Interview: Nick Mitchell Maiato

Today, we are joined by Nick Mitchell Maiato to dive into his latest album, Náquera. In this conversation, Nick opens up about the inspiration behind the record, its central themes, and the creative process that brought this collection of songs to life. Here is what he had to say about the new album, his artistic vision, and more.

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Hi, how have you been?

I’m great thanks. Currently holed-up in my basement going over the set list for December tour in Spain and working on some new stuff. 

It’s been four years since One Eleven Heavy’s Poolside. How did your time living in the Spanish pueblo of Náquera shape the overall mood, pacing, and hazy, sun-baked vibe of this new record?

Yes, it’s been a minute. The joys of having a transatlantic band. The impetus for the record was borne out of that, ultimately—I couldn’t wait around for One Eleven Heavy forever and I had a bunch of songs that I wanted to just get finished. Ultimately, them never showing up to the studio I’d built for the band was a great thing in terms of making a decision to finally pursue a solo career in earnest.

The mood of the record was definitely a reflection of the surroundings, both in the sense that it’s a very easy, tranquil, and isolated place to live, halfway up a very modestly sized mountain, and in the sense that the isolation also forced me to interact with people almost exclusively via digital methods, which subsequently made me examine the nature of the horror show that is social media, which is where the whole digital drop-out mood came from. I just felt great stepping off the wheel of accountability for things I had no real power to influence, and was able to make a decision to focus on things I could control, like improving on guitar, developing my singing voice, and appreciating the simplicity of nature. 

The album blends country honk, deep cosmic funk, blazing electric guitars, and even a horn section. Did you go into these sessions with a specific sonic blueprint in mind, or did this multi-genre palette reveal itself naturally as you woodshedded?

It’s not majorly different to what I’ve been doing for the past decade in a lot of ways. I’ve been sort of digging my heels into a more traditional style of composing and playing for a while now, after years of playing free with a relatively limited technical dexterity. What makes free playing exciting to the listener as well as the performer is that you’re on the edge of collapse at all times—and sometimes you do collapse and that can be exciting in and of itself. But eventually, it becomes formulaic in its own way, which is kind of the opposite of what “free” is meant to be, you know? I figured I’d gain greater freedom by actually going back to basics and working back up to a level of dexterity whereby I could move around the guitar neck in a way that was truly unencumbered from lack of knowledge. Stylistically, that just meant I ended up going back to my own roots as a teenager, listening to Skynyrd, the Stones, the Dead, Allmans, Neil Young, Little Feat, et al, which is what we were pursuing with One Eleven Heavy. Once I started hitting what I felt was a sweet spot with that, I really just wanted to dig deeper into it, rather than heading back into the outer limits of melody and form, so that’s where my head is at. I know some people do wonder what happened to me in that respect, being that I was known for a much wilder style of playing in the 2010s, so that’s the short of it. Having said that, I do feel like I’ve upped my game on all fronts in the past few years, and there are some giveaway signs like the occasional modal change or key change and some time signature stuff that I still don’t really understand even though I wrote it. 

As for the horns, they were really just a whim, and an Aussie guy I know living in Valencia hooked me up with this amazing British horn player and arranger living in Alicante called Steve Carty, and we just worked really well together. I would give him rhythmic and harmonic pointers—I sent him some p-funk to check out before we recorded “The Angle,” for instance—and then he would try some stuff and, more times than not, it ended up being perfect on the first take. Steve played all the horn parts himself—saxes and trumpet. Amazing player and an easy person to work with.

“Riki Rachtman” is such an intriguing premise, a cosmic Americana ballad examining heavy metal’s place in modern pop culture through a disgruntled narrator. What drew you to Riki Rachtman and the legacy of Headbangers Ball as a vessel for that narrative?

