Founded in 1641 with a population today of about 18,000 is there a more gorgeous shoreline town in Connecticut than Madison? With its awesome beaches, elegant restaurants, country clubs, stately homes, and a quintessential New England style Main Street that features an independent movie theater, a sublime book store, and several coffee shops, Madison has it all. One thing for certain about Madison is that it has never been confused with Nashville, Tennessee. However, it is in Madison where you will find Connecticut’s most popular country music singer, the beautiful and talented Nicole Frechette.
For years now Nicole has built an adoring fan base by playing practically every fair and festival this state has to offer. From Durham to Woodstock when a country band is needed it’s Nicole Frechette who gets the call. She’s played throughout the area and she’s even been sent overseas by the Armed Forces Entertainment to sing for our troops who are stationed in Europe. She’s also had the opportunity to open for such country luminaries as Tim McGraw, LeAnn Rimes, Taylor Swift, and Rascal Flatts among others. However, with the release of her newest CD titled “Listen Here,” it is Nicole who is rapidly becoming the headliner.
“Listen Here” is a dozen songs with ten originals. It’s a perfect blend of country pop, a touch of blues, a few rockers, and some heartbreaking ballads. At the center of it all is Nicole’s stunning vocals. To some she’s a throwback to an earlier era of classic country and to others she’s a fresh new voice.
This interview took place on a cold January day at the R.J. Julia bookstore in Madison. It’s also worth mentioning that Nicole has been spending more and more time in Nashville these days which is exactly where a rising country star like her should be. What a sweetheart she is!
BH – When did you know you could sing?
NF - “I thought I could always sing since I was little because I love to do it. I was very, very lucky that even with four brothers and sisters in a very loud household my parents were amazing about letting us focus on the things that they thought challenged us and the things that we loved. So we would drive to New Jersey and it would be a two hour trip and they would say ‘Nikki gets to sing for an hour out loud,’ and everyone had to suffer!
Then after the first hour I had to be quite and either sing quietly to myself or just listen to my headphones while everyone else got some peace and quiet.”
BH - Do your brothers and sisters sing as well?
NF - “No, no one is musical in my family except for an aunt that I’ve never met. She passed away before I was born. Aside from that my grandma plays the organ and she sings at the top of her lungs but she doesn’t consider herself to have any talent. I admire her for doing it even though she
doesn’t believe she has talent but I think she can carry a tune.”
BH - Was she the person who pointed you towards country music?
NF - “She was, absolutely yes! But I sang everything. From the time I was growing up my mom used to play Broadway hits and I listed to radio stations like Star 99.9 so it was all these eighties monster ballads. I’d listened to Journey or Mariah Carey and then Phantom of the Opera. I had a really wide musical range growing up and as I got older I started to do some studio work and pop music was becoming very, very popular. And I’d talk about it all the time how Britney Spears was so popular and my grandmother was very worried, just by the image alone, she didn’t want that to start to be my career. So she asked me if I had heard of Patsy Cline and at the time I had heard of her but I had never really listened to any of her music. I was just starting to get into country pop, stuff that was starting to make its way north like LeAnn Rimes and Lila McCann. So we started listening to Patsy Cline and that’s kind of where it started for me just because it’s so real and raw and you can hear everything and there is so much emotion. It’s really been the cornerstone of a lot of the music at my shows and a lot of the music that I’ve made. I do have a modern sound I guess but at least I feel that I have country roots without being from the south.”
BH - I read that you were doing studio work at age 13. How does someone that young get into a recording studio?
NF - “Well my friend Amanda Kochis who runs Fresh Management, she was taking guitar lessons and drum lessons from the time she was a kid at a studio in Guilford. We met in third grade and she had dreams of being in the music industry and I had dreams of being a singer and she said ‘come to the studio with me.’ So we talked about it for years and nothing ever really happened. And then when we were thirteen she kept bugging her instructor who owned the studio about how she had a friend that sings. Finally they said ‘fine bring her in, let’s hear her.’
