The Growlers were formed in Dana Point, California, in 2006 by lead singer Brooks Nielsen and guitarist Matt Taylor. Over the years, the band established itself within Southern California's surf rock scene, cultivating a devoted cult following through its unique "Beach Goth" sound and aesthetic. The band’s popularity eventually expanded far beyond its local roots, garnering millions of streams and taking the group on multiple international tours.
The band went on to create its own annual Beach Goth Festival, typically held around Halloween, and the Snow Ball Festival, which took place during the Christmas and New Year's season. Throughout its two-decade lifetime, The Growlers have undergone numerous lineup changes, the most significant occurring following the band's six-year hiatus. As a result, Brooks Nielsen emerged as the only returning member of the group's most recent incarnation.
WHRB 95.3 had the pleasure of sitting down with Brooks for a brief conversation ahead of The Growlers' April 16 performance at The Royale. Following the band's 2020 hiatus, Nielsen embarked on a solo career, releasing five full-length albums, including a live recording of The Growlers' 2014 album Chinese Fountain.
We would like to extend our deepest thanks to Brooks Nielsen, the band's management and touring team, and everyone else who helped make this interview possible.
How do you like Boston? How do you like the East Coast?
I love it. My wife is here, and we were riding bikes around. It got so much colder by the water, but it was awesome.
How much exploring do you guys get to do between shows?
Well, the bus is like time-traveling. Wake up in a new city, most of us have bikes. Thomas, the guitar player, runs for like fucking 20 miles. He gets the whole lay of the land. We get all over the place. Thrifting, skate parks.
Do you have any early memories of when you first created music? At what point did you know that you wanted to turn this into a career?
I used to sing a lot and make up joke songs with friends really young, like 12 years old or something.
And then later on, getting drunk at house parties, people would freestyle rap, and I would jump in. Also singing to the radio. That's kind of where it all started. My mother really liked to play music early in the morning and dance, and we’d watch Soul Train every Sunday. That’s kind of how it started, I guess. Until I finally had a friend playing a guitar next to me, I thought, “I could probably sing to that.”
Did people tell you that you were good at making music when you were first starting, or was it just that you felt passionate?
No, everyone's negative. With everything I wanted to do, I would be like, “I think I want to make a clothing brand.” I would hear, “Pfft, do you know how many there are?” I’d make a name, people said, “That name sucks.” “I'm going to start a band.”
“Do you know how many people start bands and fail?” I remember my friend's mom walked in on us playing a song, and she was like, “Is that a song about the beach?” It was probably a crappy song. But she's like, “You live by the beach, no one else does, you think the country wants to hear about a fucking beach song?” And I was like, “Wow. She might be right.”
And then I was like, “Wait, the Beach Boys.”
Yeah, she was just a mean old lady. But yeah, everyone was pretty negative. Except for when you start playing shows for people at a party, and that's good. Yeah, early on, when you do it young, there are so many friends you can invite out to get things going.
We know you're performing solo as well, how much of that is influenced by the music that The Growlers have written and the stuff that you were doing with The Growlers?
To me, it gets confusing. It's all the same to me. It's just getting people excited, getting into a room, trying to make something, getting vulnerable. It’s getting uncomfortable sometimes and just trying to make something. It's about being with good guys.
I think the difference was that The Growlers were a lot of childhood friends and stuff, but when I got a chance to redo it, it's like, let me pick guys that really love doing this and are more skilled musicians. I chose some older guys because I'm older. And just taking another crack at it with some strangers, too. Everything about it was kind of scary at first and extreme.
As bands in a similar scene to The Growlers begin to evolve, how do you see the sound of this band evolving, and how is this influenced by the fans or social media?
I don't listen to anyone. I'm not on social media. Everyone is out there giving opinions and judging. I don't really care to see it or click on someone's profile and see it's like a 12-year-old kid talking shit. So I'm really the judge first, but then also people I care about. Band members, guys we choose to work with.
My manager really, he kind of helps me pick. I don't know if anything is good, so I'm just kind of like, “This all sucks.” So I send it to him, and he makes sense of it. “No, this is good.” “This has potential.” “We should work on this one, finish that one.” And then, of course, my wife.
How does she shape your music-making?
We've been super in love for like 20 years. So on the road, I just miss her so much. When I come back and when it's time to write, it's kind of easy to do that. I sing about her, the songs are all about her. She's my best buddy, so she's always in my head. She's stylish and a musician, too.
So when we first started dating, most of our dates were her coming to my warehouse, playing piano, and me trying to record her. She has terrible tempo, so I'm trying to put her on a loop while also trying to sing to it. So it started off musical. And she showed me her inspirations and I showed her mine.
Everyone's been seeing the release of these B-sides, oddities, and outtakes. How has it been going through that archive? Are any memories coming up? Is there anything you see?
I've done it multiple times, and it's weird. I went through, a few years ago during the Brooks solo stuff, every little digital card I had, cassette tapes, and found all this old music. I was kind of proud. I was like, “You know what? We did a lot.” “We're pretty good, actually.” And then I found a couple and started to be like, “Oh, man, this one didn't make it for whatever reason.”
Most of The Growlers wrote too many songs. Let's write 60, and then narrow it down. It's only gonna be 10 or 12. The recent release, Crisis, was something my mom suggested.
Do you have a favorite song to play live right now?
