We Give You Nothingless: Manic. and Their Crew of Dreamers in the Heart of Nashville
Nashville is not a town you move to when you have a plan. Glorious at first glance, the music city manifests a downward spiral torn between idealism and starving artistry. There are more “happening” indie scenes in Nashville than pink hat Bachelorettes on Broadway — the question at hand is: which scene will worth your time?
Back in March 2022, a musician friend of mine invited me to a Sunday morning breakfast club for musicians and artists alike. Among the artists I’ve met on these temperate Nashville Sundays are Nicholas Baños, Jacob Saint Patrick, and Matthew Vero. Together, they are the boys of Manic., the self-proclaimed alternative garage pop-rock band, part of the yet-to-be-defined label/collective Nothingless.
This is a tale of a journalist who has lost the chronological plot, with months of interviews and interactions entangled and reshuffled. This is an attempt to encapsulate the essence of Manic. and Nothingless. This is the story of how a group of dreamers live on to build their own dreams.
BAYBE’S SINGLE RELEASE SHOW @ THE EAST ROOM - JUNE 6, 2022
Time: 8:06 p.m., as I get into my Uber. Destination: The East Room. Capacity probably sits around 200, including its upper balcony. Amenities: dimmed lighting with the option of white lights and a public school–style projector screen next to the stage, which is a flaky, chipping-away wooden platform — indie venue’s stable type — backed into the right corner of the floor plan.
Occasion: the “DON’T HMU” single release party for one of the most prominent Nashville-based alternative rock/punk/hip-hop artists, BAYBE.
Not only did BAYBE have eyes on her from all sectors of the insinuating Nashville music biz, this release party was multi-faceted. Upon arrival, I was pleasantly greeted by the goth/ritualistic theme, carefully curated by one of my photographer friends in town, Sean Keegan, as well as a DJ set by the town’s most promising hip-hop collective, DADABASE, led by their very own starboy, $avvy.
This wasn’t a typical night out in Nashville.
There are clans of indie musicians in Nashville, and the clans don’t typically breach. There are the ones who have figured out the formula to the algorithms and winning over the majors’ hearts, the ones who hold grassroot, punk, and DIY close to their own hearts, as well as eager prodigies from Belmont University and local legends running on the pure fuel of hometown folklores.
At any given moment, though, the fear of running out of time and getting a real job looms like a black cloud over Music City USA. However, nights like this are always around to provide you a false sense of security. Like everyone else in the crowd, I needed my dose of false security that night. The official reason I’ve convinced myself, though, was that someone was attempting to realize the idea of a community in Nashville again, and I needed to investigate.
I wasn’t the only one who had that intention. Right next to me at the bar was two-thirds of Manic., Nicholas Baños and Jake Sierzega. Naturally, I began looking for the third member, and soon found him: Matthew Vero. They were all here, and this would be my third attempt at initiating some form of a hangout with their lead singer, Baños, without uttering the words, “We should hang out.”
“You seem cool. Those photos you took of us at EXIT/IN back in March were some of my favorites from the night,” he said, complimenting me matter-of-factly in classic Baños fashion. “I’d love you to come to one of our sessions sometimes”
Oh boy, weren’t those the magic words.
Among his bandmates, Vero was the first to arrive in Nashville. By the time he dropped out of Belmont University, Jacob Saint Patrick alongside one of their producers, Matt Bolton, and Josh Parra — Manic.’s original drummer who has since embarked on a touring career of his own — were still in the middle of their Berklee undergrad years.
Growing up living across from the country’s largest Amish community, Vero taught himself everything in his rural Ohio childhood bedroom, from guitar to mandolin. He formed his first band in his high school years living in Florida, and by the time ex-bandmate and now-best-friend Sky Stahlmann moved to Nashville from Los Angeles in 2022, Vero gained the cast of friends that many musicians in Nashville can only ever dream of.
“When I first moved here I was in a punk band called The Millennium,” Vero recalled. “We got a pretty good response but we were super young — I had just dropped out of school to be in this band.”
