Louder Than Fate Jared James Nichols

• 1 Let's Go 03:31
• 2 Ghost 03:28
• 3 Way Back 03:07
• 4 Bending or Breaking 03:54
• 5 Killing Time 05:12
• 6 Dust N Bones 03:06
• 7 Show Me 04:14
• 8 Looks Like that Felt Good 03:22
• 9 Runnin' Hot 03:10
• 10 Pretend 02:45
• Total Runtime 35:49

Info for Louder Than Fate

Hard-rocking guitarist and vocalist Jared James Nichols is back with Louder Than Fate, out June 5 via Frontiers Music Srl. The 10-track collection is his most fully realized statement yet, balancing his signature crunchy guitar tones with a stronger focus on vocal melody and songcraft. Whether he’s delivering a fluid solo on “Running Hot,” burning through the lead track “Let’s Go,” or laying bare something more vulnerable on “Killing Time,” Louder Than Fate is a record that earns the weight it carries.

Two years is a long time to carry songs in your head, and Nichols sounds like a man who can finally breathe. “These songs have been floating around in my head in rehearsal spaces and sound checks for the last almost like two years,” he told Robert Cavuoto of Sonic Perspectives. “Finally, to put this together and not only compile these songs but also to get this record out, it feels like I’m finally just like getting a weight off my shoulders.”

That relief is audible in the record itself. Louder Than Fate moves between hard rock muscle and something more emotionally exposed, a range Nichols says came from a deliberate effort to let the songs go where they wanted rather than forcing them into a predetermined mold. Tracks like “Dustin Bones” and “Let’s Go” operate in full-throttle mode, while “Killing Time” and “Show Me” pull back into something closer to ache.

“One of the big things I’ve always had just because of the way I play guitar is it’s always been really, really guitar focused,” he said. “With this record, I feel like I was able to bridge that gap where there is that natural kind of rawness when you hear songs like ‘Dustin Bones’ and ‘Let’s Go.’ As a vocalist, I get my best vocal takes when I’m holding or playing my guitar. It’s like my blanket. But with songs like ‘Killing Time’ and ‘Show Me,’ it’s almost as if I was able to have the guitar play rhythm to a vocal and to a melody, which is something that I’ve been really, really focused on. This record, we finally captured that.”

The writing process was looser than anything Nichols had attempted before, leaning on co-writers based in Nashville and letting the material find its own footing. “Way Back” is a prime example, built around a chorus riff that simply fell into place once the right people were in the room. “The more it feels natural and the more it feels easy, the more it comes across as honest in me,” he said. “That thing basically wrote itself.”

That track also reflects the eclectic musical diet Nichols grew up on. Raised on a rotation of Steppenwolf, Mountain, Cream, and Led Zeppelin courtesy of his Vietnam vet father, AM radio softness from his mother, and Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots from his brother, he never really belonged to a single genre and stopped pretending otherwise around two years ago. “I said, let’s just write songs. Let’s just let it go where it’s going to go,” he said. “I have this weird kind of misfit of all this blues, rock, country, heavy stuff, and I just try and cram it all in there to try and sound like me.”

Lyrically, Nichols admits that while not every song is strictly autobiographical, each one carries personal elements that reflect his own experiences. “Killing Time” is where the personal and the universal collide most directly. The song started from a fractured family relationship rather than a romantic split, but the two threads ended up pointing in the same emotional direction. “Sometimes you have to let songs go where they want to go,” he said. He played it for Lzzy Hale of Hailstorm while it was still taking shape. “By the time we got through the chorus, she goes, ‘Oh, this is a good song.’ And I was like, got it. We’re doing that.”

The guitar work on that track also marks a personal milestone. Inspired by David Gilmour‘s melodic approach, Nichols went home the night before recording the solo, didn’t touch his guitar, and just listened back to the rough track on his phone, humming melodies rather than rehearsing licks. “I walked into the studio the next morning, fired up my amps, went through like three passes, kind of figured out where I wanted to go, and then we did it,” he said. “After we were done, the engineer looked back at me and went, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think we got it.’ That one was really special because I felt like I was really saying something with my guitar.”

That commitment to feeling over perfection runs through the whole record. Nichols and his team made a deliberate call to leave the imperfections in, no auto-tune, no going back to fix the rough edges. “If you hear the guitar and it goes or it scratches up, that’s me. That’s my mistake. And we left it because there’s an honesty there,” he said. “With ‘Killing Time,’ there are parts where I can hear a string kind of buzzing underneath it. But it was like it’s part of the energy. It’s the way it was captured.”

Louder Than Fate also carries a bonus track that most Western listeners won’t find on the standard release: an acoustic version of “Killing Time” recorded on guitars dating back to the late 1800s. “When you hear it, right when it kicks off, you go, ‘That sounds different. That sounds old,'” Nichols said. “It’s not like it was made to sound old. It’s a microphone on a real old guitar.” It also marks the first time he’s attempted true acoustic soloing on record.

