Most bands hire a producer. Nick Anderson is one. The frontman and primary songwriter of Los Angeles alt-rock band The Wrecks is also its de facto in-house producer, and he has turned that skill into a second career building other artists' records from the other side of the glass.
Self-taught from a GarageBand start
Anderson learned piano at eight, taught himself guitar at fourteen, and got his first taste of recording in GarageBand on an iMac at his father's newspaper office. That DIY beginning became a career-defining trait: he self-produces nearly all of The Wrecks' catalog, controlling the sound from the ground up.
The parallel career
Away from the band, Anderson works as an outside topline writer and producer for a genre-spanning list, from pop-punk mainstays like Atreyu and Escape the Fate to hip-hop's Jutes and rap-pop veteran Hoodie Allen. The cross-genre range is the point. A producer who can move from a metalcore band to a rapper is a rare and valuable thing.
He is the rare frontman who is just as useful when it is not his name on the song.
From the pitcher's mound to the mixing board
Anderson's path to production ran through baseball. He pitched for his Wellsville, New York high school team and kept playing at San Diego City College, where he also earned a two-year degree in digital audio technology, an unusual pairing of competitive sport and formal audio training. He led two earlier bands, Exit Plan and Coastbound, and apprenticed informally writing and producing for music executive Richard Reines before The Wrecks existed. The band's legend is that they recorded their debut EP in an unauthorized three-day window inside a professional home studio they had access to through a friend's housekeeping job. The single that came out of it, Favorite Liar, charted on alternative radio and passed 25 million Spotify streams. Anderson had never produced anything before that session. He simply knew what he wanted it to sound like.
The value of doing both
Fronting a band teaches you what a song needs to feel like from the stage. Producing other artists teaches you how to build that feeling for someone whose instincts are not your own. Anderson does both at a high level, and each job makes him better at the other. The Wrecks get a leader who thinks like a producer, and his clients get a producer who thinks like a frontman.