Back in June, I found myself sitting underneath the vast ceiling of the Armory Center of the Arts in Somerville completely and utterly intoxicated with the swells and soaring of Nicole Nelson and Dwight Richter’s voices.  As Dwight and Nicole played to the sounds of each other’s resounding heartbeats during the first Somerville Jazz & Blues Festival, I and the rest of the audience could sense that the connection between the dynamic “rock and soul” duo was one that can only exist between two people whose incredible talents are matched by their deep appreciation, creatively and affectionately, for each other.  Dwight and Nicole have been playing with each other for years, but the couple onstage and off haven’t always been rocking out to the minimalist drive behind their guitar and tambourine driven side by side: Both musicians met while holding residencies at various jazz and blues bars in Boston, and both credit Boston as being the city in which they honed their craft and built their fan base.

Since moving to New York a few years ago and exploring the multitude of musical opportunities provided by Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, Dwight and Nicole have recently left the Big Apple for Boston (Brookline, to be precise) in order to record a follow-up to 2007’s self-titled album.  They’ve been playing some of their favorite haunts in the city throughout the summer as well, including Precinct, the Lizard Lounge and numerous festivals and venues along the North Shore while billing with assorted artists/friends in the area including Jesse Dee, the Mieka Canon and the Sea Monsters.  With tambourine and Flying-V guitar in hand, Dwight and Nicole will continue to appease their fans from their stomping ground until the finishing touches are put on their forthcoming disc, so be sure to catch them in action at the most intimate acoustic, blues and jazz spots in Somerville and Cambridge while you can.

-Hilary Hughes

OPENING ACT: DWIGHT AND NICOLE AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Dwight: Honey Smax, or Large Frosted Mini Wheats.

Nicole: Captain Crunch with Crunchberries.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” or Mouth from “The Goonies?”

N: Mouth.

D: Yeah, Mouth.  I like the Cyndi Lauper song from that movie.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

D: Toaster oven.

N: I’d be a standing mixer.  Those things are AWESOME.

You go to bed, you wake up, you go to brush your teeth… and you realize that you’ve morphed into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

D: Animal!

N: I don’t know! I love Miss Piggy.  She was probably the first Muppet I wanted to be as a kid.  I love them all, though.

After a raucous night out, you wake up at some point the next day and you realize that in your fit of crazy you got inked.  What tattoo did you wake up with?

N: Some big ridiculous rainbow and clouds.  Something astral.  I have a tattoo with stars already.

D: I’d probably have “Nicole” on my neck or something.

N: [Gasps] We’re getting you drunk!  Drink up!  (Laughs)

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

N: Sumo wrestler.  I like the thong. (Laughs)

D: Sumo wrestler.  The rodeo clowns are brave, but…

If you were a particular kind of cheese, what kind of cheese would you be?

N: Oh, they’re all good!  I’ve never met a cheese I don’t like.  I’d be Brie.

D: Pepperjack.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what style facial hair would you be?

N: I would definitely be mutton chops.

D: I’d probably be a goatee, I wear one every once in awhile.  Not a great answer, either.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY UNDERWEAR AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

N: “Borderline” by Madonna!

D: “Hungry Heart”, by Bruce Springsteen.

What’s your favorite word?

N: Raw.

D: Breathing.  Probably breathing, right now.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE DWIGHT AND NICOLE TPB INTERVIEW

So, tell us the back-story of Dwight and Nicole.

Dwight: All right!  We lived in Boston.  I lived here for four years and Nicole lived here for about the same around nine years ago, and we each had bands in town, the Dwight Richards Band and the Nicole Nelson Band, and we each had a residency here.  Her’s was at the Times Pub.

Nicole: I played a lot of blues; he played a lot of original stuff.  I played mostly blues; it was a blues jam.  He used to come and sit in on my shows, and some of the people who were here tonight, like John Aruda, he’d come down a lot.  Afterwards there were lots of dance parties in the streets outside of the Cantab [Lounge] and after-parties. (Laughs)

D: I was working construction at the time, and then I’d get off a work gig, then we’d go see her, we’d eat dinner and then we’d go to my gig later.  The first time we sang together was on a tune called “Move Right” which I wrote ages ago, she came up and sang with me, and we just always had a really good chemistry together.