So I went in and sang a couple of demo songs, just karaoke stuff that I love, and they said ‘can we talk to your mom?’ So they talked to my mom and they said they wanted to offer me a spec deal which means that I would come in after school and Amanda could come and I would just sing whatever I wanted to sing and I didn’t have to pay. They just wanted to develop me as an artist and see where it could go. I was extremely fortunate because at thirteen I started getting more studio hours than professional artists have after they put out several albums. So I had more studio experience before I ever got on stage which was an interesting way to go about things. But it worked out for me because I really knew my voice and I knew how to project it and I knew my way around it without ever getting on stage.”
BH - Walk me through the process of releasing your first CD.
NF - “My last year in school was spent picking songs because at the time I was writing but not anything strong enough to go on an album I thought. I wanted all these songs to be radio ready or at least something that somebody would say ‘wow this is really good.’ And as much as I thought some of my stuff that I was writing was pretty good, I didn’t think it was ready yet. I ended up with hundreds of songs that my producers gave me to pick from. These were songs that were submitted to us from other artists. One is ‘A Good Place to Turn Around’ by Rececca Lynn Howard and another is ‘Cross against the Moon’ by Kris Bergsnes and Brian Dean Maher. I had met a lot of these writers prior to even picking songs. ‘Yeah Right’ was one of the songs that I picked out and after I picked it out Dave Northrop, one of the producers, says to me ‘it figures, out of hundreds of songs you pick this Phil Vassar song that should have been a hit but was never a hit.’ It really matched up well and I was able to open for Phil a couple of years down the road and he told me that he heard it and he loved it and so we started a friendship that way which was wonderful. People have asked me if he gave it to me but I didn’t know him when I sang it. That’s how Nashville works.
You can sing anybody’s songs as long it’s licensed and as long as you paid for it. And I thought that I had a really strong album on my hands. I thought that it was something that really kind of showed who I was. There’s not as much versatility as far as genre goes on that first album. It’s very country pop. I feel like the newer album, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, has a lot more elements of blues and rock on it. But it definitely showed me where I was then. Also, that’s when I started doing live shows along the Connecticut shoreline. That’s how I knew that it was working because I was singing these songs and people loved them. They started buying the album and requesting songs from the album. It was a good first chapter.”
BH – OK let’s talk about the new album. Last year you released “Listen Here.” Why don’t you talk some the changes you went through both personally and professionally leading up to its release.
NF - “Well like I said, I had never performed live before I released the first album. I had to build a band and get to know what performing live was all about. I was booking shows and managing everything under the sun and doing publicity, there was a lot. It was exciting, you get opportunities and at first you take them all. And then all of the sudden you realize that not every opportunity is a good one, or that there’s some that you won’t get, or its better that you didn’t get it, or you need to try harder next time. And in the meantime I was going down to Nashville more often. I had already graduated from school so I had more time on my hands. I had to work. I needed to make money and music wasn’t making the kind of money that I needed to live. So I had this job and that job and part time and full time and then I decided I can’t do that. I can’t work and do music because it’s one or the other. It’s either a life or it’s a part time job that doesn’t necessarily go everywhere that I want to go. So I wrote and I got better as a musician and I realized what I can do. I started writing more and it became something that I can do not just for someone else but for my own purposes. I grew, I had relationships, I made new friends, I moved around a little bit, I tried new things and I had several bands. I really started to come in to my own as an artist. And for ‘Listen Here’ it was literally a matter of people just sitting there going ‘complete this new music, we really want more.’ At first that was exciting and then it was frustrating because I wasn’t ready and then it became ‘ok give them what they want.’ If people are asking for new music then why am I complaining that I don’t have new music? Make it! Music can always be made. I think as an artist you get a little protective of your work and you’re not ready to release it and you realize that a song is a song.
There are some that need to be worked on more and they’re not ready to be released. But if you write a song and it’s not good then write another one and keep going. Not everything is going to be junk and not everything is going to be your best work. I just garnered inspiration from the artists that I was listening to and the artists that I’ve met. A lot of people that I started working with really started to have an influence on me. ‘Listen Here’ was a whirlwind. It took a long time to come but when it started to get going it literally happened in a matter of months. I wrote, I produced, I arranged, I did everything you could for this album and it was amazing. Not every thing was written by me. There were fourteen songs recorded, twelve are on there, two are unreleased, and two were not at all written by me.”
