Nick D & The Believers

After learning of Nick D’ & The Believers songwriting method, the construction of their newest single, “Bang Bang”, taken from their upcoming EP of the same name, made perfect sense. Focusing first on the creation of a chorus, the title track simply beams with its robust, driving melody. Not to say that the verses don’t deliver as well — sharply driven by interwoven, intricate rock ‘n rock synths and heavy percussion, the combination punches the air with deliberate, joyful tones. The cornerstone, though, is the raging solo that occurs at around 2:25 — definitely the emotional and instrumental high of the track. Check it out above, and be sure to follow up with the rest of the EP out 8/19! - The Wild Honey Pie

It was roughly a year ago when the Columbus, Ohio-based threesome Nick D’ & The Believers broke onto the music scene with the release of their EP Throwing Stones. Now, with a new EP in the works that bears the name of their eponymous single “Bang Bang,” the alternative-pop rockers release its accompanying video.

Set to a melodic offering of rock synths driven by cohesive percussion energy, the supplemental visuals for the single see the threesome deal with unexpected kidnappings as they dish out some sweet dance moves along the way. - NYLON guys magazine

Bang Bang! That’s not only the name of Nick D And The Believers upcoming EP but also how we feel about their latest track “You Got That Love (YGTL),” which we’re premiering here on ATG today. The Columbus trio’s new gem is a heavenly slice of guitar-led island pop. St. Lucia, Paul Simon, Penguin Prison and Panama Wedding all come to mind when spinning this one. We have a feeling you’ll be hooked after the first listen. - All Things Go

Just for a second there, the opening bars of 'Find A Little Love' by Nick D' and the Believers tricks you into thinking it's a chart pop song, but that illusion is soon shattered. Yes, this has a big pop aspect to it, but very much of the alternative/guitar variety, and it's even slightly experimental with it. Combine it with some big hooks, layers of sound and a catchy beat and you have a winner. - The Sound Of Confusion

With seemingly endless final papers between me and the end of the semester, it's a pretty bleak week in my world. Nick D' and the Believers are giving me some hope with their jam "Throwing Stones." If I open my window and play this song on repeat, it's almost like I'm outside.

Almost. - This Is Our Jam

Hailing from Ohio in the US of A, we stumbled on Nick D & The Believers, proof that stumbling through life can sometimes pay off. Their sugar jam ‘Throwing Stones’ is a band on the verge of something glorious, they fit snugly under the indie-pop umbrella but there is something different floating close to the surface, equal parts gritty, psychedelic and lo-fi there is an undeniable fact that ‘Throwing Stones’ is full of groove with a chorus designed for large masses. - Vulture Magazine

Rock pop indie goodness here by Nick D’ and the Believers. - Audio Drums

INTERVIEW: Nick D’ & The Believers | RIYL: Black Keys, Passion Pit, Foster the People

RJ FROMETA on 9 May, 2014 at 20:08
How did you guys put this band together?

Nick decided to pursue the dream after a heart to heart with his uncle during a Dr. Dog concert. At the time, he was music-director of an after school program, and he called Joseph the day after the concert to ask if he wanted to create a band. Once they started the band, Nick dropped out of night school where he was going to become a teacher to pursue music.

Joseph had just moved to Columbus, doing a lot of work in music production, and playing in a touring band, Bella Ruse, with his wife. Joseph and his wife lived with Nick and his wife until they got their feet on the ground in Columbus. Over that time nick and joe bonded over music.

Kerry was working as a free-lance videographer and playing in bands. He was roommates with Nick’s sister, and the band began to practice in their garage. During their first practice, Kerry heard the music coming from the garage and came to check out what was happening. He decided to sit in and jam. After the first practice, Kerry never left the band. We all quickly became close friends and collaborators.

What´s the story behind the band´s name?

It started out as just Nick D. But then the promoter of our first show asked the band name, and he said “it’s nick d and???” and nick finished his sentence with “the believers” just because he felt like the promoter implied that he needed more to the name. Then he asked the band afterwards if that seemed ok, and it stuck. He wanted it to harken back to smokey robinson and the miracles, and motown type names, as well as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

What are your musical influences?

Musicians we reference the most are bands like the Black Keys, Passion Pit and Foster the People who have strong pop sensibilities, infused with grit, big drums and dirty synths. We also draw a lot from older acts like Fleetwood Mac, for their production and song structure.

Lyrically Nick is influenced by classic songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. When Nick was writing solo his songs were very Dylan influenced, with long story-driven verses and short little one line chorus. Since we’ve started writing together we’ve been subscribing to what we refer to as The John Lennon Method: write a chorus, then make it the verse and write a better chorus. We want to blend those two worlds of lyrics driven folk and everyman pop hooks. We comb through every song until it doesn’t have any fat. Every moment is important. Every beat makes you want to hear more. Every line is essential.

You guys recently released a new video for “Throwing Stones”. Can you talk to us more about the story behind the track?