Nichols is taking the album on the road immediately after release, with shows lined up in New Jersey, Los Angeles, Nashville, London, and Berlin, playing the record front to back, in sequence, with the same band that recorded it. “When you listen to the record, and then you come to the record release show, it’s the same guys playing the songs,” he said. “To me, that means something.” (sonicperspectives.com)

Jared James Nichols

Jared James Nichols
You can’t teach the blues. It’s not something that can be codified in music books or learned on YouTube. It goes much deeper than that and it comes from the inside. It’s about the way the guitar strings are bent and the sound gets transmuted directly from a player’s soul. It’s simple at the end of the day. Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. JARED JAMES NICHOLS has definitely got it. The Wisconsin-born, singer, writer and guitarist’s channels blues grit and gusto through bombastic arena-size rock ‘n’ roll. It’s raw, raucous and righteously real.

As soon as he got his first guitar at 14-years-old, the stage immediately called to Jared. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he grew up minutes away from The Alpine Valley Resort— where Stevie Ray Vaughan performed his last show. However, no divine coincidence could truly foreshadow just how adept at the six-string he would eventually become. He personally traces the beginning of his story back to a blues jam that his mother brought him to. “Two weeks after I got an electric guitar, I was on stage with all of these old cats from Chicago playing the blues,” he recalls with a smile. “The music immediately resonated with me. It was all about the feeling and the soul behind it. None of these guys were music nerds. They were true blues guys playing what they felt. That power and reality struck a chord in me. ” Soon, he found himself practicing for twelve hours every day. Hitting up the local jams, he ended up sharing the stage with legends including Buddy Guy, “Honeyboy” Edwards, and “Big Jim” Johnson as well as opening for Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Derek Trucks. By his 21st birthday, he had logged over 500 gigs.

After a short stint at Berklee School of Music in Boston, he headed out to Los Angeles where he garnered numerous accolades at the world-renowned Musicians Institute, winning the 2010 Jerry Horton guitar contest, the 2011 Les Paul tribute contest, and the 2011 “Outstanding Guitarist” award. 2012 saw him release his debut EP, Live at the Viper Room, gaining the notice of both Guitar World and Guitar Player Magazines.

Jared has teamed up for recordings with Aerosmith engineer Warren Huart, Classic Rock Legend, Eddie Kramer (Hendrix, Humble Pie, Zeppelin), Bob Marlette (Skynyrd) Tony Perry (son of Aerosmith’s Guitar Legend, Joe Perry) and Producer/Mixer Jay Ruston (Anthrax, Stone Sour). He has released 2 full length Albums: “Old Glory & the Wild Revival” (2016) and “Black Magic” (2018) and 2 Eps: “Live at the Viper Room” (2012) & Highwayman (2016) His newest single, “Nails (in the coffin)” was produced and co-written by Mark Jackson & Ian Scott, the team behind the hit song “The River” by Bishop Briggs. They have helped take his dark tales and guitar heroics to a new level of a Modern Blues sound for a new generation.

On stage, it truly comes to life with his power trio rounded out by the Swedish born drummer Dennis Holm and young bassist Baron Fox. Jared’s presence becomes amplified with guitar in hand. Audiences have experienced that everywhere from his performances at NAMM and SXSW to tours supporting Lynyrd Skynyrd, Zakk Wylde, Walter Trout, John 5, Living Colour and Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple fame.

In 2016 Jared was featured in a mini documentary feature series called “Uncharted” sponsored by Honda thru Uproxx.com. In just 2 weeks the clip had been streamed over 4 million times and led to Festival bookings at The Stone Free Festival at London’s 02 Arena and Azkena Rock Festival in Spain. He continued to trek across the Globe in 2017 including Festival dates at Hellfest, France (supporting Aerosmith) Ramblin Man Festival, England and Steelhouse fest, Wales. 2018 and 19 had him adding Wacken Fest (Germany), Rock The Ring (Switzerland) & Sweden Rock to his festival resume.

Jared has also become the accomplished social media influencer with 115,000 Instagram followers & 50,000 Facebook friends. He has been featured in numerous Youtube videos including hosting the vintage guitar show “Fretted Americana” which have garnered 500,000+ views to date. His engagement on social media has him at over 1 million people per week. His years of dedication to his instrument and avid fan base have recently culminated with the release of his own signature “Old Glory” Gibson/Epiphone Les Paul Custom and Blackstar JJN20 watt Amplifier. Both have broken sales records for a debut signature artist product. He has already performed over 200 dates in 2019 and isn’t stopping anytime soon. All in the name of spreading the gospel of “Blues Power”. Ultimately, he lives up to that idea of Revival from his debut album’s title. “I want people to get excited,” he concludes “I want them to feel anything is possible in this music. I want them to know great Rock n Roll exists. If I can give someone that same inspiration I was blessed with, I‘ve done something right.”

This album contains no booklet.