When we caught up with The Nude Party frontman Patton Magee over the phone on a recent afternoon, he was vacationing with his family in Boone, the town where it all began.
That morning, he had taken his girlfriend to drive past the infamous house off US Route 421 where he and his fledgling band hosted wild shows while attending Appalachian State University — sometimes sans clothes, which is in part how they came to their name.
During his drive-by tour, he learned that the house where it all began had gone through a transition of sorts.
“It’s so funny because we had done some pretty liberal activities there, and now the yard is full of Trump flags and like, ‘Fuck Biden’ and Thin Blue Line flags,” he explained.
But there’s a silver lining: While the house might now be inhabited by fans of an aspiring fascist dictator, at least they’re taking care of it.
“The funny thing is, the lawn, it’s really maintained and manicured now,” he mused. “When we were there it looked like shit.”
Such is life in the college town of Boone, which Magee estimates has about “a five-year shelf life” before the whole population turns over again and everyone’s a stranger. That’s part of the reason that, following graduation, he and his bandmates packed up and went north, making a home in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.
Since releasing their debut self-titled album in 2018 under New West Records, The Nude Party has gained momentum on the national stage, opening for acts like Jack White, Dr. Dog, Arctic Monkeys, Black Lips and others. They’ve graced stages at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk Festival, and Shaky Knees, to name a few.
Though The Nude Party now calls New York home, the seven-piece group has deep roots in North Carolina. Four members hail from Mooresville; drummer Connor Mikita, bassist Alex Castillo, guitarist Shaun Couture and pianist Don Merrill all graduated from Lake Norman High School together.
Percussionist Austin Brose grew up in Hayesville in western North Carolina. Though pedal-steel player Jon “Catfish” Delorme is from New Jersey, his family vacationed in Outer Banks annually. Originally from Utah himself, Magee’s family now lives in Chapel Hill.
The Nude Party will return to the Tar Heel State on Sept. 14 to co-headline the Roaring Riot Kickoff Jam, a season-opening celebration at NoDa Brewing for Charlotte’s biggest Carolina Panthers supporters group that will lead into the team’s home opener on the following day.
Before the show, we spoke with Magee about the band’s recent release from a predatory record deal, how building a barn studio changed their whole approach to music, and what it means to play in Charlotte.
Queen City Nerve: I think a common refrain among fans of The Nude Party’s music is the fact that you can really hear the sound of late-60s, early-70s rock. I’ve heard you compared to The Rolling Stones a lot, for example. Was that something that you all, as young guys, were into and listening to that inspired your sound? Did you grow up listening to music from that time period and generation?
Patton Magee: No, probably the first thing that I liked was Green Day and then, like, ska. I lived in Utah then. Later, I really liked MGMT … I was on the way to an MGMT show [at Amos’ Southend] in Charlotte and my friend that was driving was playing something that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. And I was like, “Dude, what is this?” And he’s like, “This is ‘Sister Ray’ by The Velvet Underground.”
I had heard the name before but I had no idea. For some reason, I thought The Velvet Underground was just something that I wouldn’t like. It was too weird. I don’t know. For some reason, I just had it in my mind that it was just some obscure, unlikable thing. And I remember the first time I heard it, I was like, “This is the coolest music I’ve ever heard.” I think it all came in pieces like that.
What was it that brought you all to the Catskills as a group?
Well, when we graduated from school, we needed to go somewhere because we couldn’t stay in Boone anymore. I mean, I’m in Boone right now, and even though we lived here for like five years, I don’t know more than probably three people here anymore. It’s got like a five-year shelf life. So when we got to the end of that five years, we needed to go somewhere.
We looked at a bunch of different places. We considered Asheville, we considered Louisville, we considered Brooklyn, and then a friend of ours, Oakley Munson, the guy that produced our first two albums, he had moved up to the Catskills to work on a garlic farm and just reset his circadian clock. And while he was up there, the Black Lips were recording at Sean Lennon’s studio in the Catskills, and their drummer quit and they needed a new drummer quickly. They knew Oakley, so they asked him, and he was like, three towns over. So he went over and played on the Black Lips record, Satan’s Graffiti, and then they asked him to join the band.
Once he was in the band, he was like, “Well, I’m going to just get set up here. I’m going to get a house here. Why don’t you guys come move up here, too? And we’ll all just live up here and do music.” So it all ties in with Black Lips and Oakley.
You all built a studio barn up there. How did that help transform your process compared to what The Nude Party had been doing during those previous years?
Well, I think it makes you realize that recording music can be a far more casual thing than [we had thought.] There’s something early on where you think there always has to be a board and there has to be all these compressors and there has to be all these patch bays, and it has to be an engineer. There has to be all these elements to it that you don’t understand, and it has to be this way.
And then putting it in your own hands and having your own studio, in some parts professional, in some parts unprofessional, you realize that the only thing that matters is the sound that comes back through the monitors. And you can do that. You can just do it that way. It’s fantastic if you have a great studio and a great engineer and a lot of great microphones and the rest of all that stuff, I’m not knocking it, but you realize that you’ve been gatekeeping yourself and that you can just do this.
And how did that have an effect on your sound? Because it does feel like you guys went in some different directions sound-wise on Rides On (2023) as compared to previous projects. How did that, in unexpected ways, let you become more experimental?
Well, because if you set up all the instruments the way they are and everyone’s standing at their station with their instrument and then you go like, “Okay, here are the 12 songs. Let’s hit each song. Stay at our stations and do all 12 songs,” that’s one way to do it. And it’s not a bad way to do it, but it’s a way that means that every song is going to have more or less the same instrumentation and sound to it, where then when we broke it down and had our own studio, it just brought it back down to zero.
