Welcome to Plugged In, our digital interview series on GPB.

GPB's Kristi York Wooten talks with members of Yacht Rock Revue, an Atlanta band known for playing hits of the 1970s, '80s and beyond. The band is currently on tour with one of its musical heroes, Kenny Loggins, and will perform May 13 at Ameris Bank Amphitheatre in Alpharetta. Frontmen Nick Niespodziani and Peter Olson are here to talk about this once-in-a-lifetime gig.

 

TRANSCRIPT

Kristi York Wooten: Welcome, Nick and Peter. How are you? 

Nick Niespodziani and Peter Olson: Great. Thanks for having us, Kristi.

Kristi York Wooten: Excited to talk to you. So I want to get started with something that's in the news today, and that is that while you were on the Kenny Loggins tour in Texas, you had some things stolen, your instruments and things. Do you want to give us a little bit of an update on what happened? 

Nick Niespodziani: Yeah, we came off stage with Kenny Loggins in Fort Worth on Friday, our first show with Kenny, and it was amazing, incredible energy from the crowd, everything you would hope for. And we woke up the next morning to discover our entire trailer had been stolen off the back of one of our vans. It was wild. Very high moment, followed by a very low moment. 

Kristi York Wooten:  So I know that's disconcerting for musicians to not be with their instruments, some of which I believe you told me earlier you've had since high school or college. So what are you going to do about the next couple of shows? I know you said you might borrow some instruments and things like that to get those shows done, and until you find out what happens to the others. 

Nick Niespodziani:  Yeah, the show goes on. 

Peter Olson: That's right. Yeah. We've had incredible support from the musician industry. All of our friends have reached out not just to offer, you know, emotional support, but lots of offers to borrow gear, anything that we need to. To keep the show going. Just Saturday night, the night after we had the gear stolen, we were fortunate in that another band was on the bill and they allowed us to play some of their gear in order to make things happen. So we cobbled it together with some rented pieces and pieces borrowed from other musicians. And that's how we'll make it happen here until we can get things replaced.

Nick Niespodziani: And I just want to make the point, you know, we're lucky we have insurance and we're also lucky that we're big enough and our organization is established enough that we can take a hit like this and keep going. Like, if this happened to an indie rock band who's not playing on the same scale as we are, it can be a deathblow to a band. So just next time you see this happen to a smaller band, find a way to get out there and support them. Like, we're lucky we're going to be okay. But not everyone is so lucky. 

Kristi York Wooten: Good advice. So take us back to the beginning. Nick, we'll start with you. Take us back to the beginning: You're putting your band together. It had to stem from a childhood love of these — these songs that you heard on F.M. radio in the '70s or '80s. So can you take us back to the beginning of the idea for the band? 

Nick Niespodziani:  I mean, the band kind of came about on accident. It was never intended to be a band. It was supposed to be a one-off show that we were doing in a series of other one-off shows, and this one-off show connected with people in a completely different way than any of the other ones did. And ever since that moment, we saw the way it connected with the audience and the feelings that this music gave people. And we've been kind of chasing the head of that snake ever since. 

Kristi York Wooten:  And what year did you start, Peter? 

Peter Olson: 2007 was the first Yacht Rock show. 

Kristi York Wooten: So tell me a little bit about when The New York Times featured you in a 2020 story about the pandemic. You guys were one of the first bands out there playing in that sort of bizarre moment of people driving cars to watch a concert in their cars in a field. Can you talk a little bit about that experience, each one of you? 

Nick Niespodziani: Man. That was one of the most nerve-wracking weeks leading up to a concert that I've ever experienced, because the week before that, another artist, I can't remember his name, it was a country artist, had thrown a concert that was not, like, COVID-friendly and had just gotten lambasted all across the media. And, you know, we were taking it very seriously and the last thing we wanted was for our one New York Times article to be about how we were going against COVID protocols or whatever. So we had extensive talks with Live Nation to make sure that this was going to be actually a safe situation and they were going to enforce it. And it all turned out okay. But it was very nerve-wracking. 

