Trevor Nikrant
On being surprised by your own work
“Harmonically and rhythmically, I’m always trying to confuse myself a little bit or reach to the very edge of what I can understand.”
I connect with Trevor Nikrant by phone after a Nashville snow storm–a rare treat for the Minnesota-born musician. “It’s always exciting. It never stays for more than 24 hours, and this time it lasted for a whole two days.”
Since moving to Nashville in 2011, Trevor has become an active member of the local DIY/experimental/avant-folk community, regularly performing solo, as a guest artist in friends’ bands, and founding member of The Styrofoam Winos. Trevor’s latest record Tall Ladders (Dear Life Records), released in November 2021, is the second installment of an eventual trilogy started by 2018’s Living in the Kingdom. Tall Ladders is a buoyant, darkly humorous collection; many of the arrangements were layered together over the course of years. “There’s something really ineffable about that. There’s this glue of my life that’s holding the recording together.”
“I still feel like I can't see the end of it.”
Trevor first moved to Nashville from suburban Minneapolis to attend Belmont University for music performance.
“I was doing the performance route sort of by default, but it wasn’t exactly the best fit. Their main focus is training people to be able to go down the street to Music Row and become Nashville session folks. I still use a lot of what I learned from school, and I appreciate what I did get out of it, but that whole track they’re trying to put you on is very specific.”
After leaving Belmont in 2014, Trevor began immersing himself in the local music scene even deeper: continuing to meet other musicians, attending and playing at house shows, and making DIY recordings. Today, Trevor says he feels rooted here. Community is a big reason for that.
“I play a lot in friends’ bands, which I love, and it very much feels like a bartering thing. ‘I’ll play on your record and you’ll play in my live band’ or ‘I’ll record this thing with you and you’ll record it with me,’ back-and-forth, forever. I’ve been totally focused on being here and connected to stuff around me. It feels really natural, and I still feel like I can't see the end of it. I’m always meeting someone new, and I’m glad that is still happening. It’s also nice to know so many people who grew up here who are really rooted and support what’s happening in this scene.”
“We were all close before anything musical was happening.”
Trevor describes the formation of The Styrofoam Winos as a natural evolution rooted in friendship. Trevor befriended bandmate Joey Kenkel on one of his first days at Belmont and met Lauren Turner at a house show she and her roommates were hosting. “We were all close before anything musical was happening.”
This friendship grounded them from the start. “There was a trust between each other from the very beginning in a way that often takes a lot longer to establish. When we did start playing together, there was no agenda. We didn’t go out with any set goals, we didn’t tell each other what specific parts to play on songs. That trust is the best place we could’ve started.”
Trevor says his solo work has been running parallel to the band at the same time. It helps that all of his bandmates also have rich solo projects.
“The band started as an outlet for all of us to essentially do our solo stuff because we weren’t writing as a group yet. Since then, that solo work for each of us has branched off and become its own forest. I have been making recordings ‘just because’ since high school, and that is the root of everything I’m doing now. When I think of my solo world, I think of me in my room in high school doing that same thing.”
“I feel more surprised by myself when I’m paying less attention to what I’m doing, especially at the beginning of making a recording.”
Trevor’s composition process often starts when the mics are turned on.
“For better or worse, it’s how I start writing. I’ll hit record and see what happens and start later layering a bunch of tracks over it and eventually dropping lyrics over it. Once I have a recording going, that is always going to stay a ‘me song.’ There are also songs that I don't record right away because I think they could be Winos songs, and those go right into Wino World instead.
Crafting that environment ideal for discovery and experimentation is a crucial part of Trevor’s approach.
“I feel more surprised by myself when I’m paying less attention to what I’m doing, especially at the beginning of making a recording. When I was first getting into recording myself in high school, I was using this software my neighbor had showed me how to download illegally. I would just put random plug-ins on things, and it wouldn’t even sound like that thing it was supposed to sound like. The feeling I achieved from that was very close to the excitement I felt as a kid around creating something: building things with legos or making videos with my friends. I’m playing with something I don’t fully understand, and I love that.”
Trevor says there’s a challenge to working with songs that come together in this way, particularly performing them live. “Performance feels like a completely different part of my brain than a recording space. There will be a song I’ve finally finished recording over the span of years, and then I’ll have to take that and figure out how to play it in a live setting and teach that to a band. It feels a lot like transcribing someone else’s songs.”
“Even if I’m ready to put a stamp on it, I still have to wait to see if I’m craving for something else.”
Trevor says many of the tracks on Tall Ladders came together over a course of years.
“A year or so ago, I instituted this personal moratorium on starting new tracks. I had so many songs waiting on vocals or to be finished, and I had just gotten to a point where I was feeling so bogged down by just the weight of them being around for so long and on my computer, collecting digital dust.”
That burden to having unfinished work is heavy, but for Trevor, there is an aging that needs to happen to his works-in-progress.
“Even if something is done, I won’t really know until I step away from that recording maybe months later. Part of that is because I’m pretty much always improvising. If I’m writing as I’m recording, I’ll just get into a state of being in that moment, and it’s always really hard to be objective about how that sounds in the moment. By stepping away from it, only then will I know if it’s done or not. Even if I’m ready to put a stamp on it, I still have to wait to see if I’m craving for something else.”
As those tracks age, they also gain a special meaning for Trevor: each recording becomes representative of a specific period of time.“Having those spans of time contained in the recordings makes me feel like it’s getting close to achieving what I’m trying to do, which is to have them be timeless.”
“I don’t think the timing could’ve been more perfect.”
The release of Tall Ladders by Dear Life Records marked the first time Trevor had the backing of a record label. He says it was a dream to have their support.
“It was just so validating and humbling to have anyone hear my music and say, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna put all this work into bringing this into the world.’ It makes me wish I would’ve asked for help sooner, but I don’t think the timing could’ve been more perfect.”
Looking ahead, Trevor has two records in the works.
“I’ve got an album that will complete this trilogy of Living in a Kingdom and Tall Ladders. It feels like a really natural final installment of this particular vein of me experimenting with home recording. I’ll always be doing that in some way, but the way I’ve been doing it throughout my twenties is in the process of evolving.”
After finishing this final installment of the trilogy, he plans to record another album in an entirely different way: a studio.
“It’s a lot to do with how taxing it is, mentally and emotionally, to sit on unreleased stuff for as long as I do. I’m planning on going into a studio with a couple of people and completing it in two or three weekends. I’ve had such great experiences recording in that way for other people’s projects, and I feel like I finally have a grasp of how to do that. I know what my role would be collaborating to make the best of that space and that experience.”
Tall Ladders is available for purchase on cassette, CD, and digital download on Trevor’s Bandcamp. Header photo by Linda Parrott.
