Nelly Was Nervous is a one-woman musical project fronted by the eponymous Nelly from Brooklyn, NY.
Taking inspiration from electronic and ambient acts, each distinct wave of emo, and whatever other sounds are constantly rattling around her skull, she combines these styles into a unique wash of noise, crunchy guitars, and lo-fi vocals with driving and melancholic melodies to make the listener go “Wait what is this? This is weird. But also I kinda like it?”
I caught up with Nelly to talk about her early musical experiences, how she started writing songs and the making of her new album “When The House Bares Its Teeth”
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as a kid and what artist or band did you enjoy the most?
Nelly-The earliest music I ever remember listening to was Bruce Springsteen since my parents played that almost constantly, but the earliest albums that I remember getting and listening to in-depth were a funny blend of blink-182’s self-titled, Comfort Eagle by Cake, and Tubthumper by Chumbawamba. I feel like over the course of my life so many random albums have just had a huge impact in my life and the way I approach listening and writing music. I remember getting Boston’s self-titled album from the library and listening to that on repeat and it made me want to practice guitar more. In high school I was absolutely obsessed with The Front Bottoms’ self-titled album and all their weird early DIY recordings like My Grandma vs. Pneumonia and I Hate My Friends and listening to them made me want to write lyrics more. And of course I was a marching band kid, so I went through my obligatory ska phase (endearingly, ska rules). So yeah, it was a lot of just searching around and stumbling upon new stuff to listen to, which honestly still holds true for how I find music today.
CMM-How did you start writing songs and developing your own sound?
Nelly-I think I started writing songs probably around like middle school or so? Those songs were all total trash, unsurprisingly. I kept writing music throughout high school and college, but never really recorded or did anything with those songs, so they just kind of sat in random notebooks. It wasn’t till I graduated college did I really start to put music out there, I made a bunch of weird noisy ambient electronic sort of music, mostly as an excuse for me to familiarize myself with recording software and the sorts of sounds that I could get out of whatever I was working with, whether it was with my guitar, random free VSTs, or whatever else I could record on my laptop’s onboard mic. After moving to Brooklyn, I started getting back into lyric writing and eventually recorded broken clocks repair shop which also served as a sort of proof of concept for recording songs with vocals and more standard instrumentation. Later on, I wrote the album horseshoe crabs and that’s when things really started to click for me. Both in terms of how I would write these albums, and how I would end up recording them, typically by trying to fill as much space in the songs with a ton of noisy guitar and synth layers.
CMM-You have an album coming out on October 28th called “When The House Bares Its Teeth”. What was the writing and recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you used to get the sound you were looking for?
Nelly-The writing process for this album went shockingly quickly, I wrote these songs largely around a Halloween party that my friend invited me to that kind of devolved into something of a self-destructive night as a result of a lot of things I had been repressing and putting off. Having songwriting as a tool to analyze and process what I was going through was a truly powerful thing for me at the time, and it still is powerful looking back at these songs now. I think I wrote most of these songs over the course of two or three months, it was a bit of a whirlwind. The recording process was also a bit of a hectic one, since I essentially put a deadline on myself to be able to release the album before Halloween, meaning it would have to be ready about a month in advance. I was absolutely stressing myself out throughout September in order to get it into a spot that I was happy with, but ultimately I did finish it and I’m happy with the results. As for gear, as much as I’d like to say I was using some crazy fun gear to record everything, I’ve found that nowadays I work better by just tracking my guitar into DAW and messing around with amp sims and other fun effects and VSTs that I’ve come to love over the years. So the recording workflow was really just my 7-string guitar and a mic into my computer, and then messing around with effects until everything kind of fell into place.
CMM-If you could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?
Nelly-Jane Schoenbrun would be an obvious choice for me, but I wouldn’t want to deprive the world of another Alex G soundtrack. Really though, I’d love to do something horror-adjacent, but maybe that’s just me still living in the headspace of this album that’s very Halloween-themed, but I always love thinking about how powerful sound design is as a tool, where even just a single droning note can be enough to evoke such wildly different feelings based on what the timbre of the note is like. A drone can be peaceful or pleasant! Or it can be harsh and angry! There’s so much to play with there, and with horror especially, I think it would be a fun challenge to trace that through a narrative and follow all that tension and release.
CMM-Anything coming up?
Nelly-Other than the album “when the house bares its teeth” set to be released October 28th (of which there is one single out now on Bandcamp and YouTube), I’m also planning on putting out another single for it on October 17th! As for anything else coming up, nothing on the books as of yet! I do have many irons in the fire and I do post on social media about said irons, so if you, yes you dear reader, want to follow all those goings on, check me out on various socials @nellywasnervous or my website nellywasnervous.com!
