PRÓXIMA PARADA FIND POSSIBILITY IN THE UNFINISHED
There is a line running quietly through Próxima Parada’s new album Into the Way: the idea that forward motion does not require complete confidence. You do not need to know exactly where you are going, or have resolved every fear first. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is simply move.
– WORDS BY CJ
For Nico Larson, that idea is built directly into the writing.
“I think the album mostly documents a change already underway while encouraging me to keep moving forward,” he says. “In ‘Part 1: Can I,’ I’m definitely trying to persuade myself to act: ‘Can I speak my truth without being afraid, and if not, speak it anyway?’ Even if I can’t be fearless, don’t know all the answers, or am not perfect, I still need to take a step forward. I still have to live.”
That tension between uncertainty and movement sits at the center of Into the Way, the fifth album from the San Luis Obispo band. Their songs carry warmth, but rarely the kind that pretends doubt, grief or confusion have disappeared by the chorus.
“Writing songs to make sense of feelings is a really important practice for me,” Larson says, “but I don’t want to use the song to cover up the feelings or change them prematurely. We have to give ourselves the dignity of our own experience.”
He describes difficult emotions almost as an unfamiliar landscape, something that has to be looked at before it can be understood.
“If I’ve arrived at a black landscape, I don’t want to close my eyes or invent what is there before I’ve seen it,” he says. “If reassurance arises, I want it to come from sitting with the feeling long enough to find something true, not from trying to escape.”
On “New Moon,” that approach becomes especially clear. Larson sings about stepping outside after feeling trapped inside his own head, but rather than turning the moment into a declaration of transformation, the song finds value in still being unfinished.
“When I say, ‘I would rather be the new moon,’ it’s because I identify with its potential rather than the completeness and perfection of the full moon,” Larson says. “Spoiler alert: we’re actually both!”
That contradiction gets close to what makes the record work. Into the Way does not sound like an album written by somebody who has reached the other side and is reporting back. It was made in the middle of the process.
“Most of the lyrics I wrote for this album support that gentle forward movement,” Larson says. “They weren’t written from the destination, as though I had already figured everything out; they were written from somewhere along the way. In a sense, the album is 13 songs saying, ‘You got this, buddy.’”
The same restraint has entered Próxima Parada’s musical process. Five records in, one of the band’s biggest lessons has been realizing that being excited by an idea is not necessarily proof that the song needs it.
“The instinct we’ll always be unlearning is the belief that every exciting musical idea deserves a place in the song,” Larson says. “Over time, we’ve gotten better at stepping out of the song’s way and letting its needs take priority over our attachment to individual parts.”
Larson’s own route into music was less traditional. He began seriously playing in college without the technical background many musicians acquire as children, and for years felt compelled to explain that before sharing his work.
“There were several years when I first started playing music that I felt the need to preface by saying, ‘I’m still a beginner, so please don’t judge me,’” he says. “All these years later, I don’t feel the need to preface anymore, but I still feel like a beginner, only now it’s in a good way.”
Rather than seeing that lack of formal training as something to overcome, Larson increasingly treats it as part of how his songwriting developed.
“Songwriting specifically feels like a life practice to me,” he says. “It’s the practice of listening deeply, getting out of the way, and staying in a state of wonder and openness.”
That choice to trust music became considerably more serious in 2019, when Próxima Parada committed to becoming a full-time band. Larson had studied to become a physical therapist and was the first person in his immediate family to attend university, making music a considerably less obvious route.
“I wanted to be of support to people, but I eventually realized that PT was not my personal way of helping people,” he says. “When I stayed in San Luis Obispo after undergrad to focus on music rather than getting a PhD, I imagine everyone was pretty skeptical, like I was wasting an opportunity.”
Committing to music did not remove pressure so much as create a different version of it.
“I still feel pressure to not let people down, to give my best effort, and to share music that makes a positive impact.”
Próxima Parada eventually received a strange lesson in how difficult that impact can be to measure. “Musta Been a Ghost,” originally released in 2019, unexpectedly went viral three years later and has continued finding new listeners ever since.
“It was a really strange experience to release a song in 2019 and have it go viral in 2022,” Larson says. “That helps me to always see our music anew with fresh eyes.”
Even after playing it countless times, he tries to treat each performance as a first encounter.
“When I perform ‘Musta Been A Ghost,’ I don’t think about how many times I’ve played it. I think about how I’ve never played it today to these people in this room, so in that sense, it is brand new.”
The band found another way into familiar material recently when they performed with the San Luis Obispo Symphony, with bandmate Josh Collins leading the orchestral arrangements.
“It felt like we went from having the standard Crayola pack to the jumbo box with multiple tiers of crayons,” Larson says. “The arrangements felt like they revealed even more of the emotion behind the songs, rather than covering anything up.”
San Luis Obispo remains a major part of the band’s identity, though years of touring have changed how Larson thinks about home.
“When you’re touring a lot, you have to find home every step along the way,” he says, “so I try to write from that place.”
His musical language is expanding too. Another Spanish-language song will appear on the upcoming album, and Larson has begun studying Portuguese with hopes of eventually writing in that language as well.
“I believe we are slightly different in every language we speak,” he says, “so when I write in Spanish I feel younger, I feel more romantic, I feel even more playful.”
After roughly fourteen years together, Próxima Parada’s original ambition remains surprisingly intact. The band began wanting to bring joy to its local community. The only real difference now is the size of that community. “Our first mission was to bring joy to our local community of San Luis Obispo, and that still very much feels like the focus,” Larson says. “Only now our community has expanded significantly.”
What has changed is his relationship with the numbers that increasingly define musical success. “Musta Been a Ghost” has surpassed 70 million streams, but Larson struggles to attach much meaning to a number that large.
“For a lot of musicians, success these days is a certain number of plays on Spotify,” he says. “It’s difficult to fathom what that means, so 70 doesn’t feel much different than 10.”
What matters is whether there is an actual person somewhere inside the statistic.
“What’s more important to me now is that if in those 70 million plays, there has been a real-life human that has been touched by the song.”
That may be the clearest way to understand Into the Way. Próxima Parada are not trying to defeat uncertainty. They are learning how to live inside it without standing still.
