Caleb Nichols, a queer poet and indie rock musician is on a roll. In addition to a recent book of poems, they’ve just released a new album with Kill Rock Stars. On a cool San Luis Obispo evening, we sat in Nichol’s backyard talking at a picnic table.
They had finished teaching at Cal Poly for the day and were taking time away from grading essays to speak with me.
“I only have 55 more essays to grade!” Nichols said.
Nichols sees their artistic life in two different stages: the first was from their teens to late 20s, playing and recording music and touring with bands – they were a bassist for Port O’Brien and lead singer of The Bloody Heads.
“And then I took a long break. Like, I stopped playing music in any real professional way. I didn't replace it with anything other than work,” Nichols said.
They became a librarian and, more importantly, started therapy to deal with past trauma, which was making a creative life nearly impossible, Nichols said.
“To be a really good artist, you have to be uncertain, to be really comfortable with that. And that is really difficult for people who have bad trauma and PTSD, because what do you want? You just want certainty,” they said.
The album Nichols released in October, “Let’s Look Back,” has a song that directly addresses the source of that trauma. The song, “The Absolute Boy,” is deceptively catchy. Someone commented on the YouTube video: “I’m getting 80s vibes – fun to dance to!” And the thing is, it is.
But the lyrics talk about the abuse Nichols suffered at the hands of their father – the “you” in the song. I asked Nichols about the line about being locked inside a cage. Their dad was in prison for a long time, Nichols said.
“And the idea was like, he put himself there, because he was abused. So it's about the cycle. But then I realized at a certain point, it's also about the cage that I put around myself to avoid fear and uncertainty, as we were talking about before,” Nichols said.
The fact that Nichols is expressing that pain through music makes sense. From a young age, music meant everything to them.
“I used to have this little pink boombox. And it was when I was being horrifically abused. And I would put on my Beach Boys 'Surfer Girl' tape. I'd have to play it really quietly. I didn't have headphones, so I would press it against my ear as hard as I could. I wanted to be inside of it, to be in the sound. I wanted to be out of my body,” Nichols said.
Music was a refuge. But what brought Nichols back to it for this second creative stage was studying for a master’s degree in literature at Cal Poly. Studying the British Romantics made them want to write their own poems.
“It did something to my brain. It was like, ‘Remember how you used to feel about art?’ And I was shocked that it could actually alter my life, that art can still do that. It put me on a whole different trajectory,” they said.
Nichols said that when they are a poet, they are able to feel joy from almost nothing, a kind of transfiguration. The song “Limn” from the album is a song about letting poetry drive your life, even if it is counterintuitive at their age, Nichols said.
“The song is about liminality. I'm super proud of having been able to use the word ‘liminal’ in a pop song, I think that I should get a Grammy for that,” Nichols said.
“Limn” also touches on the idea of being uncertain about one’s gender, of allowing yourself to be in transition. The chorus is “Either or / I’m in the middle / I’m in the middle / In the space between.”
“I have this feeling that wherever I land with it will probably always be somewhere in between,” Nichols said.
Nichols is exploring new territory, mentally, emotionally, physically. They’ve even been working on a PhD and left their husband and pets and home for the greater part of last year to study in Bangor University in North Wales.
“I've been pushing into trying to feel something more, to feel truth, to feel the ring of truth. And to really not just let my life go by. I don't want to do that,” Nichols said.
That push for feeling and truth is at the heart of Nichol’s second artistic stage. And it has yielded one hell of an album.
The KCBX Arts Beat is made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation, San Luis Obispo County.