BH – Are you writing just the lyrics?
NF - “Lyrics and melodies, I don’t play but I hear a lot. I also got exposed to a lot more musicians so I was pulling from what I was learning from watching them and watching the production of different types of music because country is what I sing but it’s not all I love and it’s not all that I do. That’s what I wanted to bring into this album, a little bit of everything. And I think for me, it has a little bit of rock, a little bit of blues, and definitely some glossy pop and some ballads as well of course because it is country. You have to have heartache on it!”
BH – Speaking of heartache, tell me about the song “Old Dirt Road.” Is it based on a true story?
NF - “It’s not based on anything. My co-writer and I wrote that song soon after we met. We did an amazing acoustic version of it in his garage. It was one of my favorite recordings that I ever made. It was just guitar and vocals. I had it for about two years and I knew it would go on the album. It came out, we produced the whole thing, and it was one of the ones that I was scared about because you listen to acoustic versions of songs and sometimes you think that’s the ultimate, that’s it! So when we did it, the song kind of came out with a slight Jason Aldean country sound, like a balladeer country song. And it sounded so great when it finally came out! It made my cry. People ask me about the song because it’s terribly sad. It doesn’t end typical. It doesn’t end with a chorus. It just ends in a very sad way. It has almost a soldier vibe or a long lost love vibe.”
BH – You like the song “Gone” don’t you?
NF - “I love that song. That is one of my favorite songs on this album. That song wrote itself as well. I co-wrote that with Jacy Dawn but I wrote the bulk of it before she came over. She helped me do that amazing bridge part and really refine it. ‘Gone’ is a song I remember listening to the demo of when I was lying in bed at three in the morning. I thought this didn’t take much work at all. There was just a little bit of revamping of phrases, putting things in and making it work better. Again, that’s when it’s meant to be. When people ask me to write songs for things or they say ‘write a song about this.’ I always get a little nervous and a little stumped because I don’t really know if I can do that. For me I have to wait until it comes. That’s why the six years was so important because I wasn’t ready to just keep pumping out music. And I wasn’t ready to put things out that I didn’t think were worthy enough for the time and the energy that would be spent to make an album. I only have two right now in six years. I hope it doesn’t take another six years to make a third! But I also don’t think I’ll be putting another one out for at least another year. It’s an art, and it’s got a life and it should live. You shouldn’t just put things out and move past them. They deserve to live and this album deserves to be listened to.”
BH – You’ve mentioned Jacy Dawn twice now. I noticed that she cowrote several songs on “Listen Here.” Why don’t you tell me about her?
NF – “Jacy Dawn is an immensely talented writer and singer. She’s smart as a whip too. Oddly enough we crossed paths initially as competitors in New England music challenges like the Colgate Country Showdown long before we worked together. She was the country gal from Massachusetts and I was the country chick from Connecticut! A few years later we became friends and started working together in Nashville and she was a huge influence on my new record. She has her name on six of the ten cuts including the rocking opener ‘Bird on Wire.’ We intended to co-write a song or two but the creative compatibility was just there like magic and the material poured out so easily and actually pretty fast once we opened the door to the partnership. We worked so well together that I asked her to come in and coproduce some of the tracks. She’s just the nicest, most good hearted person and a pleasure to work with.”
BH – Tell me about your touring band.
NF - “My touring band is a multitude of people that I’ve collected over the years. I actually have two touring bands. I have one that goes overseas with me and those are guys from either Nashville or Berkeley that I have collected as friends. I go for a couple of weeks a year on plane trips with the armed services, either the Navy or the Air Force. And those are my friends that I can’t get enough of. I love hanging out with them for twenty-four hours a day if I could and being on stage with them, and on the bus going to see different countries. It’s just the most fabulous thing in the entire world. I’d love to take them with me everywhere. But they’re professional musicians so what they’re trying to do is live the life of a professional musician. They go where they’re called. When I’m in Nashville or they’re in the area I see them and they’re friends more than anything else. They’re not my band up here. Up here I have these great guys, particularly the Monthei Brothers. They found me a couple of years ago and it’s been a great relationship because we have a lot of the same music and a lot of the same visions for events and we’ve been building on that ever since and it’s been going great. A lot of those people, they will travel as well, but they have jobs and they have families. It doesn’t make it any worse for wear, they work just as hard and they’re just as fun to play with. I’m trying to put together more trips where I can take different groups of people around with me. But until I get to the point where I have a consistent touring schedule that goes through the entire calendar year, which is difficult and tiring quite frankly, I don’t think I’ll have the same band over and over again. And I enjoy not having the exact same band over and over again. If I carry a song from one show to another it’s very funny to feel differently when I’m singing in front of one band versus another. But like I said, with a lot of the old country stuff, the Monthei Brothers make it come alive like I’ve never heard before in my life. We’re working really hard on rehearsing for this summer because we want the shows to be so perfect and tight and beautiful. That’s what we’reworking on up here.”