It was like, “Does this song need drums? Does this song need a bass? Does this song need everything?” And you take everybody out of their stations and then look at the song and switch the instrumentation up. There is one song on there, “Tree of Love,” that I really like that has just an overturned bass drum being played with a mallet … There’s no bass, there’s no drum kit. Having your own studio in your own time and not being worried about wasting anyone else’s time or studio money or anything like that … When you’re only wasting your own time, it’s fantastic.
You’ve mentioned that, as a seven-piece, having your own studio also made it more of a democratic process in terms of songwriting. Is that also a result of not feeling rushed to make music?
Well, yeah. If you loosen the time crunch, if everybody’s got some song that they want to do, everybody has some feeling of, “I want this thing that I worked really hard on, and I feel strongly about this composition I made to get some attention and hopefully spring something great and be on the album.”
If everybody feels that way to some degree, but then you shorten the timeline really short and you say, “We don’t have time for everything,” it becomes real stressful because people feel like they’re not going to be heard. It can cause all kinds of working issues where people are trying to move too quickly on some things or feeling self-conscious, like that thing didn’t get enough time or whatever it might be.
So that’s another great thing about just elongating your studio time. You can just let everyone be at ease. We’re going to get around to all of it. We’re going to get around to your thing, his thing, my thing. We’re just going to get around to all of it. And then once we have 19 songs, which is too many for a record, it’ll be more obvious to everybody and everyone can pretty objectively say, “What if this cuts into a good record?”
It’s a lot easier to let your own idea go when it has been worked on, flushed out, and come to fruition. If it doesn’t quite sparkle, it’s a lot easier to be like, “Yeah, maybe it’ll work some other time later, but it doesn’t right now.” It’s easier to do it from that phase than the early phase where you’re still like, “No, it could be great.”
With so many connections to the Charlotte area, four members from Mooresville, does Charlotte feel like a kind of second home for you all when you play here?
There’s a lot of family and friends there, yeah. Especially since going to college out in Boone and stuff, just about everybody we know left there and Charlotte is where so many of our friends and family coalesced at. So it’s like, maybe home base is the wrong word, but it’s a very homey feeling to be back in Charlotte.
Do you usually get a pretty good turnout here?
Yeah. Sometimes it’s funny, too. We have our own fans who turn out and everything, and then also some of the guys’ parents will come … I remember one time, they rented a bus and brought 30 parents out, which is really sweet and fun to be a part of. I love when the parents drink some champagne and cut loose.
Last time I saw you all play in Charlotte was also at NoDa Brewing during the Queen City Jam Session in 2022. I think you hurt your foot and you were seated most of the time. Am I remembering that correctly?
No, dude, I pulled something, I didn’t know what it was. I just didn’t stretch before we played and I was dehydrated and it was hot as hell and I just did a little jump. It was the littlest little jumpy thing and I just pulled my hamstring or something. It did something, and I was three songs in, and I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know what just happened, I have no idea, but I cannot walk.” I was so embarrassed, man. I was like, “What do you do? Get a fucking stool.”
Any plans for new music moving forward?
Well we’re out of the New West deal. So we got a new record coming out outside the umbrella of New West, which is fantastic because they pretty much tricked us into signing a terrible record deal. They basically just raked us over the coals for a long time and we’re all very glad that we’ve got a new record coming out outside of them.
So is there a new label or are you shopping this project around?
There’s no label right now. We’re not sure yet, but there’s a good chance we just won’t use one because I think that part of the reason that these indie labels will create such predatory terms in their deals, the way that they do it is that they try to convince you of two things. The first thing they try to convince you of is that, without this, you will not grow. “If you don’t have us and our resources, this is how bands get big, this is how bands get to do the big tours and sell a lot of tickets and move their records and be on TV, and this is how that happens. We are the gatekeepers of that.”
That’s the first thing they convince you of, which isn’t true, but it’s the first thing. And the second thing that they tell you is that all the terms of your contract are industry standard. When you look at it, you go, “What? What do you mean? Like 15% of this and that? How does that work? What is that?” [They say,] “Oh, that’s just normal, that’s industry standard. Go talk to anybody. That’s how it is.”
Those are the two major predatory fibs that they put on young artists that are excited and doing something and want to grow … It’s not until you get a little older that you realize they don’t do much and that anything they do spend, they charge back to you anyway.
But I think the reason that they make such predatory terms, too, is because they are fading into obscurity. They’re afraid, because they’re all becoming just totally irrelevant. They don’t know how to market any better than you do, and you assume they do because they’re older and because they have offices and stuff, but they don’t know.
They don’t know shit anymore. They don’t know how to make some song go viral on TikTok, or even if it does, they’ll sign some viral TikTok thing for a million dollars and then they don’t know what to do with it because they can’t sell more than 100 tickets in New York. And they’re like, “What do you mean? This guy’s got a million followers, but he can’t sell out?” They don’t know.
And you just come to the realization that these people have some money, but they don’t know shit. They just have an office with a glass table. And we’re learning we’re just as good [at marketing] and probably better. So I think we’re just going to do it ourselves.
Do you have a timeline for the new project?
I know that at least one song will come out before October. We’re going to start rolling it out now. We’re in the mixing phase. I don’t have the exact timeline, but I know we’re going to start rolling it out in the next few months. We’re all super stoked about it.
The Nude Party will perform at the Roaring Riot Kickoff Jam at NoDa Brewing on Sept. 14, 2-10:30 p.m., alongside other acts including Moon Taxi, Simplified, Cutty Cutright and Deaf Andrews.
