WP: Why did you name your album Karma?

NDV: The answer for this question is really boring. I named the record Karma because there is a song called "Karma" on the record. There is no deep meaning behind it really, although I kind of believe that Karma is a real thing. That's pretty much it. I wish the answer was better, but it's not, it's kind of plain.

WP: "The River is Wide." Why does it start off the record?

NDV: It starts off the record because I kind of started the record off and ended the record with the kind of "progressive-ey" things. Pretty much those are the only ones that I have. And for song order and placement, so the record kind of flows. I thought it was a good opener, you know, the way the riffs in the beginning of the song start, it was a good way to start the whole thing out I think, to get it up and running. You know, and hopefully a lot of the fans that listen to Spocks Beard will buy this record, and it will suck them on in, with the first song being a little bit progressive, and when they get to the more "poppy" stuff in the middle of the record, then...

WP: They'll stay.

NDV: They'll stay.

WP: And they'll keep playing it. And tell their friends.

NDV: Exactly. That's kind of why I did that.

WP: "The River is Wide,"how would you describe this track? Is this song kind of in the vein of Spock's Beard?

NDV: Yeah, it's a little more "rock" than Spock's Beard, I think, it's a little more King's X, but it's still got a few different sections, and some odd time signature stuff, so it's kind of in that ballpark I guess.

WP: "Dream in Red." What are you trying to project with that song? Is there any theme in there? You say "red is the color that I see, signifying everything about me," and then later in the song you define red as three things: fire, blood, and love.

NDV: It's not really a personal song. It's pretty much a story about this guy who is freaking out because he had everything going for him for a while, I mean he had the girl, and he was popular and all this kind of stuff, and then it all went away and got screwed up somehow, and now he's got tunnel-vision, and red is the only color that washes everything around him, because he's kind of lost sight of everything else. And red means stop, red means pain, it means all kinds of different things, and it's a song about how he feels about what's going on in his life.

WP: It's a good song. The transition from "The River is Wide" into "Dream in Red" already takes you to a different place. Hearing the vibe on the first song, and then going to the second, where your voice is more "eloquent" if I may, it's a good transition. Is that the reason you placed it second on the disc?

NDV: Yeah. And I 's one of the stronger songs on the record, so I wanted to get it in there as quick as possible.

WP: To keep the listeners in there.

NDV: Sure.

WP: You kind of answered this one already, in "Dream in Red," that it wasn't really about you, but did you really lose that fight? And lose the girl? Or was that you just picking an idea out and running with it?

NDV: That came out of experience, I mean, I played in cover bands for years and years and I've seen lots of crazy things happen. That's more of a scene from past memories, I mean I've seen that stuff happen a million times in a bar.

WP: Okay, now on to "Forgiven." The third song. What can you tell me about that song?

NDV: That one is a personal song. It's an older song, I wrote that back in '96 or '97 or something like that. The music stayed the same, but the lyrics and the content have changed. And it just came from back in the old days, and she hates it when I say this, but I gotta be honest, me and the wife were having a few problems for a little bit, and the song just kind of came out of that. I was mad. I was pissed off at her. And it's great now, we're perfect, but every marriage goes through its ups and downs. Songs, a lot of times, come out of painful things—it's easy to come up with ideas when you're in that mindset. But they're all negative. So I wrote from that. And funny enough, I wrote those lyrics years after we worked all that stuff out.

WP: So the melody and everything came up when...

NDV: Well yeah, the crux of the song, like eighty percent of the song is the way it was when I first wrote it, but I didn't like the lyrics, I thought they were kind of cheesy, and this kind of flowed better, and what I wanted to say came out better.

WP: Would you say that writing is a form of therapy to you?

NDV: It is if what I want to say comes out. Sometimes I want to say something, especially lyrically for me at least, I want to say a certain thing, but the right words just don't show up, or something shows up that‘s really dumb. And that can happen musically too. I mean, you can get stuck. So if it comes out the way you want it to come out, at least for me, then the therapy's good, but if not it's more frustrating.

WP: Okay, on to one of my favorite songs, "Karma." When I first heard the finished product, the first thing I got was the tribal theme. And then you hear the harmonies in the background... who did the harmonies?

NDV: Everything is me, it's a whole bunch of me. Except in the middle bridge section, it's me and my father-in-law. But for the rest of the main song, that's all me, in four-part harmony. What happened was, I came in to the studio, and they just got Pro Tools in here, and I wanted to learn how to use the software program, so I hooked it up and started going, and the main percussion drum thing came out, and with Pro Tools you can have like a million tracks, so I put six tracks of me playing that four on the floor tom thing, I added some shakers, and then came up with this loop. So it was just that, and just about over a three-week period I would come in here every day for a couple of hours and just tweak with it and mess with it, and all of a sudden I came up with that background vocal part, and I came up with the lyrical idea by just playing it in my car until something came up. All the lyrics are about Bill Clinton, which is weird because I'm not a political guy at all, but he was going through all this stuff and it was before the election, last year, and he was doing all this stuff and trying to get away with all these things, and it seemed like he was making a lot of bad karma for himself I thought. I mean it's true, you can only be sneaky so much before it comes back up to bite you in the butt. That's what at least inspired me to write the lyrics.

