INTERVIEW: A conversation with PARTICLE KID AHEAD OF OUTLAW FEST
08/30 @ SPAC, Saratoga Springs
Photo by Randi Malkin Steinberger
“My favorite thing to do in life is to combine sound and vision and see what kind of new emotions I can create out of the alchemy of it.”
When I close my eyes and think about the kind of music I want to define my generation (the way grunge defined the ’90s, for instance), I think of Micah Nelson’s sound. One that really respects the past legacies of rock and country music, but also pushes into experimental and electronic sounds with a quality that still feels live. Creating under the name Particle Kid, his songs are complex and keep me listening again and again to discover more layers.
Nelson called me from his “treehouse” in California ahead of this year’s Outlaw Music Festival tour. He was already planning on joining his father, Willie Nelson, in his family band, but recently announced that he will also be doing an opening set of his own music as Particle Kid.
Nelson will be joined by Aroyn Day on bass/vocals/foot percussion and Curtis James on guitar and fiddle for their own Particle Kid trio opening set. Nelson will be playing guitar, “Karl" his suitcase drum kit, and singing.
“So it's really a four-piece band,” he says, including Karl — reminiscent of his father’s relationship with Trigger. Raised on the road, Nelson has been playing in his dad’s band for almost all of his life. Growing up in Outlaw traditions he tells me, “It's just part of my soul.”
“I've been on bills with all of them and I consider them friends and family. I'm excited to see everybody again,” he says of this year’s 10th anniversary Outlaw Festival lineup.
“Sheryl is like, auntie vibes,” he says of Sheryl Crow. “When I was first starting out doing sets as Particle Kid, she'd be out watching the show every night and would tell me, ‘You're a freak! I fucking love you!’ She's always been very encouraging.” At an Outlaw Festival show, musicians often sit in with each other and that can spark lasting relationships and friendships.
“It’s very crucial to have the human experience of communal gatherings around music more than ever,” he says. At the end of Willie Nelson’s set all artists are invited back onstage to sing a gospel together.
“In that moment, we're all here together supporting each other. We might all have different fan bases and come from these different musical worlds, but when this happens none of that shit matters,” he tells me. “It becomes a shared quest. It’s like we all become one big band. I think the crowd feels that everyone's-on-the-road-together energy.” When they play together, Willie Nelson occasionally plays some Particle Kid songs like “Everything is Bullshit” and “Die When I’m High”, which Micah Nelson wrote for his dad.
“There's definitely plenty of moments where they toss the ball to me on stage, and that's a cool feeling, but I'm really there to just support my dad,” he says “After aunt Bobbie passed away, that's been my focus. She was very much a pillar of the sound of the band so I just try to be rhythmic and melodic, like her the best I can to fill that space.” Bobbie Nelson had played piano in Willie Nelson’s band since the early ’70s and sadly passed away in 2022.
Nelson has been recording and writing lots of music recently, but has not released anything since Time Capsule in 2022. Purchasers of the Time Capsule CD set have a chance to win thirteen remaining ‘time tokens’ that can be redeemed for a hempcrete time capsule that Nelson made containing a thumb drive with the record, videos, printed album artwork, industrial hemp seeds that he cultivated himself, and a physical ticket that gains general admission to every Particle Kid concert in the year 2042.
Alongside his own music, Nelson is helping shape how artists share and release their work. He is a founding board member of TheFlow, a new artist-owned music streaming and social media platform founded by Mike Hanuschik.
“Part of why I haven't put anything else out since Time Capsule is so I can put out whatever I want directly to my fans on TheFlow.” Nelson has a new EP, Evil Weirdness, available for purchase on Bandcamp and will be on TheFlow when it launches by the end of this year.
“It’s a co-op model, so the artists that put out music on there own all of their data and get paid directly. The fans' attention is monetized directly to the artists. Albums and songs can be shared and commented on just like social media,” he explains. “Artists actually get to have financial autonomy.” Common streaming sites that exist now are not incentivized to pay artists and none of the money from a fan’s subscription payment goes to the artists.
“It doesn't have to be that way. We just have to build a new system outside of the dysfunctional one that makes the dysfunctional one obsolete.” As a founding board member of TheFlow, Nelson can only ever own 5% of the company. 51% of the company is always owned by the collective artists and the creators.
“We can't make money until artists make money. It’s really built around that principle. It's a true meritocracy, it's a true mutualistic ecosystem, which is what it should have been in the first place when digital and streaming took over.”
Micah is also a visual mixed media and film artist. Both his music and visual practices “draw water from the same well”. Through his production company Spitball Pictures (which also includes his wife Alex Dascalu Nelson, aka Sisterlu), he has created music videos and films for his own music projects as well as other artists such as Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, Promise of the Real’s Anthony LoGerfo, folk-punk musician Sunny War, GRAMMY award-winning Tinariwen, ukulele and guitar duo Folk Uke, and Neil Young.
“When I started making my own music, the whole impulse was about trying to make music that sounds like the way my artwork looks,” he says. “I think sound is a very visual experience. I get excited if a sound evokes imagery in my mind, even if it's ineffable. I'm always looking for [that]. My favorite thing to do in life is to combine sound and vision and see what kind of new emotions I can create out of the alchemy of it.”
He has also incorporated hemp into his art, and is a huge advocate for the hemp’s sustainable functional uses, serving on the National Hemp Association’s Board of Directors and championing the Industrial Hemp Farming Act which became law in December 2018. Nelson is building his home recording studio and is experimenting using natural materials like hempcrete and hemp wool to make a soundproofing wall.
“On paper, it seems like it would be really good because it's so breathable,” he says. “There's lots of little air pockets in there with the intertwining shiv of the hemp which is good for sound to hit and get stopped.”
Nelson is also the guitarist of Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts, who played their first live show together at SPAC in 2024 at Farm Aid, and are releasing their sophomore album this September. The first single and title track, “Second Song”, was released along with a music video of a film taken by the late, great Rick Rosas shot driving down the driveway of Broken Arrow Ranch on Super8 and includes handwriting by Gary Ward, executive producer at Lost Planet.
Nelson has a Particle Kid record set to release next spring entitled The Ocean Floor on Loose Groove Records — a collaborative project with Daniel Lanois that has a live band sound. This started out as an idea for a movie, but they “ended up making a record accidentally instead,” Nelson tells me as an example of how his film and music practices are very interrelated.
“I think that every collaboration is a great opportunity to embrace a new challenge and become better as a musician, or a filmmaker, or an animator, or an artist,” he says. “I am extremely curious; I tend to have a growth mindset where I embrace these challenges and I see them as opportunities to put more of my 10,000 hours into whatever it is that I want to get better at. I never want to master anything. I think that the practice itself is perfection.”
For Nelson, inspiration often comes from the creative act itself.
“I think there's something if you have no idea what you're going to make, and you just sit down and start drawing or composing from stream of consciousness, with no preconceived ideas—I think when you do that, you're creating from the deep subconscious and you'll learn a lot more about yourself,” he says. “It's all play at the end of the day.”
Check out the flow and sign up for the mailing list for updates on its release: https://www.theflow.com
Check out Particle Kid on Bandcamp for now before TheFlow is launched.