The Millennium evolved into Saint Dorian, which was partially responsible for the eventual formation of Kid Pastel — another buzz band rummaging through the Nashville underground scene — as well as the meeting of him and Baños. In fact, Vero’s roommate, Sean Rossettie, played guitar for both bands.
“He and I collaborated on basically everything he played,” Vero added. “Sean helped write the riff and play guitar on ‘Dropout.’”
“There’s no other song on the album that sounds like ‘The Dropout Anthem’” is an utterance I’ve heard from all three of the Manic. boys. A stand-alone thrill ride and an instant hit for every live show since its debut, “The Dropout Anthem” is Manic.’s take on classic rock. While it certainly isn’t the wall of sound that is the band’s “Terrible Disaster,” the song’s tempting progression samples some of the best rock executions from each member.
Making the perfect resume for Manic., the very nature of the song is messy but mesmerizing, glamorizing every artist’s dream to drop out of school, or even the face of the earth. As polished as it may be now in its recorded version, the live debut of “The Dropout Anthem” amped its messiness to the top notch.
GROUP THERAPY FOR OUTCASTS @ EXIT/IN - SEPT. 28, 2022
I really don’t remember much of the two Manic. sets at EXIT/IN. I was documenting a different band on the lineup for their first show at the venue, and for that second set, I think my body simply refused to remember. I did, however, remember Vero changing into his red Belmont University crop top just to spend quite a bit of the song trying to plug his guitar in.
Their rehearsal just two days prior was probably one of the best live performances I’ve ever witnessed, but the set that had just taken place was a near collision. In my years of attending shows, never had I heard the clicker go off on the venue’s PAs. The band clearly couldn’t hear themselves or each other, as they had to pause and restart a few times.
With very little understanding of tech at the time, my brain was processing a cognitive dissonance that was simply beyond me. In the frenzy, I made a very under-considered proposal: “I want to write a piece on Manic. and Nothingless,” I told Baños. “I just feel like there’s a story here.” He stared back briefly and blankly, said something, but mostly avoided my glance.
Disappointed at his reaction and my own negligence for making such an impulsive offer, frankly, I was hoping Baños would would forget about my offer. Yet, a week later I got a text from him: “We should find a time to talk about that thing you mentioned after the show!”
From the very beginning, I know Baños was the dreamer of the crew. There’s no Manic. without “Nick.” Charisma is not the right word to describe the naturally magnetic frontman — meeting Baños made me believe in magic. It all started from the time he somehow managed to part from the dull and sleepy crowd with his mere presence on the worst night of The Emo Night event series. Those artificial beams on him felt god-like.
Months later on another Manic. Monday afternoon, while the other two boys stepped out of the studio for a smoke, Baños told me about his days before Nashville. A NOLA native, at the prime age of 12 he struggled with social norms when he moved to Denver with his mom. A tale of an only child moving around, trying but never managing to fit in (one that I was familiar on my own), everything gradually collided by his late high school years and Baños eventually dropped out of college at 20.
In that moment, I found it difficult to associate the story to this person who sat in front of his fully-established home studio, objectively one of the best musicians in the city and a friend who is undeniably wiser than his age.
28 puts a musician in a very interesting position. Now more than ever, breakout moments for bands happen surprisingly late, typically two or more albums into the discography and way into the late 20s of most of the members. For Baños, his musical journey resembles nothing of a straight line. With an initial boom following Manic.’s debut single, “Gone,” facilitated by the support of Kellin Quinn, the powerhouse lead singer of Sleeping With Sirens, and the success of “Nothing With You,” featuring the other fearless leader of Nothingless, Maggie Miles, Manic. has had both viral and local moments.
Still, the identity of Manic. shifts and formulates into something drastically different with their additional members, who Baños met after his move to Nashville.
“I met Josh from the Young Entertainment Professionals group,” Baños recounted during our interview in November. “It's a Facebook group that almost everyone I know is on. You can make a post if you're looking for band members or graphic designers, or anything. I've met a lot of people on there. It's so silly, but every person that moves out here doesn't know what the hell they're doing, so everybody just shouts into the void. I was trying to put together a band and I met Josh at… I want to say it was Crema [Coffee Roaster] in east Nashville.”