WP: Do you believe in that, that Karma's going to come back and get you?

NDV: Sure. I think so.

WP: Which brings us back to the title of the record.

NDV: And I called it 'NDV, I didnt want it to be "Nick's solo record," I wanted it to have a little bit more of a band vibe if I could, for a solo record, if that makes sense. Karma just fit. It was good to give the album a name, rather than just my name.

WP: Track five, "The Game." For those who aren't able to understand the first two seconds of it, what is said in the beginning, of that song and by whom?

NDV: That's Kevin Gilbert, just going "hey-hey!"

WP: Where was that taken from?

NDV: That was that song. It was that recording session. I just kind of snipped it out of there and put it back a couple of seconds so it would be by itself. It's the only part of him talking, on the track, saved for sentimental reasons. That was the only song... I'd written a whole bunch of songs with him in the past, but that one, I brought him this tune and said here, let's jam on it. I finally got him to turn the recording machines on and get him away from something he was doing on his own, and within forty-five minutes we had the verse, the chorus, the bridge kind of written, and we were just starting to jam on it. We laid down the drum track, and he put down all this other stuff, and what was kept was the piano and twelve-string guitar, which was him. And that was... maybe that's the oldest song. '95? Maybe later. It could be '96. I forget. But it took me years to come up with lyrics for that one. Because it was sitting around, and I tried to work on it when he was alive, but nothing came out that was very good, and I couldn't get him to work on it any more, for whatever reason. So when he died, I wanted to try and use that with something. I wanted to write a song about him in some way, and I could never... it was one of those things, where the lyrics never would come out and sound cool enough. So very recently, the lyrics came out and I finally wrote something down that I felt was what I really wanted to say about him, and the impact he had on my life.

WP: What does "the game" signify?

NDV: "The game" signifies us going and doing a gig. The gig is actually the game. Basically, one day we were going to play the Troubadour, and it was the first part of the Thud tour, and we got together at his house in Eagle Rock, and Dagny [Kevin's dog] was running around, up and down the driveway. It was a nice day, and then we went to the gig, and I hadn't been to the Troubadour for a while, and it looked exactly the same, since I'd been there before. You know, we were all excited, really wanting to do the gig...

WP: So that was "the game." How much did you enjoy playing the game with Kevin?

NDV: That particular gig?

WP: The game in general. Because to me hearing "the game" signifies one show as a gig, but hearing your lyrics, I also hear it as the entire game from the day you knew Kevin, to beyond his death. To me, you're still playing the game as long as he is inside you.

NDV: Yes, you're very right, very philosophical about it. I mean, it was the best of times. And I've had some great times since then too, but it was extremely special. A lot of fun. It was always a lot of fun playing with Kevin. He kicked ass, all the time.

WP: Coming close to the middle of the CD, this song takes the listener into a different place. And it builds on the emotion. I think anyone who didn't know Kevin, they'll feel something building there too, even if they didn't know him.

NDV: Then I placed it in the right spot. That was the hardest part. I mean, getting all these songs written was hard, but then figuring out how to make a record out of it? I mean, placing it so that it wasn't boring, and there's not a bunch of slow songs together .

WP: "The Water's Edge." Originally I heard that on David Baerwald's 1999 "A Fine Mess," which is his double CD. A song recorded by the New Folk Underground, which you were technically a part of. Can you explain what that was?

NDV: That was me and Baerwald, and Will Sexton, and David Kitay, and Mike Thompson, and whoever else would show up to jam on and write songs. We did it collectively for about eight months, all told. We would get together for like a month, because Will is a kind of perfectionist and he would be there every day. This was at David's studio, Palindrome Recorder, and we would just write stuff. And a lot of stuff was David's songs he already had, and we'd just jam on it as a band. We came up with like thirty, forty songs, I mean it was just tons of music.

WP: Sounds reminiscent of the TMC sessions that were at Bill Bottrell's studio.

NDV: Yeah! We definitely recorded that way, very analog. But, it was fun, and we made some really great music. We would party there, drink tequila, and have a great time, make all this music and stuff. Oh, it just died out, which is a real shame because there is some amazing music on that record. We did a few gigs, like three or four gigs live, at The Mint in L.A., and...

WP: Advertised?

NDV: I don't remember. I don't know.

WP: Well how was the crowd?

