“This is our best one yet,” says Nashville pop musician and showman Nordista Freeze. He’s telling me about Space Prom, a tribute to the history of pop he first staged nearly five years ago. Like virtually everything Freeze sets his mind to, Space Prom has evolved. Freeze and a group of like-minded singers and instrumentalists convened for the initial iteration of Space Prom at a Charlotte Pike Chinese restaurant, Lucky Bamboo, in February 2018. The show featured a series of bands who pulled songs from the lively era of pop that spans the 1930s through the ’90s, and Freeze sold out the show.
Because Freeze is a hard-touring road musician and prolific record-maker who tells me he’s recently played his 710th gig, his ambition — and his confidence — seem completely justified. “We’re not, like, cashing out, and we’re not coasting,” he continues, talking about Space Prom 5, which will be held this year at Brooklyn Bowl. “We’ve put in twice, if not three times, as much work as any year before. It’s gone from something to do to something a big team of us are doing.”
Freeze grew up in Nashville and began making albums when he was a teenager, and he transformed himself into Nordista Freeze when he was a junior at David Lipscomb High School, now Lipscomb Academy. He also sang in the Lipscomb chorus, having grown up in the Church of Christ denomination, which doesn’t use instruments in church services. As he tells me, choral-singing experiences turned him into a vocalist comfortable with many approaches, as you can hear on his 2021 album Big Sky Pipe Dream.
Freeze’s albums zig-zag among various pop and rock ’n’ roll styles, with Big Sky Pipe Dream a bit looser — and a bit more rocking — than his 2017 release Cosmic Haus. In the world of Freeze, British Invasion rock on the order of, say, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich sits alongside dark Steely Dan grooves and folk-rock interludes. In similar fashion, Space Prom has been a way for a very funny rock polymath to present his vision of rock history, complete with detours into pop’s weird side.
Again, Freeze’s ambitions seem perfectly suited to a performer whose very name conveys the alluring power of a blank slate. “It’s like a blank canvas for someone who has lived in the same community forever,” he says about his sobriquet. “It’s a chance to pivot into uncharted waters.” If Big Sky Pipe Dream contains hints of The Beach Boys and ’50s rock, the album is filtered through a sensibility that’s syncretic by definition. Freeze writes simple songs that don’t feel like genre exercises, and he delivers them in a voice that never takes itself too seriously.
Talking about the influences that have gone into his albums and the Space Prom shows, he makes the kind of distinctions that ordinary revivalists often fail to recognize. “I used to say ‘ ’60s,’ and then I realized it was more ‘early ’60s,’ specifically. I definitely am a huge Beach Boys fan, and pretty deep. I just kept getting deeper into early-’60s, pre-Beatles music.”
Big Sky and Cosmic Haus defy categorization — Freeze’s forays into pop draw from several decades, and he plays a song like “Hey Gigi,” which appears in different versions on both Big Sky and Cosmic Haus, for laughs. “Hey Gigi” is a bubblegum tune worthy of Tommy Roe, and the two arrangements of the song offer contrasting takes on rock ’n’ roll basics. On his albums, he combines ramshackle rhythm-section dynamics with song structures that include tempo and metric shifts.
Freeze says Space Prom 5 will feature a large group of musicians that includes Bruce DuBray and Johnny Hopson of Nashville pop band Future Crib, along with The Minks, Drumming Bird and Hotel Fiction. As in previous years, the song list will include hits and deep cuts from the ’70s and ’80s.
“I want people to come to Space Prom and hear a set that they will never hear anywhere else,” says Freeze. “If we can do disco and then glam rock, and then throw in a song from Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart, that’s something they wouldn’t have actually gotten in the ’80s.” In past shows, David Bowie and Talking Heads songs have coexisted with hits by the likes of Fleetwood Mac.
It should be a party for the ages — a rock ’n’ roll revue that’s not afraid to push boundaries. Like Captain Beefheart, a towering personality who put together a group of great players who took his ideas into the stratosphere, Freeze is a frontman who appreciates the push and pull that only a band can create.
“They’ve all been practicing for months,” he says about the Space Prom band. “I’m just kind of up there, standing. In some ways, maybe I’m orchestrating, but in other ways, they’re on the scene on their own and I’m grateful to be surrounded by them.”