Throwing Stones came to us in about the time it takes to play through the song, which is very rare for us. Usually writing is a very labor intensive process with many revisions and scrapped choruses. Kerry started playing the guitar part during a rehearsal, Joe began the beat, and Nick started singing, and it fell together pretty instantly. We pulled that one from the ether. It sort of just poured out of us. It was our first collaborative effort, and that’s when we felt we might have something pretty special.

What´s the concept behind the video and how was the filming experience?
The concept started out as a lyric video, the intention was to get beautiful and sweeping shots to lay lyric text overtop. But the actress in the video, Beth Triffon, improvised a plot story during shooting and it grew from there. All shooting was done in secret on the Santa Monica pier, sort of disguised as tourists just getting vacation footage. During the shooting on the ferris wheel I (Kerry) nearly had to scrap getting ferris wheel shots from fear of heights and watching Beth dance around in the ferris wheel basket!

So you have a new EP coming up, Bang Bang. Can you tell us more about the recording and writing process behind it?

It was different then our first EP because we took more time reworking each of these songs. It was also a highly collaborative process from square one. We wrote every part of these songs together as a team. On the first EP those songs kind of just happened. This new batch we sweated over a lot more, and reworked them many times.

We also made a conscious decision to take every idea seriously, no matter how bizarre, and to never be satisfied with our first ideas. Too often musicians get caught up with this idea that creativity needs to be a spontaneous, a one time thing. Like lightning in a bottle. Sometimes that happens. It happened for us with Throwing Stones. Magical moment. Boom. Done. But most of the time it’s incredibly hard work. It’s revision after painful revision. The three of us made a choice to keep trying ideas until we got to a point where all of us were jumping up and down, jamming out to a tune because we loved it so much. If we don’t love it, how can we expect anyone else to? So that’s the difference. We keep writing until we love what we’ve made so much that we can’t help but share it with everyone we know.

How did you come up with the title?

It’s the chorus line of the title track, and it happened to correspond really well with our imagery from our first EP, which was a ladies hand holding a gold pistol-microphone hybrid, in the spirit of Prince. The cover image of the new EP is the three of us standing in a row with blindfolds, while gold pistol mics are being pointed at us from either side. Bang, Bang acts almost as an explanation for the image, or a commentary on it. The weird part is we had taken the album cover photo long before we wrote the song.

Where did you find the inspiration for the songs and lyrics in this record?

The songs and lyrics on the new EP occupy the same creative space as the first EP in that they address relationships and the ways in which they fail us, and also lift us up to be more than we can be. The songs themselves are very upbeat, and on the surface seem pretty cheerful, but across the board on these songs the lyrics try to dive deeper and tell stories about people working at love and sometimes succeeding but more often failing.

The inspiration is partly from masters like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen who can use the space of a song to tell an entire short story, that can have characters and plot twists and cliffhanger endings, and leave you full of mystery. It also comes a lot from authors, especially writers like Cormac McCarthy and Anton Chekov. Writers who are able to really get inside our thoughts and impulses and take us through that landscape and make it feel like a journey.

Will you be hitting the road this year?

Yes, definitely! We have plans to tour extensively throughout the midwest and definitely play on both coasts.

What else is happening next in Nick D´s world?

We are underway with another EP planned for late fall early winter. We are also finishing up a few new videos will be releasing over the summer and into the fall. We’ve also recently discovered a love for BACON. Actually that’s a lie, we just love bacon and need an excuse to talk about BACON!

Where can we find more about your music?

The easiest place to go is our website: www.nickdandthebelievers.com

We also have several music videos up on YouTube, including our most recent release Throwing Stones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTTUvy-T1Ys - Vents Magazine

Una interesante banda de New York nos llega, se trata de Nick D’ & The Believers con su nuevo video “Throwing Stones“.

La canción que sale de su reciente EP Bang Bang, está repleta de sintetizadores que llevan a suaves melodías de indie-pop a acompañar muy bien el video que cuenta con chicas y chicos divirtiéndose en un parque de diversiones. Imágenes vintage que acompañan a la perfección a la canción.

A continuación le pueden dar a play a “Throwing Stones”. - IndieHoy

There is a kind of effortless coolness about this record that caught my attention and held onto it right from the beginning. Nick D’ & The Believers present the music world with an easy going indie hit that will sneak in your head and stay there comfortably for a while. The well received verses are complimented by an onslaught of psychedelic sounds on the track which makes for a pretty exceptional hit when all is said and done, check it out below! - Hype Hits

Columbus, OH's own Nick D' & The Believers just unleashed their terrific new music video for the song "Throwing Stones". The clip takes us on a colorful odyssey through a nighttime carnival setting complete with upbeat, electronic rhythms and a smart, straightforward edge that gives the trio a bit of a edge and draws some comparisons to Foster The People and Passion Pit with their electronically dabbled elements working its way in through the crevice of the track. The group definitely has a diverse edge going for them, even throwing in some blues elements for good measure that puts them in a class all their own and enables them to move further up the musical ladder where even more listeners will get a chance to see them unravel before their very ears.