NDV: It was okay. I mean, it was fun playing that stuff. It was something coming to fruition with all that work we did. I mean we would stay there forever. I was getting home at five in the morning every day...

WP: I bet your wife loved that.

NDV: Yeah, I was there a lot. So that song was something I wrote with Will Sexton, and I always dug it, and I liked the way it worked on that record, and I wanted to try and do something with it. I thought it was a pretty cool song.

WP: One thing I notice is the difference not only in you handling the vocals, but when it goes to the second part of the song, where it kicks in, to me it sounds "beefier" than Baerwald's, more of a grind... is that something you purposely did?

NDV: Yeah, I wanted to make it sound better, hopefully, than what was on David's record, and we spent more time on it... I spent more time on the song than we did on David's record, which was really quick. Probably Will's vocals were done in one take. I don't think we did another take when we went and did it.

WP: People may not know that that is Will singing that song. A lot of people might think that is David. But on your track it is solely you?

NDV: Totally me. Yeah, and I wanted it to sound as big and bad as possible.

WP: The piano on there?

NDV: Mike Keneally played the piano.

WP: Who was it on Baerwald's? Do you know who?

NDV: Probably Mike Thompson. Great keyboard player. He rules. He's so cool.

WP: Who came up with the intro? On both versions, the beginning starts off with a feedback-type sound.

NDV: That, on David's record, that that was them messing around with loops, they had these ambient loops, and they made up something weird and just faded it into the song. I just wanted to do something similar, so I had Mike Keneally and Bryan Beller just make some crazy noises, to make my own thing out of it. Just for the heck of it. It's a good segue between the songs.

WP: It makes you pay attention even more.

NDV: Yeah.

WP: "Come What May." A different version of that song is actually in the film "Moulin Rouge," with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Where did that song originate from and why did you decide to record your version of it?

NDV: I heard that tune ages ago. Kevin Gilbert and David Baerwald did a version of that song. I think it was for a movie...that's what they told me back then. They recorded it with David singing lead, did a cool version. I thought it was one of the best love songs I ever heard...it was killer; I loved it. The lyrics are very simple and to the point, and it's a great love song, so I always wanted to try and record it, just for the heck of it. And I was in here one day, with that particular song... a lot of the songs have other players playing, but that one is all me... and I was in here and I made a scratch piano track, and got this great ambient guitar thing happening with this Eventide box over here and the guitar, and all this stuff was coming out of me and I wasn't even trying, and all these really cool things were going down... The song is a great love song, and I wanted to do it justice if I could. That's all. I had no idea it was on "Moulin Rouge." I was in Europe, and Matt, who works at Inside Out, the record company in Europe, came to our show, because Spock's Beard was on tour, and I delivered the masters. He told me that Nicole Kidman was singing it on this movie "Moulin Rouge." I had no clue, no idea.

WP: It comes across good. I've never heard it—other than your track, I've heard segments of Nicole Kidman's.

NDV: They did it completely different. They added lyrics and different things, and definitely singing it differently, and their harmonies... it's a duet, singing in harmony. It's a completely different track.

WP: Would you like to play that song live?

NDV: Oh yeah.

WP: Would it be difficult...

NDV: That song is not too hard for me to sing. The range and the notes... they're all easy to hit. That's not the hard part. The hard part would be seeing if the passion is there.

WP: The passion is what comes through on your vocals.

NDV: Right, and that was maybe thirty tries.

WP: Where did you record the vocals for this album?

NDV: At my house. You were there! That's my daughter's purple room.

WP: That was right when you moved into your new house; you had boxes everywhere, you could smell the nice aroma of fresh paint, you had people installing things in your house, you had wires everywhere...

NDV: The best was like, we live on this street where you could hear the cars outside… but you can live there, and I was dealing with that. They're building a freeway down the street from the house and trucks were going by, hauling whatever, up and down the street… cars, Harley Davidsons. The best one was when I was trying to sing a song, trying to get something done, and across the street the tree trimmers started pulling out their chainsaws. So if you hear stuff in the background, over your headphones, it's because it's out in front of my house, outside the window.

WP: When I was there you did "Karma." That's the one song I remember you doing, and remember you having to stop repeatedly because of the noise.

NDV: I had no choice. That was where I had to do it. And it worked out fine. You can't really hear anything. It worked out fine in "the purple room."

WP: "Untitled." This is your instrumental piece. Why is it "Untitled"?

NDV: It's always been that. I could never figure out what to call it when I first recorded it, and it just stuck.

WP: And what was the creation of it?

NDV: It was just me doing a jam in here, I was messing around with stuff. A lot of these things are coming from jams, working out, just tweaking and things like that. That one started with a guitar riff, and messing with this effects box again. I was playing one time through with it up an octave, another time with it down an octave, and that particular song is all me, playing all the instruments, and I was messing about, and that's what came out of it. It's a lot of guitar, it's guitar-based, more than drum-based, that song. I've been trying to play as much guitar as possible, and it's one of my cooler guitar things that I've ever done. It's pretty short. Only about three and a half minutes.