BH – What it’s like for an up and coming musician trying to get her music out in this day of the internet and downloading and digital sales?
NF - “Well, the second album ‘Listen Here’ is the first one that I really did any kind of online push with as far as digital sales go and it’s doing very well. I work with an agency that does a lot of promotion for online artists and one of the first things they did was they helped me get on iTunes. They dug up a fact for me that said something along the line that only ten percent of music on the internet gets downloaded over a hundred times or on iTunes possibly but regardless. The ten percent includes U-2 and Britney Spears and huge artists. When my numbers came in two of my songs got downloaded far beyond a hundred downloads. What that means is not only is my music is good but what it also means is that it was marketed correctly. And that’s a little disheartening just because it means that it’s a business. It’s getting it out there, putting it in the right places, making it show up on the right blogs or the right channels. That’s the part of the music business where you hire people for what they’re good at. You get involved with people who know what they’re doing that you can trust. I’ve been working with a company called ‘Get Noticed.’ It’s a newer company that’s been really great. I see all these numbers come in on CD Baby and iTunes and its great and I Iove being able to cut royalty checks to people. And we’re getting placement deals with TV shows which is also very exciting because that means that you might turn on a TV show or a commercial and my music is going to be behind there. And not only is it paying my rent but it’s validating to make a little bit of an income from it as well. I was so used to only making any kind of money from live performing, that’s what my bread and butter is and I love it, but it’s nice to not have to go out and do every show. I don’t want to do every show. I want to do the shows that feel good to me, that the fans want me to do and that matter. It’s nice to be able to be a little choosier sometimes. Also it’s nice to be able to build the right kind of tour and the right image and the right structure around the whole project instead of just throwing out lines and seeing what sticks. The internet is a place that can hurt music a lot but it can also help music obviously tenfold. It allows everyone to be an artist which is great but it can also create a lot of clutter. It also allows you to access people that you never before would have access to. When my sales numbers come in and I see that people in Australia and Japan are buying my album it’s great because it means I can go over to Japan and there will be something for me if I can just pinpoint where I’m suppose to be. But I will tell you that as an artist it’s not fun to do all of it. It’s not fun to have to run your website and think about a blog and think about your sales numbers and your Facebook page all of the time. I hate when I walk into an event and I have my head down because I’m tweeting or instagramming. I want to do those things but not always. I don’t want to run my life behind my phone and sometimes I have to do that. I think that’s the difficult part of it but that being said I know how effective it can be and how wonderful it is to also still stay connected to all my fans all the time through all those mediums. It’s like a tug of war between good and bad for the internet.”
BH – You’ve gone from being a local Connecticut singer to having a more regional following. What needs to happen next to get a national following?