Well, that came from a conversation I was having with my metal drummer friend Tim about the escapism inherent within the metal form. I said to him in a message: “Getting punch drunk from sustained whiplash is a great way to forget you have any subjectivity,” and I thought it was such a great line that I just built a song around it. I started thinking about the different contexts that the line could be applied to, and the most interesting one, to me, was the old hair metaller who’s mourning the loss of the glory days of Ratt and Crüe and Poison and so on. I was a big fan of the Penelope Spheeris movie, The Decline Of Western Civilization: Part II,” as a kid and Riki Rachtman seemed like the obvious figurehead of that scene, being that he owned (and still owns) The Cathouse, which was the epicentre of that whole sleaze metal scene, so I made it about him. He also stood as a great example of one of those people who was once so central to mainstream pop culture but who’s now only really known by the people who were around in the eighties—and they do still follow him around on his one-man-show tours, where he talks about those glory days—and it’s all just funny and sad and heartwarming and life-affirming all at the same time, so yeah, why not? If anyone deserves a song being written about them in 2026, I think he’s as good a candidate as any. 

“Critical Mass” is built as a towering, two-chord ode to “dropping out.” Is dropping out a personal philosophy you find yourself leaning into more these days, or was that song more of a conceptual character study?

Yeah man, I believe in dropping out if you can make it work. Not a Bill Burr fan or anything as I don’t really know his work, but I did hear the guy say something in a new interview with Rolling Stone this morning that piqued my interest. He said—and I’m paraphrasing here—that, if corporations really gave a fuck about the people who work for them, which they purport to do, they’d give the CEO’s fat salary to an AI and let everyone else keep their lower-paid jobs, rather than the other way around, which I thought was very incisive and just very raw and real and a very humanitarian thing to say. The veil has been truly lifted on corporate culture and I think that so many more people, now, are just grossed-out by the whole thing, especially with the whole black cloud of “AI will kill us all” looming over our heads. The basic functionality of everyday life enabled by a benevolently-minded society seems to have just gone out the window thanks to the seemingly bottomless greed that characterises the big corporates, especially in tech, obviously, and—didactic as the song may be—I do wish more people would just think to themselves that there is a way out of this, and that that’s to essentially disengage. This isn’t an aloof standpoint because I’m as engaged as anyone in the sense that, if I want anyone to even hear my music now, I have to use the channels that other people use. But I think we need to move beyond “starting the conversation” and take accountability for our ultimate position in the culture war, which is to oppose our tech overlords by our actions. From a music perspective, that means going to live shows, buying physical media—records, books, CDs, etc. It means not shopping on Amazon and supporting local retailers. I’m not living in some la-la land where I think we can just upend digital culture from the bottom in one fell swoop, but I do think we can put a dent in it by making our money circulate more broadly, rather than funneling it all up to the likes of Daniel Ek, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and those goons.

Having Bob Bralove open “Critical Mass” with an organ salvo brings a direct, legendary connection to the Grateful Dead universe. How did that collaboration come together, and what was it like working his sound into the track?

When I moved to Spain, one of the first cats I met in the music scene, here, was a guy called Aaron Feder, who’s a Chicagoan living up in Barcelona. He’s loosely connected to the whole Dead universe and more tightly to the general psychedelic jam band scene and he’s had a ton of Dead-adjacent folks come through Spain to play with him and in his Slow Sound Studio space. Peter Rowan was there, Scott Law has been there a couple of times, Dead cover band Terrapin Flyer are pals with him, and he’s also had Bob Bralove come through a couple of times for shows in Barcelona. Last time Bob was here, I was gonna try make it up to Barcelona to see him play, but we had a terrible storm down here in Valencia that week and it wasn’t safe to make the drive up there, so I hit Aaron up and asked him if Bob would like to play on a tune. Aaron put us in touch and Bob just went for it. He was very complimentary about the track, and told me it was the “continuation of what we began in the sixties” or something to that effect and we’ve kept in touch since. There’s talk of taking the band to the West Coast of the US next year and maybe he’ll jump in with us for a session or two, if and when that happens. For anyone who doesn’t know, Bob was the producer of the crazy 1991 Grateful Dead CD, Infrared Roses, which is basically edits of a bunch of “Drums > Space” jams from the previous year’s tour, and he was also the midi tech for the band and an auxiliary member of the band during those segments of the shows. So, yeah, an honour and a privilege. 

