I was writing a lot of pop-punk music as I had since I was 14 years old, and around 18 or 19, I started writing some indie rock-type songs that I thought might work well as sync songs and pitch songs for TV shows and commercials. And so I started listening to bands like Jett, Cage The Elephant or the Pixies to get that kind of indie rock sound out of some guitar riffs that I was writing and to try to hone in on the commercial side of indie rock. And I accidentally stumbled upon some songs that didn’t sound very good for sync but were really cool.
At the time, that style, because it was so new to me, that alternative rock thing felt new for me and felt fresh, so I was really excited. You know bands that had been around forever were brand new to me, so I just started writing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a band out of it, so I just kind of chalked it up to sync songs and pitch songs. And then my manager at the time said, “you should do a band out of this style,” and I was like, “no, I got my punk band, I'm going to stick with this.” And he said, “no, it’s really cool, we should try it.” And I insisted, “no, this is not the kind of music that I grew up on and I don’t know it that well – it feels like I’m doing an impression. I’d rather do the pop-punk thing that I know really well.” And so he said okay, and then sent these demos that I made to a band in the United Kingdom and he said something to them and he asked them to learn them. They were an up-and-coming band. He said, “Nick, how about you write songs for this band and you’ll be the ghostwriter. They will be the band. They’ll be the look. And you’ll just write all the songs because this has to be a band.” So I said okay. But then the band sent him a video of them practising one of the songs in their garage and it sounded so cool and I got really jealous. And so I said, “screw that, I want to be in that band.”
I kept this all to myself and I started The Wrecks, and I knew that it was a new direction and I knew that I needed to find members, and that’s kind of what took me on the journey. And now, it feels very natural and it feels normal, and, you know, pop-punk sometimes comes into our alternative side and genre that we’re in, so it’s really cool to bounce between both genres now.