Peter Olson: Yeah, and it was, I think, in normal times everyone was so spread out and it was we were playing to a giant field of people that were so far away that it would be hard to harness that energy on stage and give it back. But because of the circumstances of coming from isolation and quarantine, it was like just the honking of horns from all the cars and everything. It was like we were just feeding off of that, that there were real people in front of us.

Kristi York Wooten: That's great. 

Nick Niespodziani: I forgot about the horns, though. That was how the encore was asked for. It was like a choir of car horns. Yeah. 

Kristi York Wooten: So you've kind of experienced the gamut of what live performance is in ... the age of streaming. So around the time you all started your rock revue is when things like Spotify were becoming popular. So tell me a little bit about how live performance itself has changed since then — or has it? How have things changed over the course of ... obviously you've made it through the pandemic … and here we are at a new phase. How has either your audience or the way you approach music … has any of that changed since you started? Do people request different things from you? Do different songs get bigger cheers, anything like that? 

Nick Niespodziani:  I mean, I think part of what we do is definitely emblematic of the Spotify era in that we are like a playlist, an infinite playlist of songs from an era. And that's an experience that people are looking for now. But I think, you know, whether we're talking about our first shows when we were starting out, or whether we're talking about the live streaming during the pandemic or everything that's happened since then, the one constant threat is that people want that person-to-person connection of live music. And that's been our livelihood. You know, we never made a bunch of money off of selling records so those changes to the business haven't affected us. And I think that, you know, whatever changes are coming in the future, that person-to-person like live music connection is the thing. 

Peter Olson:  Yeah. I feel like from a performance standpoint, we kind of picked up where we left off. Not a lot changed. It's amazing how long ago that the pandemic phase can feel. But it was like when we started playing again, it was just like we had just had our last gig a month before. But the thing that was really different was that we kind of were at a phase in our career where we were garnering a national fanbase, and over the course of the pandemic, they had this opportunity to connect with each other via the livestream concerts that we did. So when we came out back out on tour, there was already this connection, not necessarily with the — well, there was a deeper connection with the band and our fans, but also the fan-to-fan connection was just unbelievable. And we see that live on, which is really cool. 

Kristi York Wooten: That's a good point. So you talked about your live show being a playlist. So let's talk about this playlist. So how did you first come up with your very first gig of which songs you were going to choose? And let's tell the audience to what your personal definition of yacht rock is. I asked a member of Toto what his definition of Yacht Rock is, and he said, "I don't know because I don't have a yacht yet." But you can tell us how you came to love bands like Toto, artists like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, The Doobie Brothers, and how you kind of put that first playlist together and how, that has grown or changed over the years as well. I know that that Yacht Rock has now been expanded to allow some songs from '90s and 2000s to sneak in a little bit.

Nick Niespodziani: Yacht Rock is now whatever we say it as far as we're concerned. [Laughs]

Kristi York Wooten: You own it. 

Nick Niespodziani: Yeah, well, you know, there's no point in a limited definition for us because our whole thing is having fun with people at the concert and like, saying that Yacht Rock can only be made between 1976 and 1984 in Southern California doesn't really, like do anything for us or for our fans, you know. I mean, that is the that is the center of it. That's where it starts. But it goes out from there. And Yacht Rock is really less, to me, of a genre than it is a vibe. And if you set that vibe, then anything can be Yacht Rock.

Peter Olson: Yeah, people like to put those parameters on like the date and where it was recorded and that kind of thing. But you don't do that to any other genre. It's not like grunge had to come from Seattle, right? Grunge was made all over the country. It was just a style of music. It's a feeling or a general sound. 

Nick Niespodziani: It's kind of like basketball, like it's fun to talk about, like whether, you know, Kobe's Lakers would have beaten Jordan's Bulls. But in the end, you just want to go watch people play basketball and have fun. And that's kind of my view on the whole ‘what is Yacht Rock?’ and ‘what is not Yacht Rock’ debate? 

Kristi York Wooten: So you're out on tour with Kenny Loggins. Tell us about the first gig. Tell us about what went over well in your show. And then you said that you were able to talk with [Kenny Loggins] as well. So tell me a little bit about that first night on tour with Kenny Loggins. Peter, we'll start with you. 