That has to be the least Manic. thing ever — an entirely too shiny of a meetup spot, and east Nashville of all places. But the true surprise came after, from the same Facebook group, when Baños initially ignored Saint Patrick.
“He messaged me and I didn't respond at all — he didn't even have music out,” Baños said, half-laughing. “I looked him up and I was like, ‘Okay, Jacob St. Patrick. Weird.’ And he reached out again after he released the EP — I got really excited then and felt stupid.”
They had to be doing something right with their guerrilla-style marketing, as the names of the Manic. boys are almost inescapable if you are in the indie music circuit of Nashville. Besides the logo sticker I used to see outside of my day job every day, one of my friends showed me Saint Patrick’s alternatively experimental, self -conscious, and sobering Id Est EP almost a whole year prior to my conversation with Baños.
“Around the same time, Matthew Vero and I had been passing each other on Instagram — you know how it goes,” Baños continued. “He's been playing keys and synth with Saint Dorian, and I went and saw them live on Music Row. There were, like, four people in the room.”
What he didn’t tell me, but was mentioned by Vero, was that Saint Dorian actually auditioned Baños as a vocalist but ultimately passed the role on due to different creative approaches. These boys were taking the game of musical chairs to a whole other level.
”When I was writing ‘It Starts With This,’ it was important to me that the lyrics matched how the music felt,” Baños said of my favorite song of the band, an explosive track that is an instigating moment of its own. “Despite it being one of our heavier ones, it always felt like a blank canvas to me. When I heard it, I envisioned blooming. I wanted it to start a conversation rather than push a certain (party-related) agenda and just state that change … Hope starts with all of us playing a part.”
A four-piece that eventually shifted into a three-piece as Parra left to focus on a solo career, Manic. proceeded forward with a rotating live cast (currently with the addition of Matt Bolton and Matt Salvo), and the songwriting process became more flexible and variable.
Recalling the making of the main singles for their upcoming debut full-length, Baños described, “‘The Dropout Anthem’ and ‘Into Oblivion’ were both songs that I brought in a guitar riff and about 90% of the vocals, then we wrote the arrangement and parts on the fly in rehearsal. Jacob and Matt Bolton actually wrote the instrumental for ‘Blood In My Mouth’ and brought it to me, which was a cool challenge.”
INTO OBLIVION SESSION @ MATT BOLTON’S HOME STUDIO - AUG. 1, 2022
“We got our friend Gomi off the camera with us.” Baños addressed the director for their next music video, and I heard him nam-edrop me from the other side of the porch. “She’s got a cool jacket and a cool The Maine shirt on.”
Dang it — was that too on the nose? I didn’t know what would constitute an appropriate session fit, but hey, at least Vero had a Dead Poet Society shirt on.
Let’s set the record straight: I was the nervous one at my first ever Manic. session. I was adjusting every micro-gesture while taking way too many close-up photos of Vero’s tattoos as they spent the entire afternoon tracking his keyboard parts. What I really wanted to do, and would deliberately tell the guys then, was to sit still and take in how great of a keyboardist Vero truly is.
It goes without saying that “Into Oblivion” has one of the most intricate keyboard parts on the upcoming Manic.’s debut album, The Butterfly Effect (The Bedhead Cut). The synth holds the key to the “oblivion,” takes the torch from the glittery guitar line, so perfectly tucked beneath the anthemic, drum-amplified melody.
“I've heard those songs dozens of times, but getting the masters back yesterday and listening to all the mastered audio, I felt like I was hearing it all for the first time,” Vero relayed during our interview the day after Manic. obtained four of the masters for their upcoming debut. “I was listening in my car and was on the verge of tears at the end of ‘Two Fourteen,’ because I'm listening to this as an audience member now instead of as the creator.”
