Not many bands’ first gig is at the Iron Horse opening for indie rock royalty—Sleater-Kinney founder Corin Tucker, in this case. It’s even rarer for a young group—its oldest member is 18—to be the subject of a feature in Interview magazine, accompanied by a full photo spread.
Northampton’s Big Nils (pronounced “Big Kneels”) is no ordinary band. Drummer Sen Morimoto and bassist Lilly Daiber are joined by vocalist Coco Moore, progeny of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, and guitarist Zoe Wardlaw, pride and joy of The Marshes/The New Harmful/So Very Small rocker Steven Wardlaw.
Since its auspicious beginning, the quartet has kept busy writing punk-inspired tunes and playing a slew of shows, many at Easthampton’s Flywheel. Moore and Daiber together answered a few questions via email about the band, which they say is named for a very tall German ex-punk rocker named Nils who has a rock ‘n’ roll tattoo and has been arrested for “stealing and setting buildings on fire.”
Valley Advocate: How did the band get together?
Big Nils: We were not all friends before Big Nils, but somehow we were all hanging out in Coco’s room waiting to go to a party on, like, a Friday night. Coco found a notebook she wrote in sometimes for homework or just some lyrics for songs she wrote. We were laughing about how funny the lyrics were, then Sen kept begging us to go into the basement to play around. We clicked immediately, and then started practicing almost every week.
What was the first show like?
Our first show was at the Iron Horse. We opened for Corin Tucker’s band. It was fun. We got all our friends to come. So once we finished, basically half the crowd left. We kind of forgot sometimes what we were supposed to play during the songs, but because we have such good chemistry, we just worked off each other—which happens still all the time.
Several of you come from musical families—was it inevitable that you would make music?
Coco never thought she would be in a band or do music, but now that she has, she can’t imagine not doing it. Sen was always insanely musically talented—everything he creates is amazing. He is the glue to Big Nils. Zoe’s dad was in the band Marshes. She is extremely knowledgeable about music and she’s played clarinet professionally and went to Italy to play it. Lilly’s parents are both visual artists, and in sixth grade she started taking drum lessons for three and a half years. She went to the Institute for Musical Arts for two years, where she fell in love with playing the bass. We are all self-taught musicians with the instruments that we play in Big Nils.
What’s the songwriting process like?
We used to take lyrics out of Coco’s notebook she wrote in when she was 11, but now we’ve basically exhausted the notebook. Normally Sen, Zoe, Lilly will play around until they find something they like, and Coco will listen and write lyrics or just sing into the mic until something comes to her. One song Lilly wrote, titled “Looking Through My Eye Ballz,” is about when she was staring into Coco’s dog’s [Sid’s] eyeballs and singing to him in an extremely high-pitched voice. That’s kind of the only time when we wrote song lyrics outside of the basement.
Recorded material so far?
We first recorded an eight-track album, Sibling, in June, 2011. We are currently working on putting out Sibling on cassette tapes and hopefully in the future on vinyl with the help of our “manager,” Bill Nace.
Recently we have recorded three new songs, which we are currently mixing with Justin Pizzoferrato in his studio in Northampton. We hope to put out a single (currently untitled) on seven-inch as soon as possible.
For more info, visit www.myspace.com/biggienils.