N: Yeah, it’s very familial.  He felt like a long-lost boy from kindergarten and we loved each other and lost each other and found each other again.  It’s a really beautiful thing.  We both moved to New York around the same time and we started playing a little bit together, but mostly we each had our own gigs.  We’d just sit in, because it was like, “Oh! Dwight from Boston’s here!  Get up and sing with me!” Or I’d get up and sing with him, and then that turned into a thing.  People were like, “Do you have a CD of the two of you, together? Because these harmonies…” and we were like “Oh, no! But you can buy each of our albums-“ and they were like “Wait. No.”

Liiiike maybe something should happen.

N: (laughs) Yeah!

D: So, we’re in Brooklyn where she grew up, incidentally, and I grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and we were low on money, so we decided to book a few shows and we got some gigs as a duo, and Nicole’s on the tambourine –

N: -I had never played tambourine before-

D: -And it just caught on.  We both feel the beat the same way.  We both sort of- I guess you’d say we compliment each other, and we just had a thing that really took on.

N: It did.

D: We recorded an EP at Club 39 in Sudbury a few years ago.

N: One day we just went in and played the songs, and we just sat down and made a five song CD in five hours.   We kind of just had to talk what we got, but we wanted to make something really beautiful.  We got lucky.  Phil, who played guitar tonight, he has a beautiful studio in Brookline and it’s called Rear Window Studio and it’s UNBELIEVABLE.  So, he was just like, “Come stay at my house and record.”

D: I think he recorded Godsmack’s record.  Phil basically dug a pit in his basement and the ceilings are twenty feet high, almost 10,000 pounds suspended by spring, so when music hits it the whole room gives.

N: We’re thinking of doing our record release at the Somerville Theatre, because we’ve got a good thing going in Somerville, but this place [the Armory] is awesome!

D: Yeah, it’s a very cool room.

N: So, yeah, that’s how we got our thing together.  Just sort of organically playing duos.

D: I’d play guitar and she’d play tambourine and we’ve developed this really cool thing as a duo, and now we’re gonna go and play with a band, a larger group.

N: Not to sound strange, but performing is a very spiritual thing for me.  It feeds me.  That conversation between the audience and us is this thing that bounces back and forth.

You can absolutely say that.  And I’m gonna blow up your spot a little bit: When we were watching you earlier, we were like, “That girl can work a tambourine like nobody we’ve ever seen before!”  The connection between you two was very strong in the sense that you were playing to her heartbeat.  That absolutely comes across to your audience.

D: We’ve been friends for about ten years and we’ve been together for almost five, and it’s so nice to be able to reaffirm that onstage a lot.  It’s cool to be able to go onstage and do our thing.

Can you take us through the creative process behind Dwight and Nicole’s music?

D: We both bring songs to the table, so it’s very collaborative.

N: I have to be in a clear-minded state in order to be creative.  When things get jumbled because of stress or confusion, I have to try to clear my head in order to feel that thing where you’re focused and creative.  It’s not easy for me at all.  I’m always critical of what’s around me.  I want it to be perfect and I want it to be very precise, I want it to have that great point, so I tend to throw things out before they’re done.  He’s the complete opposite; he’s like, “Keep going! Keep going!” and I’ll be working on a song all day, and he’s like “Work on it all year! It’s a rough draft, keep drafting!”  He’s constantly writing and coming up with ideas and riffs and tunes.  For me, it’s always been hard but it’s getting easier and I’m learning my triggers.  I know how to just clear my mind and go for a walk and sit and do that kind of thing so I can be creative.  Dwight has taught me how to get through all that stuff.