Peter Olson: It was the first time I think we all had butterflies in quite a while going up on stage, but it was incredible. It was at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, and it was a packed house, and we had a little bit of arena experience, but not like this. And so when we got up there and I think we kind of were all in our heads a little bit through the first few songs and a little nervous. But once we found our flow, it felt really good, and it was a lot of fun and then it was over like that. Our set was 45 minutes that night and it just came and went so fast. But it was a rush.

Nick Niespodziani: It was interesting because most bands who've gotten to the level that we're at spent a lot of time on the road opening up for other bands, right? Like, that's pretty common. That's what you do. And when we when we were in an indie rock band, we would play 45-minute sets opening up for, you know, whoever. But this band had actually never opened up for someone else before, so that was a new experience. And we were also — another thing we haven't done a long time, we were playing in front of a bunch of people who we needed to win over. Like we're, you know, at this point we're playing places like Chastain headlining ourselves and everyone is there to see us and we've been there already and they've bought into what we're doing. So it was kind of like being the young buck again out there, like having to prove ourselves in an opening set. It was unfamiliar territory and a lot of that kind of like nervous energy came out, I think, in a pretty positive way. 

Peter Olson: Yeah, and we're taking that two-hour playlist that we're so used to delivering. And when laying it down, when you talk about what is the Yacht Rock sound, like doing what we're best at, we had a limited time to, to deliver that.

Kristi York Wooten: So what songs can folks expect when they come to Alpharetta next Saturday night? 

Nick Niespodziani: We won't be playing any Kenny Loggins songs in our set. [Laughs]

Peter Olson: So we check out what you might call the major boxes mean you can anticipate. Doobie Brothers and Christopher Cross and Toto. We can't give away the set list. I can’t tell you everything. 

Kristi York Wooten: We’ve got to have some surprises there. You told me earlier that Kenny Loggins had asked you all to be on this tour. That it was a request from him. So how did that feel? 

Nick Niespodziani: It was so cool. He came up right before we played and introduced himself to all of us and said, ‘You know, I'm really excited to have you guys. And it was my decision to have you on this tour. It wasn't my agent. It wasn't my manager telling me I had to do it. It was it was my decision, because I see the energy that you guys bring, and I want that to be a part of my show.’ And that was really a ‘Wow, we've made it’ kind of moment. 

Kristi York Wooten: So did you watch from the wings? You watched Kenny from the wings, or were you out in the audience?

Peter Olson: Oh, yeah. From the wings. We watched the whole show, and it — man, he brings it. He's still incredible.

Nick Niespodziani: Yeah. If you're out there wondering, ‘Can Kenny Loggins still sing?’ The answer is emphatic, 'Yes!' His voice is money. 

Kristi York Wooten: Do you have a show highlight from his set list? 

Nick Niespodziani: Oh, there were several. For me, “Danny’s Song” is always one that gets me because that was one that my dad would play. He’d play those Loggins and Messina records in the garage when I was a kid. But then [Kenny] closed the show with “Forever,” which is a song that I hadn't really remembered as well. But then it got to that, that moment where he sings the big “forever” [sings] at the at the end. And he just nailed the note after his whole set. It was ... that one just knocked me back. It was incredible. 

Peter Olson: Yeah. “Keep the Fire” is one of my favorites. But he touches on, he does the whole span of his career, and he breaks it down and pulls out the acoustic guitar. And not only can the guy sing, but the guy can still wail on the guitar. He's incredible. 

Kristi York Wooten: And so this tour is going for several months this year. So do you have any plans for. Is it going to Europe or just this is just the North America tour? 

Nick Niespodziani: Just United States? I don't know. Tell Kenny that he's wanted in Europe because we want to go. 

Kristi York Wooten: Well, thank you both for being here. Nick Niespodziani and Peter Olson from Yacht Rock Revue performing and opening for the first time on a tour when they are used to being headliners. Opening for Kenny Loggins at the Ameris Bank Amphitheater in Alpharetta, Georgia, on May 13. Thank you again.

Peter Olson: Thank you. 

Nick Niespodziani: See you out there, Atlanta. 

Tags: Georgia  Atlanta  Yacht Rock Revue