Just days before our conversation, I once again found Vero at the center of the crowd during Zëta Ræ’s set, a project centered around the magnetic grunge-punk songstress. I caught Vero fixating on Saint Patrick’s bass playing several times, the kind of fixation you often see on musicians’ faces when they are genuinely fascinated by another musician’s skill and execution.
For two shows in a row, Saint Patrick leaned over the stage after the set to ask me, “What do you think?” but shook his head after I praised him. This time, however, Vero walked over to back up my compliments.
“It’s that sense of awe and wonder that I think everyone who’s doing music is chasing,” Vero explained of his habit of watching his bandmates play. “When you create, you want to inspire wonder, create things that move you. That’s a big theme for me, trying to tap back into that, because music became professional for so long. It's like a formula or a job — you lose the wonder and you lose the element of play. I'm constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to collaborate with these guys. I think it's important not to take that for granted.”
Speaking on the nature of this coming album, Baños supported the idea of play: “I’m very excited to get the new material out. A lot of the old and current catalog was written more spread out, and the guys came in later on the process to help finish it out.” The project relays much of Baños’ personal journey and re-executes many previously released songs such as “Tired Eyes” which “is very much the sound of us figuring it out in real time.”
“Right now, I've been so busy trying to finish the record that in a weird way I actually haven't been writing very much,” Baños added during our conversation in November. “I’ve been getting back into it again but not nearly as much as I want to in this phase of life.”
He continued, “I think my winter is definitely going to be living in that realm. Lots of books, lots of video games, lots of cozy days in the house.”
I can attest that did not end up being the case. Since the EXIT/IN show in September, Manic. was steadily playing at least one show per month, from The End to The Cobra, Music Row to East Nashville — it’s been a nonstop year for the boys, shifting between album mode and show mode. Just this past January, Manic. played Nashville three times, if you include the Feb. 1 show at The Basement East. It’s safe to say that the jeopardized EXIT/IN show is now very far behind the Manic. crew.
An alternative rock band with no management, no label backing, and, at this point a negative budget, opening for The Foxies at The Basement East was a milestone for Maniac. On top of that, it was the tenth official Manic. show with the current lineup of Baños, Saint Patrick, and Vero, and they were once again on the bill alongside their best friend Maggie Miles, this time with a shiny “Nothingless Presents” plated on all the promo assets.
The passion project of Miles, Baños, and Saint Patrick, currently Nothingless exists on a plane between a concept and a fully fleshed-out label service for alternative acts. It is the very reason you can always spot the familiar names together on a bill, and why the showcases of this crowd have the comforting name of Group Therapy For Outcasts.
Even just within the months upon my first meeting of the crew, Nothingless has evolved drastically.
“THE DROPOUT ANTHEM” HOUSE SHOW @ 605 - JAN. 20, 2023
“This doesn’t even make sense!” Baños said into the mic, as he took a second to process which one of his friends was on stage. Currently, the lineup is composed of members from both punk and alternative pop bands, some upcoming Belmont musicians, and his fellow Manic. bandmates. “It doesn’t have to,” he concluded.
The venue for “The Dropout Anthem” release show couldn’t have turned out better. The 605 was fully soundproof, beautifully and functionally divided into multiple rooms. As it was, it was the venue host’s first time throwing a house show, and the concern of over-inviting limited promotion to the party. With just messages, word-of-mouth, and the close friends sharing the Nothingless Instagram account, The 605 got pleasantly snuggly.
My favorite part of the night was everyone telling me their favorite parts. Some found Freddi Astraia’s soulful voice to be insanely beautiful, and some found Maggie Miles’ keyboard playing to be beyond impressive. Having seen most of the rotating performers at the house show at various other occasions by now, I found the room to be most fitting for Janna Jamison. The bedroom pop grooves of her songwriting comforted me just as much as the harmony between Astraia and Zëta Ræ.
But the atmosphere changed when it came the time to introduce “The Dropout Anthem.”