D: Thank you!  Going back ten years the Aruda brothers and I had a group that would go around town playing all over the place and that’s actually how those guys got into the original scene.  We built in a big following.  So Johnston, who plays with Club D’Elf, we released two records together, and I got going with the creative stuff with that project and just kept up with that.  This project is so cool because we’re together, she can write songs, and I can write songs, and I can talk to …. So, yeah, this thing is like a, we have a creative house that we can bring stuff into and write stuff together and do whatever, and it’s like, all under our little roof and it’s cool, you know?  The original music thing, writing tunes has always been my passion, it’s my thing, and then with her, we’re doing it.  It’s really cool.  We’re very lucky to be where we are right now.

N: And he can rap, too! (Laughs) He can freestyle.  Every little thing he can pull inspiration from!  He can start talking about your scarf and your eyes and he can turn everything into a rhyme.

Can you give us one about those Donutties on the table over there, on the spot?

D: No!  I wish I… if I ate all of those I’d have a heart attack with that round one, in a black stack of, lovely powdered sugar treats, what would be great with a whole table of eats, would be luscious donutties, perhaps some ice cream and cereal, too, but more than anything, I’d like to share… a donuttie with you.

That was great.

D: See, it’s just things to make her laugh and make our life fun.  It’s just funny ridiculousness.  So, yeah, we like to write songs.  Our influences would be EVERYTHING.  We love Michael Jackson, we love Dolly Parton, we love the Beach Boys, we love Van Halen, we love Nirvana, Black Sabbath, B.B. King, Patsy Cline, Merle Travis, Ricky Lee Jones, Solomon Burke, Sam Cooke, Jimmy Smith, Bill Hailley and the Comets, the Rolling Stones…

What about Boston bands, maybe some current local acts?

D: We like The Sea Monsters, Mieka Pauley-

N: Yeah!  She’s like my favorite singer.  You know Eva Cassidy?

Yeah.

N: If Eva Cassidy was like, rock n’ roll like Joan Jett, she’d be Mieka Pauley.  She’s amazing and writes songs and plays guitar, she’s also one of our dear friends.

D: Yeah, and Jesse Dee.  Jesse Dee’s our BOY!

[Editor’s Note: Jesse happened to be walking through the backstage area in the basement of the Armory just as he was mentioned.  Dee, upon hearing this, beamed.]

D: That’s my guy!  I love his music, I love his painting, and I love his spirit.  He’s another one of our favorites around town.  We also love Ryan Montbleu, he’s a great guy.  There are so many original songwriters here that are good.  When we moved to New York, and we’ve been there for about four or five years, I came back here and there was an unbelievable singer/songwriter scene.  Jesse, and Christian McNeill, and Danielle Miraglia… and Four Piece Suit, too!

N: Yeah!  They did all the music for Sex and the City for the first three years.  I’m gonna segue into the whole Boston thing.  The Boston music scene is very family-like:  It’s a lot of friends getting together, there are a lot of late night jams and stuff.  New York has this really ridiculous level that comes there and just any night of the week you go out in New York, any little whole in the wall, you can go and see some music.  I mean, first of all, Eric Clapton might walk in, that kind of stuff happens all the time.  The other thing is somebody just flew in, like the hottest band from Belgium or something, and they’re playing there for like, a bucket or something.

D: James Hudger!  I saw James Hudger’s first show in America.  Do you know him?

The name sounds vaguely familiar. I would probably recognize his stuff if you pla-

[Dwight and Nicole then break into song, on the couch, Nicole’s clapping and they’re both harmonizing and I’m sitting on my chair with my mouth gaping open like a four-year-old with a chronic sweet tooth who just walked into a candy store.]

D: I mean, Norah Jones, even, everyone’s out on the scene and around.  The people who are famous, Moby and those people, they hang in the scene and proliferate the buzz or whatever it is.  And everything is made up of slots, so you’ll have five bands a night- Like, we’ll take the Lower East Side, there’s like ten clubs, which means five slots each on any given night.  You could see fifty shows a night.  Here, people can actually have two or three hours to themselves to develop something like The Sea Monsters, to develop a project.  It’s not like showcases for labels, necessarily, and New York is much more a Mecca for that, and there’s a million great artists there, too, but Boston, I mean, it’s more relaxed in that area and can give someone who would be overwhelmed by New York a chance to develop their sound and their maturity as an artist, and the community here is amazing,

