Higher Ground's Lift Every Voice & Sing: Interview with Dwight & Nicole

Dwight and Nicole. Photo courtesy of Dwight & Nicole.

This weekend Higher Ground is celebrating the fourth with another addition to their Drive-In concert series. The event will feature a live set from Dwight & Nicole with an opening by DJ Luis Calderin, and will also include a storytelling segment with Ferene Paris Meyer & Friends of All Hearts Inspirations, plus a screening of a short film by Isora Lithgow about recent social uprisings. More guests are also to be announced.

The concert demonstrates the passion behind Vermont’s music scene. The Higher Ground team, whom Dwight & Nicole thank wholeheartedly, has been working double time to put these concerts together. All proceeds of the event are benefiting local foundations working towards equality for people of color across Vermont: Rebel Womxn, Loving Day Vermont, the Loveland Foundation, and Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington.

In anticipation of an inspiring concert, I decided to catch up with Nicole Nelson and Dwight Richter of Dwight & Nicole. Their usual drummer and local artist Ezra Oklan of Matthew Mercury will not be performing with them this weekend; instead, local stick-banger Caleb Bronz will be keeping time at the back.

The concert comes at a prime time for Dwight & Nicole, as they’ve recently released a new single, “The Next Go-Round.” About the unfortunate permanence of true love, “The Next Go-Round” explores feelings of love and despair as a conversation between Nicole’s sultry and probing lyrics and a requiting guitar that manages to pontificate with six strings in place of a larynx. When I brought up this free flowing conversation between singer and guitar with the duo, they seconded this:

“It is a question and answer,” said Nicole. It’s a conversation that carries on into their live shows, and is always evolving with each performance, according to Dwight. “Conversation is the thread of our music,” he added.

Dwight cited BB King as one of his leading inspirations. Just as BB King could speak a thousand words in a single note, Dwight attempts to talk through his guitar. Doing so allows him to escape the boundaries of language, avoiding the limits of signifiers and speak with something intrinsic. “It’s freeing,” he said. Like BB King, Dwight likes to think of music as drawing from an ether, drawing its meaning and vernacular from something too fundamental or too divine for language.

Nicole expresses something more tangible in the song, pontificating on true love. It’s similar to an ocean or cloud, according to her. It’s there. It’s real. True love won’t disappear, even if it goes unrequited on one end.Tell me why, doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore? she begs in “The Next Go-Round.” Maybe the next go-round we’ll get it right.

The speaker believes there will be a second chance, because how could there not be? How could this love dissolve into nothing when it is as real as the mountains and sky and trees? As tangible as a pen, or a letter?

Nicole speaks to the perpetuity of love, and Dwight responds with statements of emotional transience on guitar.

Now, speaking to things less ethereal—things that don’t make you go, “huh?”—Dwight & Nicole will be performing on July 4th as a part of a special Higher Ground Drive-In Experience, titled Lift Every Voice & Sing: a Benefit for Racial Equality in America. Dwight & Nicole are the headliner, and they see the concert as a fantastic opportunity.

Nicole attempted to quote the Dalai Lama (perhaps incorrectly—we can’t verify this), saying, “the secret to peace is more music festivals.” These days, with everything “upside-down,” as Nicole said, music provides a medium for individuals to unite. Dwight & Nicole make no effort to box up and sell any particular message or idea, meaning their music is itself a vessel for love, humanity, and other key words. The songs become their own canvas for the audience to paint their feelings upon.

That’s not to say Dwight & Nicole are apolitical. Quite the contrary, in fact. While their music pushes no agenda besides the tenant of “love thy neighbor,” they still view it as a tool to combat hateful ideologies, and the “programmed illness” of racism, according to Dwight. Their music, while not provocative or propagating on its own, can act as a mode of healing or realization—whatever it is the listener needs, wants, or lacks.

Text by Luke Vidic.

Photos courtesy of Dwight & Nicole.