For more info on Nick D' & The Believers, 'Like' them on Facebook here and follow them on Twitter over here. - Music Box Pete

Trio from Columbus, OH experiment with indie pop, synth pop, and soul, rendering jumpy ditties in the vein of Beta Band and The Polyphonic Spree. Your knee will bounce and you’ll soon sing along! - The Dadada

“Find A Little Love” is off Nick D’ And The Believers‘ Throwing Stones EP. Says drummer Joseph Barke of the track, “Not having regrets, taking chances even if they don’t work out, and not wasting your youth. I guess I’m just trying to avoid saying YOLO, but that’s essentially the message here.” - Magnet Magazine

In the studio, at least, the three musicians in Nick D’ & the Believers are perfectionists, content to spend hours toying with a single track until it’s just so.

“You try a million things and see what hits you in the gut,” said singer/keyboardist Nick D’Andrea, 28, in an early January interview. “We want there to be that moment in the studio with every song where we all jump up and down and love where it’s going.”

This explains, in part, why new material has trickled out so slowly since the band formed in December 2012. At the moment, the group has only the three-track Throwing Stones EP to its name, though the musicians recently completed work on a follow-up EP they hope to release sometime in April (a single-song teaser of the punchy “Bang Bang” will be available to attendees when the band visits Kobo on Saturday, Jan. 25).

The trio, which includes D’Andrea, drummer Joseph Barker and guitarist Kerry Henderson, tends to approach recording the way a carver approaches a block of wood, methodically chipping away all the extraneous matter until only those essential elements remain.

“We put every idea we can think of on the song, and once all that stuff is on there we see what’s actually working and strip it back from there,” said D’Andrea, who points to bands like the Black Keys and Spoon as steady influences. “The first three songs came out quickly, but now we’re taking more time. Every time we think a song is done we’ll think, ‘No, we can write a better chorus!’"

D’Andrea and Barker first met through their significant others, connecting on a shared interest in music and their experiences studying abroad (each spent a semester in a Spanish-speaking country). But while Barker grew up in a musical family — both his parents are theater professors and performance was a large part of his childhood — D’Andrea’s musical education was limited to singing along to “Rapper’s Delight” whenever his father spun the classic Sugar Hill Gang track on the family turntable.

As such, the Believers’ music is continuing to evolve as the players become more familiar, exposing one another to new sounds and ideas. So while early songs might have been more straightforward, recent tracks have taken increasingly surrealistic turns.

“When you’re a teenager in high school it’s all about angst-y love songs, and we’re not that interested in stuff like that anymore,” said Barker, 29. “Which I guess means we’re never going to get the angst-y teen demographic.” - Columbus Alive

Last fall we saw "Motor City Motor City(or "motorcity, motorcity, as they capitalize it), a great video from upstart Columbus alt-pop songwriter Nick D'Andreas band Nick D& the Believers. A couple weeks back, DAndrea and company posted another cool clip for their song Find a Little Love. Find a little look above, and find more music plus a list of upcoming concerts at Bandcamp. - Columbus Alive

Nick D’ and the Believers emerged on the internet quietly but auspiciously last year in especially modern fashion, a virtually unknown band with a handful of sleek music videos. So the Columbus trio obviously understand how the music business works these days. More importantly, these guys know how music works.

Nick D’Andrea writes songs with a keen grasp of their inner wiring, the knowledge that barely perceptible details can elevate a few chords and a melody from background music to instantly ingratiating pop song. He also gets that less can be more where arrangements are concerned hence only two bandmates on stage with him Saturday at Brothers Drake: Floorwalkers guitarist Kerry Henderson and Bella Ruse drummer Joseph Barker.

It’s the same approach that made Spoon living legends of pop precision, and there’s certainly a resemblance here. D’Andrea’s songs are taut and punchy accented by little flickers of noise or falsetto octaves. They usually glide along at an easy going gait before building to a big sing-along chorus or, occasionally, a satisfying blast of dissonance. And they lull you into not noticing how much isn’t happening, so that when the big payoff hits, it really hits. It’s like a paint splatter across a pristine white gallery space, but much tidier.

But whereas Spoon grounds its tunes on the gruff side of rock history — Wire, Pixies, Springsteen and the like — the Believers crib from rock’s chipper side, the Beatles-over-Stones side.They crib well, too; the hook from would-be radio hit “Find a Little Love,” “Just find a little love before you go!” could have appeared on any number of FM classics from the past five decades. It’s timeless.

D’Andrea’s voice is one of the band’s weaker elements — Floorwalkers singer Jon Elliott powerfully out-shined him in a guest spot Saturday — but it’s serviceable.

More impressive is his stage presence. Dude carries his mini keyboard around stage with the mobility of a guitarist, freewheeling like Bob Dylan, whose “Subterranean Homesick Blues” got a reading Saturday. And when “Mercy, Mercy” took a turn for Velvet Underground cacophony, D’Andrea let it all hang out like a true frontman. He understands how that works, too. - Columbus Alive