Nik Freitas

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NIK FRIETAS
By his next door neighbor
Last February, the problem neighbors finally moved away.
After a few days, their replacement stopped by to introduce himself. This was Nik, and he was a musician.
You could tell he wasn’t a hyphenate. Not a waiter-guitarist-painter, web designer-sommelier-racecar driver, lifeguard-director-pilates instructor, or one of the countless other combinations you meet on a normal day in Los Angeles. Nik was just a musician-musician, who hung TVs for entitled meanies on the West Side when the rent demanded immediate action.
Nik was putting together a studio in the back shed. Now, when a neighbor tells you this, this news can either be very good or very bad. In my experience, there’s not really a lot of middle ground. Would I "mind the noise?" Of course, you always say "of course not," but you’re grinding your teeth on the inside.
To prepare/protect myself, I immediately ran over to iTunes. Nik’s first three records were available. I secretly bought myself a few tracks, as my version of a housewarming present.
Bit by bit, I ended up buying all of Here’s Laughing at You, Heavy Mellow and Voicing the Hammers. They produced a lot of echoes that I liked. Emmit Rhodes (who made better Paul McCartney records than Paul McCartney) was my first thought. Something Else by the Kinks, Summerteeth, Hunky Dory, Plastic Ono Band, Bookends, Something/Anything? all arrived soon afterwards.
I also heard no evidence of frills or pretensions to greatness. No going for the gold. Just immaculately produced and performed pieces that informed you exactly how their composer was feeling at that particular time.
Other details soon filled in the gaps. Nik was from Visalia, CA. It’s in central California. Kind of the same area as Pavement and Grandaddy. Nik had toured with Jason Lytle the previous summer. I like Jason Lytle a great deal, so this was immediately impressive to me.
You talk to Nik, and you can also tell he cut his teeth around a lot of skaters. Nik grew up skating. He took pictures of other people skating and, for a period, was a staff photographer for Thrasher magazine. While at Thrasher, Nik bought an antique piano from one of the higher-ups and taught himself how to play.
This would probably be a good time to bring up Nik mostly plays everything on his own. He plays a lot of instruments, but it’s probably easier to say he simply plays, what...the studio? Somewhat overstated, but true all the same.
So, Nik had made three progressively good to great records that no one really got to hear, then moved to our street.
Which caught us up to a few months ago.
I soon got a tour of the new studio, which was very impressive. Not because of all of the top notch gear, but because of the sheer lack of it. Nik was working minor miracles with just a four figure budget. In Nik’s Poppy Peak studio, nothing cost more than a couple hundred dollars. There was a lot of Craigslist in this room.
I figured out one reason Nik’s sound was always changing was the fact he was constantly having to sell off equipment to pay for other equipment, which would soon be sold off to pay the rent. The unending turnover was actually easing along Nik’s progression -- in the development of his production, and in the evolution of his songwriting.
In a musical sense this amounts to “growing up.” There was something new to his songs, something building in the highly detailed sound he squeezed out of that slapdash wooden shed.
Then I didn’t see Nik for awhile. But day after day, you could hear the hum of snares and electric guitars bouncing back and forth within his studio.
Finally, after a few months, Nik handed a CD-R. This was the new record to be amongst the first to hear it.
It started with a Graceland-type guitar pattern that walked me into the first line --
"I wanna stand...on the mountain that’s way up there."
One listen, and I knew this mountain, the one referenced in “Sundown.” It wasn’t the one that looms directly over Poppy Peak (that’s only Pasadena, after all). No, this was the larger mountain, the one you have to strain to see, the one that looms over the mountain that looms over our street.
It’s the kind of uncorrupted, unfettered spot your eyes naturally drift up to after getting knocked around a bit by whatever is threatening to pull you under.
That’s the gravity that fills “Sundown.” To me, “Sundown” is a major song, one of those recordings that becomes both instantaneously personal and uncommonly universal.
The rest of the record -- eventually named Sundown -- builds on the thesis statement of its title track. It’s a record of real scope and sweep, one with a beginning, middle and end, one that goes from Graceland to Abbey Road all in the span of 40 minutes.
Whenever I hear Sundown it becomes whatever I’m doing at that exact time.