WP: "Will it Be Me." The first thing that caught me on this song was that you seem to use your voice in a different way than on the previous eight tracks. I don't know if it's an effect being used, but that's how I heard it. Is there anything different that you used when you did that song?

NDV: I don't know. I mean, effects-wise, I don't really remember. I mean, I think we used the widening effect, to make it sound wider.

WP: Maybe that's it.

NDV: That's wider, not whiter. w-i-d-e-r.

WP: <Laughs>

NDV: And again, that's another personal song, coming out of that same time frame, with me and my wife. I think it's one of the stronger songs, I mean it's a mellow, kind of adult song, I guess. I don't know how you call it. I have a tough time describing these things sometimes. But it came out of that same time period, so...

WP: Same as "Forgiven." In that era.

NDV: Yeah. Definitely a relationship tune. Chicks, man. They bring it out of you. It's hard; it's hard. But I love it. I love it.

WP: Track ten is called "Anything." It's a rocker, to me. It comes out with the guitars... who's on that? Who is playing the guitars?

NDV: That's me and my friend Rick (Musallam), doubling in the intro. It was originally me, and we doubled Rick in on top. And in the main body of the song, with the verses, I'm playing the high part and Rick's playing the low part... and I think it's the same in the choruses too. And the drum track and my guitar parts are from like 1996 or 1997.

WP: Really?

NDV: Yeah, I was going to do the whole thing over again. I was playing it for my friends (my friend Dave Carpenter plays bass on that song) and they thought the drum track was cool. It had a good vibe, and energy, and I 't want to lose that. So I just decided to keep it, and of course we did the vocals over the top.

WP: I can see hearing that on any rock Station.

NDV: Me too!

WP: It's gotta be done. The KLOS's of the world. . . they all have to play that.

NDV: It's a cool song. I wrote that one about my Dad. It's an older track too, I guess about the same time. That one came out of my whole Dad experience. It was the way I felt then. I don't feel that way now. It's kind of stupid when I think about it now, you know: I didn't want to be like him. I wanted to be anything but like him. Now I kind of look back and think that was kind of lame, because he wasn't as bad as I thought he was. So that's what the song is about.

WP: Now we get to the final three tracks, "Paying the Price" is the main title.

NDV: I had the song "Unknowing," which is the last song, for a while and I needed something else on the record, and there were too many slow songs, and I wanted to end it with something else. I started writing the first part of it... the "Dysfunction" because I had this program bit and I had a melody idea, and it kind of grew from that. The "Paid the Price" song, the one in the middle, came out last, which was kind of a weird timing thing. But I came up with this idea, a storyline kind of idea, and it doesn't even really make sense how it happened.

I thought there was this cool thing in the beginning song, the "Dysfunction" one. The vibe was really dark and eerie, just the music. I didn't have any lyrics. And I started thinking about everything that was on the news, and reading the newspapers, and there's always this depressing stuff about kids, and how messed up they are in the head, and going through all these weird things, and trials and tribulations, and they hate everything and life sucks, whatever. And all the bad things about parents and how they don't raise their kids right, they don't care, they don't give them attention, and the kids are like a throwaway commodity. They're around when parents want to have a good time and feel like a parent, but they also just want to put the kids in their room and do their own thing too and forget about them.

So I thought up the storyline, and I had to come up with a middle section. I knew "Unknowing" was kind of like, since I wrote "Dysfunction" about two kids, a boy and a girl, I wanted them to end up meeting each other, and come out of the shit and walk off into the sunset together. So I needed the middle song, and that's how I wrote it. I came up with the guitar riff first, and then it kind of flourished from there. That was the boy and the girl's meeting point.

WP: It works well to end the CD. You can visually be there. You can visually go on that roller-coaster ride with them.

Okay, now the secret track to "Karma" is just drums and jamming.

NDV: That was me, Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller, and Rick Musallam. We were tracking my set. I think Mike, the engineer, was still getting sounds and stuff, we were just jamming along and that happened, out of the blue.

WP: And at the end is someone saying "Alright!"

NDV: Bryan goes "That was awesome!" And it was. We ended at the same time, and we couldn't even see each other. Mike was playing the piano, and we just had a jam, and we started in and stopped at the same time. It was some cool, weird thing. It was great.

WP: It's good that you got it on tape. Those are the kinds of things where you always ask, "Were we rolling? Did we have tape?"

NDV: Yeah, and you want to keep it. Sure.

WP: Same as Karma… you just want to keep it! Well Nick, I'd like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this interview with me. It has been a lot of fun.

NDV: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank YOU!