N: That’s what I love about here, besides the fact that it’s just gorgeous, too, it’s a beautiful city.  It’s a beautiful place to exist in with all this water and these parks and the river and all that.  There is a family kind of vibe here.  We’ll hang out with friends, like all these guys, and we’ll all jam for five or ten in the morning.  There are a lot of clubs that support that kind of thing, and they’re dwindling and it’s sad, especially the blues scene, because we came up in that and all those clubs are gone.  The House of Blues in Cambridge is gone-

D: The Yard Rock-

N: We both loved it here.  I came up in this town.

D: I love Boston, I love the musicians here, and I love people like you guys who are fiends for music.

N: And the school scene here drives that so much.  I think that so many young people are hungry for creative energy.

D: Christian [McNeill] was saying that he started out playing Matt Murphy’s or something, and just getting people interested at a little place like that.  Same thing with Tim Gearan at Toad, people get sucked in.  To bring back the blues thing we were talking about, we saw the last movement of that.  I’m talking The Yard Rock, the original House of Blues, the Cantab Lounge was like, the most unbelievable place ten years ago.  When I moved here, it was old, old cats doing their tunes, and it was absolutely insane.  You’d have every type of person there singing songs.

You have a really special place on that stretch of Mass Ave in Central Square, between the Cantab Lounge and TT’s and the Middle East…

N: Yeah!  I love the Boston scene for having those heavy roots in the blues and jazz scene.  Everything came out of that stuff, and there’s a great rock scene, too.  Boston has just all these great music scenes where you can just hang.  You can hang in New York, too, but everybody’s working all night in these spots all over the place.

I think that the fact that there aren’t really 18+ venues in Boston is a problem, too – you have a lot more of those in New York.

D: Yeah, I don’t like that at all.

N: That’s awful!  When you have a good college following that cuts your audience way down.

D: For the amount of revenue it would generate, you should be able to find a staff that’s trained well enough to card people.

N: Plus, going out at that age was huge.  Going to see people when you’re in those formative stages of creativity, that’s how you learn!  You don’t learn from reading a book about music.

D: Yeah, that’s so true.  Those are defining years.

N: A show like tonight, for example, it was 18+.  I’m like, “Hey, why can’t it be 16+?”

We haven’t touched on challenges you guys have faced, either creatively speaking or even about the transition between here and New York.  How is it for you guys, being a couple that also happens to make music together? I’m sure it comes with a whole set of difficulties!

N: It does, but we’re surprisingly well-suited for it.  We have a really, really good thing.  For me, we wear all these different hats, and sometimes we’re business, and sometimes we’re lovers, and sometimes we’re friends, and sometimes we’re maniacs who are trying to kill each other!  Well, not maniacs (laughs).  We’re like, in business mode half the time, and the challenge from that, while we do work really well together in all the different areas, we’re still always together, so we’ll be in business mode at home and dates happen less and less when we get busier-

D: I take you out on dates!  You’re crazy!  We went out dancing last week!

N: (Laughs) I know!  That’s true.  So, that’s where we found the biggest challenge, to keep all these things growing all the time and healthy and moving forward.  The New York/Boston thing?  They both have their challenges.  Down falls and great things about them?  I think our feelings about both cities are pretty positive, and they’re just different.

D: We suffered the financial thing by doing original music.

N: Yeah, but it’s worth it!  When we switched into doing original stuff, all of a sudden I switched and was doing solo stuff with a guitar, and people were used to seeing me with a big band and horns and a gown, and people were like, “What’s this? What happened?”  It’s worth it, to get to what it is that I really have to say.  Everything that Etta James already did, I’m not going to do it better, so I need to do my thing!  I guess that’s a challenge.

D: It’s a challenge going into Club Passim with a full-length beard and not scaring the crowd away! (Laughs)

So, what’s next for you guys?  You mentioned that you’ve been recording your album and that you’re excited to play in front of people again.  What was your performance tonight like, how did it feel?

