Nicholas Krgovich pays tribute to the musician who got him through his teens, with covers of Veda Hille songs
This Spring album-release concert at the Cultch finds the pair playing each other’s work in a kind of music Freaky Friday
Veda Hille and Nicholas Krgovich have a relationship that spans decades. Photo by Anders Hille Kellam
The Cultch livestreams the This Spring Record Release concerts from the Historic Theatre on May 21 at noon and 6 pm.
IN THE MID-’90s, musician Nicholas Krgovich remembers being 13 or 14, living in Coquitlam, when he tuned his radio dial to CiTR and first heard Veda Hille.
“I loved Tori Amos at the time,” the multi-instrumentalist recalls on a conference call with Hille, “and here was this weird, strange, beautiful piano-singer-songwriter from the place where I live.”
What he could not have realized at the time was that it was the beginning of a decades-long relationship—one that would find him, in 2021, sharing a stage with her. In two record-release broadcasts from the Cultch’s Historic Stage this week, they’ll play together and cover each other’s songs.
But first, flash-back to when Krgovich was 15, and had already worked up the nerve to meet Hille after a concert (he says the Evergreen Cultural Centre, she says the Cultch). He handed her a home-recorded cassette of covers of her songs, played by him and his friends (his piano teacher’s daughter and a 12-year-old drummer, for the record).
In the following years, Krgovich and Hille would play on each other’s albums, and he would work and tour with her husband Justin Kellam in the band No Kids. All along, Krgovich would be drawn back to Hille’s songs—and to covering them.
“I always felt this dreamy atmosphere in Vancouver when I was a teen,” he reflects. “I’ve always liked the idea that someone else was squirrelling away writing about it too.”
Nicholas Krgovich and Veda Hille today. Photo byJennilee Marigomen
Hille and Krgovich in the ‘90s.
That dreamy city is on full view in the video for “Bedlam”, the Hille magic-realist masterpieces that Krgovich reimagines with hazy vocals, heady sax obbligato, and a summer-daydream tempo. It’s just one of the tracks on This Spring, his new record that features a song from each of Hille’s albums since 1992—16 tracks in all.
Krgovich says the project gave him purpose and order during pandemic lockdown. “That was so vibey and synonymous with the big question marks of what was going on with COVID,” he relates. “I had all this time on my hands. I would throw on my head phones and...seeing how I felt about them, having listened to them since I was a young person.
“The thing that keeps popping up is how curious I am about my teens and 20s in a round-about way, to simmer in some of those feelings—not to find any resolution or whatever,” he adds. “It’s just funny that Veda’s music has been with me through those ridiculous teen times. That was the music that made my heart sing.”
Hille says she was surprised to find out Krgovich had been reimagining her songs over the past year. But the singer, who served as the Cultch’s pandemic artist-in-residence in 2020, says she couldn’t be happier to hear new versions of her creations.
“You always hope you’re sending songs out into the world that have their own life out there, and this is the clearest way songs have waved to me from another mountaintop,” Hille says.
The biggest difference between their approaches, the pair seems to agree, is that Hille, even when she’s singing at her piano alone, loves to build to “bombast”. Krgovich, on the other hand, “swings”, she says; look no further than the relaxed, eclectic groove on his multi-instrumental version of “Plants” on the new album (a tune that also popped up on his previous covers album Pasadena Afternoon). Multilayered renditions of songs from “Luckylucky” to “Carnage” and “Noahs Ark” feel radically different from Hille’s adventurous and energized forays into chamber pop and indie-folk.
“Nick has a really interesting rhythmic style that’s way different than me,” Hille observes. “Nick takes things really far afield, but he kept the melodies completely intact—he does not change the melodies but he changes everything else.”
At the Cultch livestream concert, there’s an extra layer of exchange, in that the artists will cover each other’s songs. Krgovich likens it to “putting on each other’s clothes”, while Hille hilariously describes it as more akin to the body-switching flicks Face-Off or Freaky Friday.
And what would Krgovich’s 13-year-old self think of him performing on the Cultch stage with his early musical idol?
“It’s crazy to be doing this in this venue where we probably met,” he says. “It’s this dear friend, too, so it’s surreal and confusing.”
“Confusing and lovely,” Hille says.
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