Otto Wilberg’s bass work on “Critical Mass” anchors a massive, key-changing guitar duel. How do you approach structuring those extended, multi-movement jams so they stay tightly grooving while still feeling expansive and free?

Yeah Otto’s bass part is so special on that song. Such a fluid, funky, dextrous player, and I’m so excited to have him come out on the road with the band as people will really get a kick out of seeing him do his thing. With hindsight, I would have liked to bring the bass out more on the record overall, but we mixed it remotely with Dom Tanner in Manchester and, though Dom is amazing amd did a wonderful job, it’s just such a hard way to do things that I ended up compromising on a couple of things I wouldn’t have, had it been done in person, and the bass was one of those things. But yeah, touring will set the record straight on what’s going on at the big bottom end on a lot of those tunes, and I can’t wait. As for the guitar duel, it’s a pretty simple story. “Critical Mass” is, essentially, a two-chord song, made interesting by the fact that it’s broken up into a bunch of different arpeggios. I wrote the opening lick first, then I wrote the rhythm guitar arpeggio that comes in the duelling section and then I just dropped in a chicka-chicka strummed thing rooted on a B7 chord and that was the entire structure done. The second guitar part that flows in between it was just an alternate rhythm and melody in the same key picked out as another arpeggio and you just get that weave sound that excites the ear as a result. To anyone with any serious chops, it’s kind of a parlour trick, but I love the way it sounds. The groove stays in the pocket in the same way you see a flock of birds flying in unison during the dawn chorus—sensitivity to what everyone else is doing and making your parts sit within the spaces. So much fun and just extremely satisfying.

“Flamebait” hits hard as a Lennon-esque rock-and-soul critique of technocracy, complete with a woozy horn section. What pushed you to take a swing at modern tech culture on this track, and how did you arrange those brass parts?

I guess I covered most of this with the drop-out question, and the song does cover pretty much the same territory, if from a more focused and even more didactic standpoint regarding the ways we engage with social media. But I also wanted “Flamebait” to be more ambiguous in its own way. I think the one thing that unites us all is the will to survive the looming dystopia as a species, and so I wanted to touch on the idea of maybe stepping back from the hills we say we would die on and, rather, think about what it really means to be human-centric. I used to see a therapist back when I lived in the UK and it’s amazing how vociferously psychology encourages us to disengage from untenable situations, and how popular that mindset is, and the concept of mental wellbeing in general, considering the degree to which popular culture—as centred in social media—tells us to do the exact opposite. Got a shitty, irreparable relationship with a parent? Attempt dispassionate honesty without accusation and, if that doesn’t work, discontinue the relationship. Got a shitty, irreparable relationship with a political adversary? Attack them to the point of complete alienation and never stop. To me, that’s the mixed message at the very core of the sociocultural breakdowns we’re increasingly seeing. We’re attempting to live one kind of life with the opposite set of rules to enable it. That’s what I mean when I say I wanted “Flamebait” to be ambiguous: yes, “the devaluation of the traits of democracy” is something we should unite against, absolutely. We just can’t do that by abandoning those traits ourselves. 

As for the horn parts, I told Steve I wanted some woozy counter rhythms and he just instantly nailed the song. When we started the record, it was the song I cared least about, as it’s one of the simplest for me and so not the most thrilling as a guitar player, but it ended up being one of my two favourites on the record and one of the ones I’m most proud of.

“The Angle” channels the spirit of rock-and-roll pool hustlers through a blend of country-funk, Parliament, and the Dead. How do you balance the wit and storytelling of a classic narrative song with deep, danceable grooves?

I don’t try to balance it. It doesn’t really work like that, for me anyway, and especially not in a song like this. The lyric came about after I watched The Color Of Money for the hundredth time. I just love all that weird, singular slang that belongs to pool halls. “Squat the rock,” meaning to plant the cue ball right in the middle of the table off the break, for instance. So yeah, I just wanted to explore that lexicon and have fun with words on that one. The arrangement, which was already done by the time I wrote the lyric, didn’t really allow for much character exploration beyond that, so I just made it about a guy who thinks he’s a badass at the table but probably isn’t. There’s no time for a resolution to the story due to the arrangement, so we just dip in and out, Cassavettes style. You know he knows his shit re: “the angle of incidence” and other important pool know-how, but at the same time, he’s ready to make a run for it both from the pool hall itself and the whole town, if he has to, so something’s going on. There’s a Tom Waits reference in there, which not a single person has picked up on, which either says something about the way people listen to lyrics nowadays or the amount they listen to Tom Waits. I hope you danced to it. That’s what it’s there for.