“When we started throwing the song together, we were getting ready for our show over at EXIT/IN for the second Group Therapy For Outcasts — you were there!” Baños paused to point at a familiar face in the crowd. “I've been writing this song for a few months. We were testing out a million different technical things and I'm like, ‘Hey guys, how about we do another song?’ I picked up my guitar, showed it to them and broke two strings trying to show them the damn thing.”
The crowd laughed as he continued, “I was like, ‘So do we think that we're ready to play this in two weeks?’ They were like, ‘Yeah, let's do it.’ We did it. The song is called ‘The Dropout Anthem.’ If you dropped out of school, this song is for you. If you didn't, this is an excuse to bump the person next to you — and scream if you know the words!”
“Something of sort happened, and it was a lot of fun” could probably encapsulate my whole experience in this community. I imagined that one acoustic set they did at The East Room back in October to be something similar to this house show: mellow, intimate, just like home. But perhaps a lot more people expected the night to be like Miles’s “Asthma” release party, which had since become somewhat of a local legend in the underground scene.
“The ‘Asthma’ party was my way of directly grabbing Nicholas by the shoulders, and be
like, ‘This is what I want,’” Miles went on to describe of the multi-media, community-oriented, mixer/showcase/party. Almost an entire year following the party, I still came across photos taken by Jesse Paul from the night on social media. Each time I was pleasantly surprised by how the aforementioned clans of musicians and artists seemed to interact and mingle across the board.
Miles got on my radar early. Thinking back to the beginning of my Nashville days, I definitely shied away from Miles initially — her songwriting style felt brutally vulnerable. Each of her songs contains turmoils in her train of thoughts, most times unresolved, in a lyrical sense. But it’s the arrangements and melodic runs that gradually warmed me.
Scattered in every song is an emotional landing point, whether it’s the gospel-inspired, exhilarating “What Do I Say?” or the dilemma-charged, rhythm-driven “Indecent.” Then came “Sanitized Things” at EXIT/IN’s Group Therapy For Outcasts. Sometimes a live performance can transfix a moment and remind you what makes living worth it — it takes a powerful performer to facilitate it, and Miles is capable of just that.
“This makes me feel this way so I'm gonna sing about this instinct,” Miles described of her songwriting process. “I'm very much connected sonically to the things that I create. For example, you said ‘Sanitized Things.’ I wrote [that] in the midst of a lot of pain, and it was just me and the keys. I knew as I was writing it that this [was] gonna be heavier when I record it, and I [could] hear it in my head. But right now, it's just me. I know Nicholas is also similar in this way.”
Instinct and an almost dream-like vision seem to be the fuel for the Nothingless crowd. For Miles, that bleeds into every aspect of her life. The day after the EXIT/IN show, with her crew composed of her best friends, she took off to Boston with no returned flight booked — she was waiting for the advance to come through from her newly signed deal with BMG. It all worked out at the end, but Miles was never going to pass on the opportunity to tour with Maude Latour.
Way too many life events occurred for Miles on the week-long tour, and it was certainly not for the faint of heart — fortunately, she had her friends close. “It wasn’t that I just went, ‘Hmm, for the Maggie Miles touring team I want it to be all my best friends’ — it's that we all bound together with this commonality of a dream,” she summarized of the nature of her touring party. “I see an opportunity for someone to have their dreams, and I happen to be in a position to provide that for them to be able to do that. Why wouldn't I do that?”
That same logic applied to the formation of Nothingless. “Ever since I started playing shows, I would always say this phrase — usually during the last quarter — I would stop and I would look at the audience and say, ‘Okay, this is the last portion of the show. We're gonna give you everything we have, and nothing less.’ And I guess, for Nicholas, it really gripped him.
“He brought the idea of an artist collective to me … I floated the idea of wanting to start a label down the road of my career. He was like, ‘Why not now?”
When asked to theorize future Nothingless events, Miles brought up the audio/visual nature of her scene and recalled the “Asthma” release party: “There were so many alternative artists in every sense of the term. I had them each set up different stations that you could go to interact with their art. Jesse had a big sheet set up for people to get their photos taken, and Bex was selling paintings. Then Harrison had a walk-in, immersive thing. It was so cool. I want to tap more into that. The music side of it is super important, but I think the visual arts is what's going to really set us apart as a label and as a collective.”
