When the New Year came to the Flathead Valley, Nick Spear was battling the flu. It’s not unusual to be sick this time of year, but Spear had an ever-important duty to fulfill: Sing as the frontman for The New Wave Time Trippers during the band’s performance at the Great Northern Bar in Whitefish.
“It was a little scary, being up on stage and singing while sick,” Spear said.
Spear eventually found some time to rest up, but his performance on New Year’s Eve is an indication about how passionate he is about his being a musician. And his work ethic is paying off: The New Wave Time Trippers are as popular as ever, and he has a new single playing on 103.1 The River.
He also released a new music video for his song, “I Had a Nice Time,” which debuted during a release party in Whitefish on Dec. 30.
Add doing all of this while working on a new album that he hopes to release by the summer and teaching at Flathead Valley Community College as adjunct faculty with his wife Rebecca Spear, and it’s easy to see why he might need a time machine.
“I’m busy,” Spear said. “It’s the Flathead; you do a million things at once.”
In 2012, Spear released the album, “A River Below,” and since then, has been working on new music while putting together the Time Trippers. He’s also a familiar face for those who frequent the Alpine Theatre Project in Whitefish, and he’s got the acting chops to match his musical talent. But music is where his heart is, he said.
“Acting comes naturally but I definitely prefer playing music and writing music,” Spear said. “That was sort of my first love. I was always getting awards for consistent effort in music.”
His commitment to music paid off last summer, when he earned a scholarship to attend the Crown of the Continent Guitar Festival’s workshops, taught by some of the top guitar talent in the world.
There, he had the time to stop running around, and was able to focus on writing “I Had a Nice Time,” which he performed as an opener before the Livingston Taylor and Mac McAnally concert.
He said it was almost surreal, to write a song in four days and then perform in front of such a large crowd and open for such big acts. That’s the beauty of living in the Flathead, he said, because there is so much musical talent here, all one has to do is dip into the river to get swept away by the current.
“It’s actually a pretty quintessential Montana thing,” Spear said. “I wrote it at the Crown of the Continent workshop, Brett Allen at Snowghost (studios) recorded it, Marco Forcone directed the video and helped conceptualize it.”
Jazz musician Erica von Kleist composed the piano arrangement for the song, which Spear believed would work better on the keys than on the strings of a guitar.
Von Kleist is also in the video, which was shot in a wrecking yard in Columbia Falls.
“This video couldn’t have been done anywhere else,” Spear said.
As for the upcoming album, Spear said he isn’t sure if all his new songs will be on one album, because they vary in their mood and tempo.
“It’s stylistically so all over the place,” he said. “I might just have to punt and say ‘Yep, it’s stylistically all over the place,’ or I might have to separate it into two different EPs.”
His tune on local radio station 103.1, “The Song We Sing,” is upbeat, reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen, while “I Had a Nice Time” is more cynical, almost melancholy. Spear said he made sure his 2012 album flowed nicely from song to song, but as the industry changes, that may be less important for his next release.
“It’s so ‘one single at a time,’ so most albums now just end up being compilations and they’re not really designed to be listened to from beginning to end,” he said.
But fear not, Time Tripper fans: Even with a new album, Spear said he will continue to front one of the most popular dance bands in the valley.
“I’ll always play with The New Wave Time Trippers, that’s my junk food,” he said. “I love that.”