Náquera places your guitar playing and vocal presence front and center. Compared to writing and recording in a band context like One Eleven Heavy or Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, how did stepping up to man the wheel entirely on your own change your songwriting process?

I’m glad you asked that. I did feel a little bit of pressure to up my game on this record. It’s funny because I think people love the idea of the gang aspect of bands—camaraderie by proxy or whatever it is—and I think there’ll be some people out there who wish we had just made another One Eleven Heavy record, or they miss the to-and-fro between me and James or whatever. And there’s always someone who prefers one songwriter over the other in the band and so on. But that wasn’t really the source of the pressure. It was more just that I wanted to push myself to a new level for my own sense of self-satisfaction, as this really does feel like a new beginning. It didn’t necessarily “change” the songwriting process as much as slow it down. I spent more time practising guitar than I did writing the music, in all honesty. So the approach was basically to feel there was a greater degree of performative and compositional mastery before even starting to consciously write songs, and then songs just naturally emerged out of practising every day for hours at a time.

The record opens with a piano preface by Macon prodigy Gavin Rushing. How did Gavin get involved, and why did you feel his piano piece was the right threshold for listeners to cross before entering the album?

I think you’re thinking of “Riki Rachtman,” which actually closes side A, but yes, that’s a great intro. We had the song done. It actually opened with the vocal part. But then Gavin sat down at the piano and started messing around with the chords and just grooving on them. I was in the control room and I just leapt up and was like, “Stop right there—do that again but now let’s record it and patch it in as an intro!” So that’s what we did, and I think it’s one of the highlights of the record that just came about from a little mindless studio fuckery, which is how all the best ideas come about really, which is why I want to make sure we do the next one with Gavin and everyone else in the same room at the same time, no exceptions. 

Gavin came late to the recording, as I’d hired a local Valencian jazz guy to do the whole record and, when he showed up, he was just not getting the music at all. No groove, no vibe. I was freaking out a bit as I’d booked the space and this guy’s time. Anyway, Roni, the engineer at the Valencia sessions, said, “I know a guy who could nail this whole record in like three hours.” He called Gavin, who’s a young, Macon, Georgia-born pianist, now living here in Valencia, he agreed to do it, we cut the session short and sent the other guy home, and then Gavin came in the following week and, indeed, nailed it in three hours. Great cat, insane chops, and now part of the touring band we’re taking on the road next year, which I’m thrilled about. I should add, here, that my old One Eleven Heavy bandmate, Hans Chew, did step up to play for one song that Gavin didn’t manage to nail on the first take, and he brought the perfect amount of thump to it, and I’ll be forever grateful to Hans for that. 

You’ve managed to capture a warm, analogue, end-of-summer feel across the whole record. What was the recording environment like, and how did you approach tracking to get such an organic, live-in-the-room energy?

As producer Colin Sick would put it, “It’s just a case of hearing the other guy’s flubs and making sure you do your damndest to make it sound like he meant them.” 

The album got a physical release on limited olive green and orange splatter vinyl via your own channel. How important was the visual and tactile presentation of the LP to matching the music inside?