D: It was so great to be with you guys.  It was fucking awesome.  It’s been a long time.  It feels so good to go back playing gigs.  We’ve worked so hard on this record and when the record comes out, we’re gonna do that whole push that everyone talks about doing with a new record.  We’ve built up a very good thing, and then we’re gonna do the thing and hit the road.  The great Boston musician Marty Blue is going to be hitting the road with us too, he plays with Dennis Brennan sometimes.  Dennis Brennan, too, he’s one of the greatest people.

N: Very rarely do I feel the whole, you know, “I don’t wanna follow that!”  But going on after Dennis Brennan?  His band is ridiculous, and I’ve definitely felt that when we’ve played with him before.

D: Yeah, the song that made us feel that way was Charles Browns “Fool’s Paradise”.  That was the tune.  Dennis is awesome.

Can we talk about the songs on the new record?  How is this a departure from previous material we’ve heard from Dwight and Nicole?

N: I think it dives a lot deeper.  With the blues and jazz and folk stuff, we were in the ten-foot deep section before, and now we’re like, in the center of the earth.  Everything is just a direct connection between what we’re hearing.  We’re so psyched.

Is that “My Hell is Burnin’ for You” song on the new record?

D: Yeah!

Yeah, that song really hit us.  Hard.

N: It stands out?  It does for me too!  I wish we could play you some new stuff…

D: (Looking around the room) Does anybody have a guitar?  Seriously?

N: We can after-hang, maybe!

(Editor’s note: This is when I became smitten with Dwight and Nicole, and wanted to become best friends with them.)

What kind of journey has it taken to get to this point, lyrically and musically, for these delving deeper new songs you’re doing?

D: Production wise, too, we’re doing a lot of different sounds and a lot of different styles.  We have this tune that we did as a duo, a song that she wrote for her grandma, and now it sounds orchestral.  It sounds bigger, and fuller, and the potential of the song has come out more because there’s more people involved musically, more musicians, more production things-

N: When I say that this record goes deeper, too, I mean that we are diving deeper into what it is that, pulling out every little influence. For me, I’ve always been like, “Well, I’m singing blues, so I’m going to sing blues”, but I think of the blues style of singing or jazz standards, and that’s changed since I’ve gotten older and that’s what I’ve been looking for.  The reason why I never did a record is because I felt, before, that I had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said.  It’s cool for me to say something new.  If you’re going to say something, say something new; Otherwise, it’s just noise.  We’ve been diving into all of those things, so you’ll hear a little Sheena Easton in there, and you’ll hear all this other stuff, and that’s all part of me so you have to dive in and get it and let it come out and get your own voice that way.  For me, that’s what it is: Not trying to sing a certain style or try to do a song justice, which is what I used to kind of do, but now, I’m not gonna think about anything and whatever comes out comes out.

Let’s talk about the Boston crowd and Dwight and Nicole’s Boston fans.  How is your relationship with them different than your audiences in other cities?  Does it go back to the familial nature of the singer/songwriter scene in Boston?

N: I feel like that the people who are working in New York and living in New York are doing really well, and it’s ridiculous to try to exist there as a musician professionally and that’s all you do, so the guys who are on a really high level are all the musicians who are on Saturday Night Live and the Letterman Band and they’re totally like that, too.  New York has this influx of all these other people all the time, so you get this sense of, “Holy Shit.”

D: Boston is our highest drawing city, so we do big publicity pushes for our shows here.  Every show counts and it doesn’t make a difference, but in New York, we’re smaller, so it’s cool to have more people in Boston and it makes our shows here bigger events.

N: I feel like there’s another difference too where I feel like Boston- like, in New York, people want new stuff, and that changed me for the better as an artist, because when I got there people didn’t want to hear covers of somebody else’s stuff at all.  They wanted us to just be ourselves.  In Boston I feel that there’s such an appreciation for the roots of the scene here, where people want to hear the jazz tradition and they like the tradition and want to hear standards.  The city, to me, feels very heavy with a lot of tradition, and people take it very seriously and respect it.  If you play old blues, people love it.