Sylvester ’00 Journeys to the Top of the Music Scene

Nick Sylvester ’00 has become one of the top music producers in the business as co-founder of Godmode, a California-based artist development company. A graduate of Harvard University, he is also a musician, and was a music reviewer and editor prior to that. He and his wife, ESPN reporter and personality Mina Kimes, live in Los Angeles. Even though he is a continent away, Sylvester has stayed active with the Prep, mentoring students interested in music this past year.

Alumni Prep Update recently caught up in conversation with Nick:

NS: The journey was long, winding, and inevitable. I thought I was going to stay in Philadelphia and study trumpet at Curtis. Paul Bryan, who’s now the dean at Curtis, was the Prep’s band conductor and begged me not to get the wisdom tooth surgery that ended up causing the 1-in-1000 nerve damage that took out my embouchure and curdled that dream. 

I put aside music and followed a girl I was dating to Harvard. I thought maybe I’d become a doctor; that became classicist; then novelist; then television writer. I finally graduated with no job (and no girlfriend) at all. 

I worked for websites, newspapers, TV shows, ad agencies, nice restaurants, terrible restaurants, and tech startups. I was also a wine sommelier who weirdly only got hired for bachelorette parties. I was fired from every job I ever had. 

Nothing made sense for me until I let myself get back to making music. I learned my way around the studio under my friend James Murphy, who eventually started a band called LCD Soundsystem. I learned about synthesizers, which are my primary instrument, from Jeff Blenkinsopp, who was Pink Floyd’s synth tech in the ’70s. 

Around New York, I started playing in bands and recording and mixing records for people for free. That turned into a tiny cassette label called Godmode, which became a full-scale artist development company based here in L.A., with an amazing roster who makes all kinds of forward-thinking rap and dance music and plays festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza (and Made in America!). A lot of jobs I had in my twenties ended up being useful for figuring out how to get an artist to break through.

I stepped away from artist development recently and now focus full-time on writing and producing for more established artists (the kind who get weird if you mention them in high school alumni newsletters). I’m also currently scoring my first film, which is a 30 for 30 documentary for ESPN.

NS: From the beginning, music was always a group effort. I started playing trumpet, which only lets you make one note at a time. You can’t accompany yourself like on guitar or piano. You typically need other people playing other instruments, and you need to learn how to play with each other. In college, I sang in a 65-person men’s chorus that, if I remember correctly, performed at the Gesu almost exactly 20 years ago. It’s the same deal: You work with what you have and hopefully end up with something much bigger than yourself.

If anything, the harder jump was going from performing other people’s music to feeling comfortable making my own. It took forever to feel like my sensibilities were good enough. It took forever to feel like my artistic point of view was equally valid. It’s still a daily struggle. Some days you really feel like a fraud. The next day you feel like you’re Eskimo-kissing with God.

NS: I want to give Prep students the permission to become the things they want to become but don’t realize they’re allowed to be. You’re fending with a lot of different definitions of what “successful adult” looks like and it’s easy to just go the routes you’ve seen other adults in your immediate vicinity go down. Catholic guilt is also a real thing: At the time I thought pursuing a career in music was selfish and irresponsible.

NS: Too many. Joe Mirarchi ’00 arguing against evolution in A.P. Biology. Jason Schwartz ’99 installing a mini-fridge in his own private office when 90% of the faculty didn’t even have desk space in the faculty lounge. Graham Rufus ’00’s beautiful hair. All the nicknames: Crazy Carl, Jake the Snake, Dirty Bob, Hurricane Bob, The Beast, etc. Greg Bossong ’00 building a microphone into an Altoids box so he could record Father Garber’s chemistry lectures. Doc Bender trying to convince us the word “hick” comes from the Greek “aphikneomai”, because a hick is someone who is “always arriving.”

I did way too many activities. In addition to band, I played in two jazz bands and a wedding band. I edited the newspaper. I directed photography for the yearbook. I wrote poems for the literary magazine.

I played in the pit for Tony Braithwaite ’89’s musicals. I was Anselm Sauter ’00’s coach in the Prep’s first and presumably only Wing Bowl. I drove to State College to compete in the National Ocean Sciences Bowl, knowing absolutely nothing about marine biology. We all did so many activities though. Maybe it was so we could hang out more. Maybe none of us wanted to go home.