I’ve been buying records since I was six years old, man. When I run the world, the first thing I’m gonna do is disband the internet, then disseminate materials on the relative ecological superiority of vinyl records to the emperor’s new clothes of digital music, because they last for generations, can be passed down from one to the next, driven from city to city to be DJ’d by those generations, and played on the radio by them too. I have records that were released in the 1930s that must have passed through a dozen households before they landed in mine. Plus, no artist cares that they’re not making a dime on used LP sales, because they were remunerated fairly the first time it was sold. The tactile aspect is a big part of it from a listener perspective, of course, because playing a record is a mindful act that demands you dial into the experience, rather than streaming, which is so called because it’s pretty much like mindlessly letting the tap run. Digital music is just a slew of aural static that’s there to plug the gap between activity and pensiveness, because thinking brings up all kinds of scary shit. A record is a beautiful artefact of human endeavour—and on many levels: the musicians, the producers and sound engineers, the cutting engineers, the pressing technicians, the illustrators and graphic designers, the printers, the distribution and logistics experts, the truck drivers, the record store owners, and the people who get off their butts and make a conscious decision to invest their money into making sure those people are taken care of in exchange for a lifetime of enjoyment. Hooray for all of those heroes of what should be just everyday life. I’ve been called a fantasist and a philistine by more people than I can be bothered to pay attention to for holding this view, but now there’s this whole back-to-CDs “movement” that the press has jumped on as some kind of magical way to “disconnect” from the digital culture, as if it’s some kind of temporary salve from the otherwise inescapable. What a lot of horse shit. The less we plug physical media as an alternative and the more we start to re-acknowledge that it’s the best we ever had it, the longer those “disconnections” will last and the less we’ll have to complain about.

You’ve worn many musical hats over the years, from the psych-noise chaos of Desmadrados to the cosmic Americana of One Eleven Heavy and now this solo record. Do you feel Náquera brings all those distinct lives together, or is it a complete pivot into a new chapter?

It kind of does bring them together, at least in a nascent way, because I’m back working with Otto who was in Desmadrados Soldados. And, in that sense, it’s also a new chapter because I think there’s a lot of potential to be mined from the new collaborations. Desmadrados Soldados fizzled out due to weariness on my part and frustration with me for being too demanding on the part of the rest of the band, which I hold my hands up and admit was probably not the best way to handle that situation. But the point at which it did, I think it was just starting to head into a direction that I wish One Eleven Heavy had been able to pick up more gracefully, rather than going straight into verse-chorus-verse mode. I attempted to bring back some of the expansiveness into this record, and songs like “Critical Mass” and “The Angle” do hint at that potential, but it won’t be until we’ve done three months’ touring and are all fully up in each other’s musical zones, that I think we’ll start to see the full bridging of that gap. I love the idea of that, though, and have been contemplating just such a middle ground in recent days.

With Náquera now out in the world, are there plans to take these expansive, jam-heavy arrangements on the road with a full live band?

Asked and answered, but to expand on that, we have a four-date mini-tour of Spain coming up in December, then we’re working with a French booker to get up there later in 2027. We’ve also had an offer of a YouTube channel session in California in 2027, so I’m hoping we can pull together some kind of run out there. Just a matter of finding the right agent who’ll enable us to do it without losing our shirts, I guess, but I do miss playing in the United States and want to go back as soon as possible, as it’s been seven years since I was last there, which is crazy to me as I was there playing shows every year between 2009 and 2019. That’s kind of the holy grail for me, touring wise, just because the scene there is far more ingrained than it is here in Europe and you tend to play to people who are there because they’re a head and they know you’re a head and you have all the same reference points, and that both keeps you on your toes and gives you a real sense of satisfaction when people respond well to it. If it weren’t for my wife and the dogs, I could happily live on a bus, Willie Nelson style, for the rest of my days. First things first, though… let’s get 2027 done and see how it pans out. 

Whether it’s new solo material or a potential return to One Eleven Heavy, what’s on the horizon for you creatively as you look beyond this release?

One Eleven Heavy isn’t done. It’s just on indefinite hiatus while we figure out if, and how, we can make it work in a way that doesn’t break us spiritually and financially. I still message James pretty much every day, which—bless him—he never fails to respond to, even when I’m at my most garrulous and unhinged. My focus for the foreseeable future, though, is on developing this solo thing as I think this is just the beginning. 

Thank you for your time. Anything you would like to say to our readers before we wrap this up?

So much love to everyone who’s supported me with this release and bought a copy, and if you haven’t yet, I’ll see you at the merch stand. Thank you for the great questions, this was a lot of fun.