Nicholas Krgovich on Gardening, Reunions, and Embracing a Low Profile

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Big fan of the spacious, thoughtful, and unbelievably warm sound that Vancouver's Nichols Krgovich has developed over the years. His work with regular collaborator Joseph Shabason has been especially entrancing; if I ever get around to publishing my Best Songs of 2020 list that I've been writing blurbs for on and off for two years, you'll definitely see a song from them on there. He's seemingly always got something going on, even if by his own admission the steady pace of productivity is not intentional; his previous band P:ano released their first album in 19 years, ba ba ba, last fall, and they're heading out on a tour of Japan in a month or so—and as you'll read on in this interview, he's got plenty more on the way too. Check it out:

Do you do music full-time or do you have a separate gig?
I have a separate gig. This is a long story, but I worked on a gardening crew and then, in the last year, moved due to corporate restructuring, so now I'm setting up for events as part of the same company. I've worked there since I was a teenager. I've only really had one job.

Honestly, that's amazing. I wish I could only have one job. Sometimes it feels like I have like five jobs. Talk more about that work and your your day-to-day existence outside of music.
I would've probably answered all of this a little bit differently prior to this change in role, because I was finding myself pretty intent on working on this gardening crew—greeting every day like, "I'm just going to do this simple task that seems totally manageable." It's almost freeing that it's all I have to think or worry about. That's all I want out of a job, because I don't really like working that much. The idea of a career is something that I never really thought about seriously for whatever reason, so I was like, "Oh, I can just do this thing, and there's familiarity to it." One thing I realized is that I really love working outside. Now I'm working in these dang buildings. My Perfect Days simple life got shaken up, and I don't know what to do about it.

I was talking to Margaret Chardiet of Pharmakon recently, and they said that working as an art handler—working with your hands, manual labor—ended up making them the most ripped they've ever been. Had you found similar benefits to working as a gardener? Being outside is, at this point, quite possibly highly underrated as well.
Yeah, that's another thing I've been wrestling with, because I don't consider myself "outdoorsy." I'm not, like, on a kayak. But I need the feeling of the sun going up and down—natural light and fresh air. I don't think I'm cut out to work in an office. I think I could do those things—it's not so crushing that I couldn't do it if I felt like I was in service of something that I really felt strongly about—but if it's just kind of random...

[This job] is union, and it's this company that's been around for over 100 years.
When I was young, I didn't ever go, "I'm going to be a bus driver or a doctor." I was like, "Oh, I'm just doing this"—and then I just continued doing this, and all the while, music was like rumbling alongside it. Over time, it just felt really good to not have to rely on music for anything financial and keep it in this really clean place, so this is how I've brokered that reality for myself.

Your previous band P:ano recently reunited after quite some time away. Tell me about how that decision came about.
It wasn't quite a decision, necessarily. It was an invitation to get together to create a new song for this label Zum's 25th anniversary. They put out our early CDs in the early 2000s, and we're all in each other's lives to varying degrees still, so we were like, "How random would it be to just do this?" We got together, and it was incredibly fun and weird, and the album was a result of the fact that I kept hearing songs and making them, and then bringing them to our little rehearsals. The ease of which the songs were written and came together was because, energetically, we
just meant to hang out more and play music again—to reinvestigate what this thing was we did when we were much younger. And it's just like fun for us, too. It was nice to make this record outside of any sort of expectation or ambition, which is another thing that comes with being 43 and having done this for a minute.

How did making the record square up with your early memories of the band?
I don't know if this has happened to you, but I've started to disregard my teens and 20s. They weren't far enough in the rearview for them to feel significant, but now that I'm where I'm at now, I'm like, "Wait, that was a big chunk of time. What was I thinking? Who was I?" It's made me like reinvestigate more things about myself and where I was at when it comes to emotional development. Even outside of the music itself, here's the thing that was really important to me that I did right out of high school with these people. It's been fun jumping back in that pool, and if I could speak for everybody, in some ways we're completely the same people, and in others there's been some tweaks over time.

Around the mid-2010s, you started releasing more music under your own name. What changed for you after years of being in bands? How did your sound shift, to you?
I recently did a quick interview with my bandmate Larissa Loyva, and the person asked her what it was when we were younger that appealed to her about my songwriting. She pointed out that I'd write songs about our everyday teen lives. I didn't realize that, because it wasn't on purpose, and it's a lyrical throughline that I've taken to the extreme—especially with the Shabason & Krgovich lyricsheets. I've always just wanted to sing about boring stuff, it was never a conscious thing. It was nice to know, as someone that's musically gone all over the place, that there's a melodic sensibility and lyrical approach that's actually been very much rolling with me. I took some wilder swings in the 2010s when I started making music under my own name, but there's always been a bit of a creative restlessness. Whatever's gone on with me in the most recent past—I'd say from 2018 onwards—has congealed into something that's very in step with my creative life and who I am as a person, in a way that feels very different than when I was younger.