During my interview with Vero, I asked about why, out of the three of them, he is the only Manic. member who isn’t directly involved with managing Nothingless. “I'm a part of the collective as much as everyone else, which is awesome,” he explained, “But Nicholas, Jacob, and Maggie are the co-founders of it. And, frankly, I really have nothing to do with this to put my name on it. It's a separate entity from the band. They are three people that are very driven to build a sense of community … and they inspire each other.”
But his belief in a community is one that many artists would resonate. “I want to level the
playing field a little bit and bring resources to the DIY scene and the punk scene,” said Vero, “I talked about the attitude of scarcity versus the attitude of abundance. There's certainly plenty of creativity and there's plenty of support.
“When I say level the playing field, I mean to bring the possibility of having a full production with lights, and fully set up to everyone, every band, regardless of their budget, or whether they're signed or who the fuck thinks they're good. And I think we gain more from diversity and giving everyone a voice, and letting the audience sort it out. That's how creativity comes from innovation.”
NOTHINGLESS HOUSE - DEC. 19, 2022
I felt like my entire body had abandoned me, but it was okay.
What happened in those dusking moments had already gotten blurry. It involved Saint Patrick walking up to the keyboard and hitting some notes and Baños walking back and forth ensuring no precious elements were lost. Eventually I stopped moving around the room with my point-and-shoot and sat with Zëta Ræ in silence. Baños’s clear and gentle vocal line for “Through” filled the room. Time became a very diluted thing.
Saint Patrick joked about the original version of “Through” — which at the moment is still available on streaming services — how the guitar was out of tune and layers of backing vocals and instrumentations got completely lost in the mix. It all came down to technical difficulties again, Baños tried to explain.
I laughed with them but a remnant of tears hung onto my face. The few melodies that flowed out of that keyboard came close to being real magic. Out of the Manic. discography prior to the to-be-released The Butterfly Effect (The Bedhead Cut), “Through” stands as the most vulnerable and personal track for Baños, perhaps even so more than the gut-wrenching “DNA.” Released prior to his meeting of his now bandmates and brothers, what happened at the time of writing “Through” could only be retold by Baños himself.
Somewhere in the piano line is Saint Patrick’s promise of a future, a future of a Manic. that looks nothing like its original lineup, in which it was Baños’ one man show. That afternoon, I came to realize my personal relationship to this crowd and the parasocial relationship to their art. Any remaining hope to grasp onto journalistic integrity felt like a meaningless pursuit. By being in the room on this very day, many other session days and rehearsal nights, I forced myself into the narrative.
Three days before the release of “The Dropout Anthem,” I have my final interview with Saint Patrick. Sitting on the porch of the Nothingless House in 30-degree weather, as Miles and band rehearse inside the house, I bring up my concerns of journalistic integrity to him.
“You can't pretend that you aren't the sole source of that conversation,” he says. “Because you're a writer and that's what you do. You're crystallizing something. There's a time and a place for objective news. The people who are supposed to be doing objective news are doing the least of it, and [there are] people who aren't supposed to be doing subjective news and raising the consciousness and introducing new ideas. There's a gap in the ecosystem that nobody is sure who is supposed to fill [it] — you just have to decide what part of the ecosystem you're trying to fulfill.”
Later, he adds: “It was an idea that brought you here, and now you're doing the objective work, the real work of becoming part of something. And in that sense, [by] contributing to something by participating in it, you are creating the band of Manic.”
That’s something I would have to process down the road. If Baños is the leader of the dreamer pack, Saint Patrick is the rock that grounds the group. The way he advises and revises ideas comes subtly, but he establishes his confinding presence firmly in every room and situation, not unlike his bass playing.
“The reason we don't hear the trees talking to each other is because under the earth they're talking to each other in these frequencies that are so low we would never even be able to pick them up,” he describes. “The bass kind of connects us and grounds us. That's why music is top-down, from vocals [and] guitars, down to bass; and drums are usually in the middle.”
