-controlled chaos lasted this long,” he says. For the next decade, the band would release five studio albums, including Chinese Fountain, whose 10 year anniversary this year will follow a live release. 

The jam sessions and parties drew out their wreckloose lifestyle as a balancing act. “We started a band to party not to work, we became road dogs and began touring,” says Nielsen, reflecting on old times. Things would take a drastic turn in 2020, however, when the band was forced off the road mid-tour due to the COVID-19 pandemic and band issues that Nielsen refer

The last year has been all change for The Growlers, in particular for frontman Brooks Nielsen. Within the space of just over twelve months, the California outfit have rounded up touring 2014’s successful ChineseFountain, seen Nielsen get married and lose two band members while switching to Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records (one of whom, bassist Anthony Braun Perry, may still return). It’s not been an easy time for the frontman and his band (now consisting of himself, and guitarists Matt Taylor and Kyle Stratka), but they’ve managed to overcome a whole host of obstacles and recently put out the career-defining CityClub. It ditches their washed-out Beach Goth sonic musings, replacing them instead with groove-laden rhythms, huge choruses and a slick production sheen for which only Julian Casablancas could be responsible. We caught up with Brooks ahead of The Growlers’ sold out show at the Paradiso Noord in Amsterdam.

Hey Brooks. Before I get down to talking about City Club, I just want to talk about the time leading up to it – your transition from Everloving Records to Cult. How did that come about?
Brooks: I’m not sure specifically how things happened date-wise. We met Julian briefly before shows and when he was in LA he bumped into my wife. He said to her, “oh, how are The Growlers doing? Are they making any money yet?” and she said no. She brought it up to me and said he wanted to work with us. We went from there, to be honest. We’d been with Everloving for a long time since the beginning, but they wanted to shift from being a label to going into management. Because of that, we wanted to go to a new label. We had trouble with that at first, because there wasn’t too much demand or whatever. It was about time for us to move on, though, so it all worked out with Julian. We switched label and manager and it felt great. Every time we make changes in the band it’s good: new blood, even just for a m

Uncompromising, enigmatic, and wildly ambitious, Brooks Nielsen (lead singer of Southern California surf-psych icons The Growlers) is proud to announce his first full-length solo album One Match Left: a double-vinyl, twenty-song journey into the heart of darkness, and toward the light that eventually remains. 

“There’s happiness in there,” says Nielsen, speaking from his Los Angeles home. “The bands that I like have a sense of humor, like Television Personalities or Jonathan Richman, but there’s tragedy too. That’s the old theatrical tradition.” One Match Left showcases these aspects in epic fashion, with Nielsen playing the role of carnival barker, lullaby crooner, and rock & roll priest, depending on the track. It’s actually Nielsen’s first time around without his partners from The Growlers; he’s now joined by old friends Christopher Darley (guitarist for Father John Misty) and Levi Prairie on songwriting duties. 

No stranger to the emotional landscapes of modern pop life, producer Michael Andrews expands the songs from the theatrical and into the cinematic. From his Elgin Park Recordings studio in Glendale, Andrews makes chart-topping hits (like the song “Mad World” from his soundtrack to Donnie Darko) and cult favorites (he scored the entirety of Freaks & Geeks and Pete Davidson’s King of Staten Island). “He’s an encyclopedia and extremely talented,” says Nielsen of Andrews. “Which meant he could be a great commander in the studio.” 

Assembling a core team of himself on guitar and bass, Robert Walter (TheGreyboy Allstars) on keys, and Joey Waronker (Beck, Atoms For Peace) on drums, Andrews infuses the material with a lush palette, more akin to Harry Nilsson and Serge Gainsbourg than anything we’ve heard before from Nielsen. Album opener “All That You’ll See i