Tell me more about who inspires you, lyrically.
Early on, when P:ano started, it was probably Talking Heads' Sand in the Vaseline. Last night, I played a show in Vancouver with Allegra Krieger, and on her previous record I felt like she was a kindred spirit as far as just sharing aspects of a day—that resonated with me. That's the thing that I like the most: You can just share yourself and your little life and potentially do something for someone else.

Let's talk more about your work with Joseph Shabason, which has gained a sense of prominence over the last five years. Collaboratively, it seems like you guys have really hit on something that's quite special and appealing.
I was actually just talking to someone who works with Joseph about him last night. I regard him as a mid-life new friend. We met in 2016. I love this idea that you can form very strong, beautiful friendships well into your life, and he's a prime example of that. I just want to make music with people that I love being around, and it turns out that we're just two little fountains when we get together. We enjoy each other's sensibility, and we compliment each other. It's always a relaxed joy. We're open, and I don't think about [our creative process] that much. We don't even talk about what we're doing conceptually.

You guys also have a very specific sound that I feel like I hear reverberations in others' work. I lump Destroyer from Kaputt on into this basket too, and I feel like I even heard this sound pop up on Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride a little.
That's amazing. When I was making On Sunset, I tinkered with it for way too long from 2009 to 2014. Halfway through that, Dan put out Kaputt, and I remember being in the studio like, "Oh damn, Dan just did the thing I'm working on right now already." There's a synchronicity as far as wanting to ape the romantic hi-fi '80s. With Vampire Weekend, I had two afternoons with Ezra when he was collecting ideas for that album. He was trying to work with lots of people, and we came up with some stuff, but none of it stuck. Joseph is a Toronto guy, which is obviously far from here—almost on the opposite end—so I don't think the sound necessarily speaks to Vancouver, for me. But, also, I don't really know what currently goes on musically. All my associations are from the '90s, more or less

Tell me more about what you've witnessed across your career when it comes to the ebb and flow of music scenes.
Joseph has a really robust community in Toronto—so many people that I consider incredibly talented ande fun to play with—so I've slipped into that. I have lots of L.A. people. I feel like my musical community is L.A. and Toronto, but I guess I should also mention that I spend large chunks of the year where I don't do music at all, and I don't actively try to plan or do much in general when it comes to all that stuff. But stuff always continually starts coming up, you know?

So, I'm currently working on—this is actually so beautiful that this happened, it's been one of the most pleasing things about the year. Tsunami, the band from the '90s, I got a Twitter DM from [Jenny Toomey] a couple years ago, and then we moved to email and phone calls, and now we're working on an album together. She hasn't made anything for over a decade. Things keep coming up that seem exciting, and in succession. Like, when Joseph and I were in Japan in the springtime, we were touring with Tenniscoats, who have been around forever. We had an inkling that we'd probably want to record something, so we set aside a couple extra days when we were over there and we made an album that'll be coming out next year too. There's just always something on the go, but I never feel like I'm going to do this or that, basically.

You've been making music for a while. What have you seen change when it comes to the extramusical aspects of being a musician?
I find that question a little hard to answer, because all the mechanisms about the way things work in the music world are things that I try to think so little about. I've downplayed their importance on my participation in making music and releasing it. I don't feel that passionate about it, but regardless of whether or not I care, I guess things have changed, obviously. I feel I have to think about what's going on with those decisions, because like a large part of what I'm realizing about myself is like that there's been a level of imposter syndrome with me that I just put a name to in the last year.

So much of the time, I was actively in the music world—writing, making records, touring—but I never felt that comfortable feeling or belief that, even though I was in the same mix with other artists that were like clearly on a path, I was on an upward trajectory to something—not even a lazy-river trajectory. So now, I've been doing this for so long with such consistency. and it's the thing that I love and care about so much, but I don't know what it's yet coalesced into, if anything, as far as something that's quantifiable or impressive in any way. I just feel like a guy that makes stuff.

I mean, I think that's a good mindset to have. The ways in which people feel put upon and pressured to constantly be pushing things in a certain direction...whenever you can take the opportunity to just be a guy making music, it seems better for your sanity.
That's generally my feeling. I do have general nostalgia for touring with printed-out MapQuest directions, and and not having to do anything where the internet was barely anything—but, I mean, what can you do?

"What can you do?" kind of sums up this decade so far.
Amen.