NF - “It’s a lot of marketing, building it and doing it the right way, and putting in the footwork. The album was, like I said, so much for me. I had to pour my soul in to it. I’m also planning a tour which is incredible once you’re on it but the planning phase is just overwhelming and it can get tiring. You’re doing all this work and everyday you’re exhausted and you’re sitting at a desk all day thinking this isn’t what I’m suppose to be doing. For me it’s hard to write right now because I have half an artist brain and half a business brain and it always catches me because I can’t just turn on the artist and go write. That’s not how that works for me. When I write, when it comes, that’s when I let it go. It’s frustrating to not be always working on art and always be doing the music business part of it. I think what needs to happen as far as going national is what’s been going on for six years which is consistent work and keeping at it and changing the shows so that I love them and sticking to what I know but also stretching those boundaries. I have a great following. I have amazing fans that are practically like family. I need to spread it beyond just my comfort zone. Going overseas has been very helpful. Thankfully we’ve been going to American bases so once you get there you find your safety zone. That’s been amazing because you go to one place and all those people on that base are from all over the country. They’re leaving that one place you just were and then going home to the states eventually and they’re spreading your music throughout the country. That’s hugely helpful of course. I’m getting involved in some television projects and some magazine and blogging projects because you need to be multifaceted as an artist. You can’t just have a voice and perform. There needs to be more, unfortunately, to get to that next level. That’s why you have shows like American Idol. It’s the best platform you could ever ask for because it’s literally mass exposure with all the gloss and all the glitz. But it’s not all gloss and glitz. And when you’re trying to present that all the time or you’re trying to present a polished, together image it can be difficult to keep it all together, especially when the show doesn’t work out like you thought it would or rained and all of the sudden your fundraiser is a little smaller than it was suppose to be. But at the end of the day as long as I’m enjoying it I don’t really care. I feel like now my vision of what this is going to be has shifted because what I’m more interested in is sustaining and keeping the people that I love close to me, whether that means taking them with me if they want to come where I travel or making sure that I can travel but always come home. Because at the end of the day who you love and your home is what it’s all about. I love that what I do for a living doesn’t seem like work to me and I want to make sure that it always stays like that. I’ll keep moving in the direction that I’m moving which is doing the shows I want to do, being excited about new projects, working with other artists, and expanding the tours. It’s a lot to do independently but it’s the way that I want it. There’s nobody telling me what to do which is great for now. I want to be my own artist and I want it on my own terms even if it sounds selfish.”
BH – Finally Nicole, I read about all the different charities you’re involvedwith. Why don’t you talk about that a little bit?
NF - “I really want to try to use my music this year as a healing tool. With this album all the emotion that comes out in these songs and everything that happened to make these songs, it was such a personal and emotional journey for me. But this for me became so much of a healing tool and a release. All these projects and foundations that I work with like Mason Lindley Miracle Foundation and like Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital, they do so much good. And it’s not based around music. I mean music is a tool that people use to get exposure for these programs and every time we do events for these programs it’s such a great response. For example I work with the Fairfield Theater Company and a group called Band Together. They find charities and they sponsor them. We’re going to work with the Connecticut Challenge Center where people who have either been affected by cancer or have family member who have been affected by cancer can go and take yoga classes or nutritional classes as a healing process. We’re going in and doing a music program with them as well. That’s what this year is going to be about for me. Instead of doing shows to advertise myself, I’m going to do these shows for these charities and really use these as a healing tool because that’s what a lot of it is. For me it was therapeutic to make the album and to get everything I want to say out there. People come to my shows and tell me all the time that a song got me through this or means so much to me or you knew exactly what I was thinking. So that’s my goal this year. The healing part is going to be huge this year. I’m really excited for that and I think it will help to share a lot more of the messages that are in the music. Just seeing how the response is with fans and strangers when I’m involved with these charities makes me feel really good about what I’m doing.”
On February 10th I was watching the 55th annual Grammy Awards show and I couldn’t help but think about how, once again, it’s the women of country music who seem to dominate the show. There was Taylor Swift opening up the proceedings. Perennial favorite Carrie Underwood was front and center wearing a digital projector dress and sporting a thirty-one million dollar diamond necklace. And of course there was Miranda Lambert accompanied by her equally famous husband Blake Shelton looking elegant in an old style Hollywood navy blue gown with a plunging neckline. As I watched these women I couldn’t help but think of how easily Nicole Frechette could fit right in with them. I don’t think she would need any distracting accessories either. Are all these women better singers than Nicole? That’s a subjective question with no definitive answers. Are they prettier? Are you kidding me? Take another look at the cover and tell me that Nicole Frechette isn’t hotter than the face of the sun! Whether or not Nicole becomes a country music superstar remains to be seen. But I believe that with her confidence, kindness, intelligence, drive, talent, and beauty the possibilities are limitless. The red carpet awaits her.