Recalling the “Through” session in December, he adds, “Simple cycles are what run the world. I started applying those things to art, that small cyclical motion in the songs, like the simplicity and the starkness, and I started attacking that. Suddenly things weren't getting overcomplicated on my end — it was like getting healthfully complicated in a way that was elevating the music. From there, I was able to find my niche within the band. I am the deconstructor.”
He doesn’t hesitate to find the right descriptor for the upcoming Manic. debut. “Tired,” he says. “This is not the traditional process that artists go through. We've been reinterpreting and retracking and reorganizing the sound for two years, some of the songs were released before that process even started. We have songs about hopeless romanticism, about feeling like a total dropout loser. We have songs about the complexities of growing up in small towns and a slowly decaying society. Somewhere in there is a through line that you're not going to be able to put into words. And that through line is what's going to either propel the band forward or not. Because it's either going to resonate or it's not.”
It sounds simple, but finding a through line for Manic.’s narrative feels like an impossible task at times. For both Manic. and Nothingless, Saint Patrick is the balance between personalities and their separate artistic entities. “Fortunately and unfortunately, Nothingless doesn't progress if Manic. doesn't progress because Manic. is catalyzing a lot of relationships,” he explains. “In Nashville, Manic. is something that other people can be competitive with, and that's going to inevitably force other people to look at themselves and decide if they are going to quit or if they're going to double down on what they do well.”
In the more immediate future, Nothingless has been growing even in the short months of 2023. With Zëta Ræ finally moving to town and reuniting with her band (Saint Patrick, Bolton, and Josh Parra), the collective is further living up to its promise of inclusivity for all alternative music.
For every full band Zëta Ræ has set thus far, they’ve been blowing the crowd away with their closing number, “Kidding.” “It's from the first EP that we made,” Zëta Ræ elaborates. “It's one of my favorites. It was about feeling like I couldn't have a single real conversation when I was at this house show. We were all playing characters of ourselves. And now to be here with all of my friends and so many genuine people feels very full-circle. And it's one of those songs that has a breakdown that I just couldn't play without the guys. We've been waiting for this forever.”
Commenting upon her bandmates she adds, “They are positive encouragement. Just having somebody to say, ‘Oh, I like this’ made me think that there's gonna be other people like us who enjoy the sound. I don't think I ever would have had the guts to go through with releasing songs or doing a show without them. Also, they are so on my musical wavelength. They just helped me discover more of what I truly like and how exactly to do it.”
Her favorite spot in Nashville so far is a fan-favorite: Baños’ house, which has since been renamed to the official Nothingless House. The creative support and mutual inspiration vouched by Zëta Ræ is something Baños may not be aware of, but everyone who has been to the house would attest.
“Nothingless is a very grandiose idea of how to bring people together,” Saint Patrick says, attempting to nail down the definition. “What I do in that realm is advising on where the pressure points are that need to be pushed, rather than making something just to make something. The intent, again, is to bring people together, but how can we do that objectively [so] that it doesn't eventually get so bloated and bureaucratic?
“We're in the business of ideas,” he continues. “The community doesn't create community. What we're doing is we're presenting people with an idea of community that they can either take or leave. They [won’t] feel obligated but obliged to participate and give something more from themselves. They'll feel like they don't just want to take but they can offer something by being a part of it, and they can take their own sense of self-worth from that.”
In that moment I recall how this all began on that evening at the East Room: I was looking for a community in Nashville with a great deal of doubt. Even as I reached the end of this journey, over six months later, while I still hold a great deal of doubts, for the very reasons and concerns of grandioses mentioned by Saint Patrick, I sure hope everyone involved succeed in this nearly impossible pursuit that is Nothingless.
After that sombering monologue, Saint Patrick concludes, “What I just said would land me with no friends, huh?”
But with that statement, I lose my plot as a journalist in this crowd, and I’ve found a new reason to stay.
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