INTERVIEW: Nashville’s NIGHTLY chats their approach to the band, current tour with NF and what 2019 may bring!

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It seems like there are new bands sprouting up every day, and it feels like every single band in the world is constantly going on tour. So it’s hard to shine in a sea of that and a big move that bands are now taking is being way more present with fans. Producing content and making videos be a story versus just singing into a microphone. It’s part of making a “brand” and while that’s something bands don’t want to always admit, it’s there and it’s part of the job. For the Warped tour crowd, the band The Maine tends to come up. For glam rockers, it’s Motley Crue. For alt radio, it’s the 1975.

It’s the time of social media, where videos are important, where Instagram is important and one band that is of that time is Nashville’s NIGHTLY. The new hot bands are these alt rock acts who are playing the natural progression game, constantly releasing new songs, to keep their fan base growing. Just Saturday night, I headed out to the Agganis Arena to talk to the duo, Jonathan Capeci and Joey Beretta, just an hour before they took the stage to open up for NF as main support. Capeci and Beretta talked the tour, their approach to NIGHTLY versus their previous project together and what’s to come for the band in 2019! Find our chat below and keep your eyes peeled for much more to come from this talented duo!

Obviously you toured with NF last year, so obviously you guys are familiar with each other. Sold out tour. Maybe how have these dates been? You’re out with him for still quite a while.
Jonathan Capeci: Great! All awesome. It’s been fun because there are a few repeat markets from the last tour. I don’t want to say those are more fun because honestly like last night Montreal was insane.
I saw the Instagram story, it looked nuts.
Joey Beretta: It was crazy.
JC: Yeah it was crazy but I will say it is fun to play a repeat city because at least usually like a third of the audience is familiar with us from the last tour. And it just makes it more fun because they maybe know the songs or something like that. So they’ve all been great.

Perfect, then obviously this band is still relatively new in releasing music. Clearly the EP did so well in 2017 with ‘XO’ and all the songs off that but I know you’ve been releasing singles. Where are you in the process of this upcoming EP? Are you still writing, are you still collecting songs? How has the writing really progressed for this new EP? I know you’ve been playing together in other projects for so long. Maybe how have you been approaching the process for this project, do you think it’s changed? Maybe from the first EP?
JC: From the first EP? No, I don’t want to say that the process has changed honestly. It’s the same process but just updated in terms of what we’re writing about. It’s just whatever is happening in our life at the time and honestly the second EP, a lot of these songs were written at the same time or like shortly after.
Oh okay, so same time or pretty close to it.
JC: Yeah they are definitely some too that are on the newer side like this last one we released, ‘Who Am I To You’, ‘Holding On’. But I don’t think the process has changed.

And you’ve spent so much time with each other. Maybe something that you left behind from previous projects and maybe something new you tried when you started doing Nightly together?
JG: I think we went into Nightly with no expectations of anything other then just writing what we wanted to write. I think that’s why it ended up being very different from what we did before. Because there was really nothing holding us back from doing anything. We went in very open minded and then we came out of the original writing with a clear idea of what we wanted to be. I don’t think that will ever change. I mean we’re constantly progressing.
JC: We’re better at communicating with each other now. He can say, ‘I don’t like that’ or I can say ‘I don’t like that’ and each other isn’t offended. Where that’s something when you’re younger where you’re like ‘well screw that, this is the guitar part’. There’s just not really ego anymore when maybe there was when we were younger.
Then like I said before, Nightly, it’s still so new. You obviously had a really big year last year. It’s going to continue to grow, you’ve put in the time. Just from recent interviews like Weathers and Night Riots, there’s this new genre of bands. To have this visual element, that are pushing for the videos to have storylines, like ‘XO’s which I just watched on my way to the interview. When it comes to that creative side, is it something where one of you leads it? Do you put story boards together, how have you approached it? As of recent, a lot of bands are making that big effort to be visual, to put out these creative videos and not just have you singing into a microphone?
JG: Yeah I think now, just because of the amount of music coming out, we want to put our imprint or fingerprint on everything that we do. That’s more so the reason and those are the kinds of bands that we like. Whether it be like Coldplay where each album is like an era that you can feel throughout the artwork and the videos, the production. There’s really a million bands, there’s a lot of bands doing it. Dudes like The 1975. I think it’s just something cool that we like also wanted to do in our music. Just have this little universe that we’ve created. So I suppose the creative side, it often just happens all at the same time. Even we just wrote a song right before this tour that we were all really excited about and while we were writing it, all of us were already thinking about the artwork for it or being like it would be cool if we did this. I think you just sort of log those little ideas away and when it’s time to be like what’s the roll out going to be like for this, it comes out. And sometimes we do dive super deep and sometimes it’s ‘Here’s a song’. It kind of depends on what we’re dealing with in that time. But it’s definitely collaborative.

Perfect, then like I keep saying, there is a lot going on. You have this tour, I know the EP is in the works or music is to come in a full release form. Maybe some hopes or focuses, I’m sure you can’t say much about what 2019 is going to bring, for you two over these next few months?
JC: We’re always writing. We love the writing process so we always have a big backorder of songs which we keep adding to. I think by the end of this year, we’ll finish a bunch more songs. Then we’d love to keep releasing music next year.
JG: Yeah we have our eye on a headliner right now.
Yeah? I mean you’ve had that natural progression. You’ve opened for so many tours now.
JG: Yeah we’ve opened for a lot.
You want to make sure the headlining shows are big. You don’t want to risk it out and go out on your first tour and be like ‘let’s headline’ and then have ten people show up.
JC: Yeah! Smaller rooms but we do think that that’s the next step. We have actually booked the headline tour. So yeah I think it’s finally time and like you said we’ve opened for a ton of people and sure we’re not going to be doing these size rooms like we’re doing right now. Start it small, do something for the fans. We can play all the songs we have and some new ones. That’s our next big thing that we’re going to tackle after the second EP’s done.
I’m sure that will be great since you won’t have the time constraints you have when opening for someone else. It’s like picking your babies.
JG: It’s definitely going to be a challenge because we have opened up so much for other artists. That when we put together a set, it’s going to be interesting going from playing only thirty minutes to playing like an hour, hour and fifteen minutes. Haven’t really thought about it too much yet. Going to be a little bit of a learning curve probably.
Important.
JG: Oh yeah in a great way.

About Author

Colleen

Colleen has been writing about music since 2009. Interviewing bands since the glory days of Warped and has continued to do so for now over fourteen years. As well as doing freelance for other publications, the love for everything rock continues today.