Grand Lake

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Caleb Nichols and Jameson Swanagon, the musical force that along with drummer John Pomeroy is Oakland’s Grand Lake, began their musical collaboration in 1994 – on a dilapidated basketball court in the bleakest of circumstances – middle school.
Both cast as social misfits early on, Nichols and Swanagon found refuge together, shooting hoops and discussing the finer points of the Beatles studio output, and daydreaming of the day they could escape.

Over the following 15 years, the pair parted ways and reunited more than once – working together at a bookstore in their early twenties, they compared notes on their mutual admiration of the Pixies, the Flaming Lips, Ernest Hemingway and Dave Eggers. Later, they would form a band called The Bloody Heads which would last for less than a year before the duo was again separated by circumstance – Nichols went on to join Oakland indie band Port O’Brien (along with fellow Bloody Head Josh Barnhart), and Swanagon moved with his soon-to-be wife, Danae, to Boston where he studied improvisation with the likes of Anthony Coleman and Joe Morris.

Two years later, Nichols and Swanagon found themselves together again – on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay – and formed Grand Lake. Shortly after recording their debut EP for 500 Records, they played their first show, with Man/Miracle at ABCo Art Space in West Oakland. From 2009 to present the band have released two EPs and a cassette single and played shows on the west coast with Starfucker, Maus Haus, Man/Miracle, Thao With The Get Down Stay Down, The Thermals, Alec Ounsworth (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), The Donkeys, Cryptacize, Two Sheds, Birds Fled From Me, Dirt Dress, Pizza!, Turbo Fruits, Greg Ashley, The Blank Tapes, White Cloud, Rad Cloud, Giant Cloud, Battlehooch, Guidance Counselor, the Nightgowns, Manuok, Silian Rail, and more.

Grand Lake’s debut full-length offering, Blood Sea Dream, is the culmination of a decade and a half of friendship and musical camaraderie. Anchored in the youthful, exuberant drumming of John Pomeroy, the album twists and turns sonically and topically – winding its way from the angst-filled art-rock of ‘Louise (I Live In A Fantasy)’ to the gently lumbering, orchestral waltz that is ‘Our Divorce’. The straight ahead rock of ‘My Father As A Forest Full Of Trees’ finds Nichols singing desperately about confronting his father – currently an inmate at Old Folsom Prison in California, who abandoned Nichols at the age of six – while just a track earlier he sullenly croons an epic poem of American wanderlust in ‘Riderless Horse’. Through two sides and twelve tracks, the musical and lyrical juxtapositions of Grand Lake’s Blood Sea Dream weave in and out of each other to tell a story familiar to all – the facing-down of demons on the long drive home.