I like “I'll Be Around” the most because of the boys. It's this call and response; it feels like people yelling at me, and I'm pushing it off.
And then I see the fans singing it to me, everyone's yelling at me.
Do you have any pre-show rituals?
A little bit of peace and quiet before the show. I try to be back at the venue at the very least an hour before the show. I don't want to eat right before I play, I’ll feel bloated. And like a shot of tequila. Cole from the keyboards, his girlfriend's a singer. She taught me a couple of vocal warmups I'm finally doing, and it's like, “Why did I never do this?”
Because it's such a difference. Something like blowing through a straw in a cup of water.
How do you guys conceptualize that new brand we're seeing through things such as the new logos and merch, and what role does social media play in that?
They'll check in. Show me the social media here and there. But the designs, I don't know, I got ideas, and the manager did so much of it this time. Like we've just been doing this for so long. It’s fun to screw around. We know that the fans get excited and that they kind of like to play around with it.
One of the artists (we use a handful of artists), but one of them, Daniel, is a Kiwi who lives in France. We've known him for a while, and I can just kind of throw a few ideas at him, and that's enough. He just goes and kind of gets real close or makes something entirely different. We've been doing this forever; merch has always been an important part of The Growlers.
How so?
That little shop funds the tour really, especially when you're young, and we were really roughing it. I wanted to start a brand before I wanted to make a band, the shop is really a chance to do that. And it's just cool to see people get so excited about it. This is a cool audience. They like to wear their band T-shirt to the show, you know? It's really hardcore. Sometimes the merch is so cool, I want to wear it.
Is there anything that motivates the music you consume, the songs that you play?
A lot of it is from the homies, where constantly it’s, “We heard this, you remember that guy? Write this down.” There's so much flying around. Our drummer is an encyclopedia. If we have any questions, we just go, “Where's Richard?” He's gonna tell you anything about everyone. But everyone just has great ideas that come from different places.
Me, I kind of tend to go back to the same stuff. I'm not really trying to look for something. Like, “Oh, what was that great 70s punk band I love from New York? I only know a couple of songs, so let me go back and listen to all their albums.” Just kind of revisiting stuff that I loved as a kid, because there was a point when I started making music, I just stopped listening to music.
I didn't want to be influenced. I don't want to take something from somewhere, I just want to focus. My job is to write. So I just kind of shut everything off. I wouldn't listen to anything for years, so I kinda missed out on a lot. So now I'm going back.
What's your favorite part about being on tour? What are some crazy or fun memories?
I think some of the best memories are from when shit goes wrong. Like breaking down back in the day. The bus broke down at the end of a tour in the middle of nowhere, and the guy was like, “I can't help you until Monday, but you guys can park here.” And we'd park in the middle of a junkyard, and there’s like big bonfires. We would just stay there until Monday when he comes back. That kind of stuff that happens, like, you just kind of have to roll with it, and then everyone gets super silly with it. We got a flat a few days ago. And we're like, we would never be in here, we were in an IHOP.
We were also in a gas station buying laser pointers.
You've painted this picture of an evolution of tours. It seems like at the start of it, it was more DIY. We just want to know how it has evolved.
Well, it's weird when you're first on the road. When you're driving all day to the next spot, you see stuff like the world's biggest thermometer. You hear stuff like, “Pull over, let's go to the gas station, I have to pee, can we just get one beer?” And you see the country, like you see what the landscape of Texas is.
I'm glad I had that in the early days because now it’s just night traveling, you're sleeping. Just wake up in the next city, you don't really have that kind of on-the-road feeling again. But I'm grateful for it. Now we can spend all day in the city in the luxury of a tour bus. It's nice, I sleep so well in my little coffin.
Does this tour bus happen to have a name?
Oh no, I never named the tour buses, I named the school buses. Lizzie, Brandy, Shaquila, Choddie. We had a van called DMTina.
Do you have any visions of the future for Brooks Nielsen, for The Growlers? Where do you see the music going? Where do you see this all going?
I want to do solo again.
But right now I'm focused on The Growlers, I want to go make a Growlers record I always wanted to make with this crew of guys. Something much more psychedelic. But I'm on the fence too, I kinda like being a song factory, just me pumping out song after song. I don't know what to do. Eventually, I do want to do the Brooks thing again. I want to do something collaborative, I was thinking of doing a bicycle tour on acoustic and we can just bike from like Mexico to I don't know. And we can take our time.
I like the idea of fans, when we're doing that, driving by being like, “There they are, look at them, struggling up the hill.”
I know you guys were playing in Mexico City, at the Teatro Metropolitan. How do you feel about that?
Super excited, our tour manager, Adrian, is from Mexico City. I was like, “Do you know the spot?” He's like, “No, my parents do. My parents used to go watch movies there.” And it was really difficult for us to get it. We're like, “We don't wanna play at a festival”, we want to play a show.
There was so much maneuvering to find and commit to a venue. And I'm just excited to see our own fans, real fans, as opposed to playing to a sea of people who don't even know us, you know? I've taken some of these guys who are in the Brooks band to Mexico City. It was amazing, it's one of the best places ever to go to.
This current lineup, this band, is such a jolly group of dudes; we're gonna have the time of our lives.
Isaac Pacheco-Martinez ‘28 is a Record Hospital DJ, staff writer, and director of the RH and Sales department at WHRB.