After years of intense dedication to making music in every crappy van, cramped attic, and waking moment that presented itself, John Bowers and Aaron Chapman—core duo of the Portland-based avant-pop band Nurses—decided to get busy living life for a change. Their art depended on it.
“If you’re not living life then what the fuck [kind of art] are you going to make?” Bowers says over the phone from Los Angeles, where he currently lives. “You have to live life, and there are so many aspects of life, and clearly being in a band isn’t the only one. So we took time off of being in a band in order to write music.”
Bowers and Chapman were probably due for a break. They met in their hometown of Idaho Falls, Idaho, in 1999, where they started making music and never stopped. That’s nearly two decades of collaboration between two guys who are only in their early 30s.