Remy Reilly Navigates the Perils of Womanhood With Avalanche

The year is 2017. A group of college interns, local artists and musicians gather at DaLat for PR agency Culture Hype’s semiannual karaoke party, unknowingly about to get sung under the table by 14-year-old Remy Reilly. Brought to the party by her father John Nicholson, she approaches the mic and belts out an impeccable cover of Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why.”

The room quickly goes silent. Though, at the time, Reilly was just about to start high school, her delivery had all the soul of a veteran diva.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving weekend of 2022. Just days after Turkey Day, Reilly is performing a headlining set at Ruins. The next weekend, she will head to Houston for a secret show with the pop-up concert series Sofar, and the weekend after, she will release her second EP, Avalanche. It’s a wonder she has the time to chat with us at Wild Detectives.

Reilly, who’s now 19, has come a long way since her karaoke days. She’s now a high school graduate and studying music marketing and audio engineering at Collin College. In the four years since her self-titled debut EP, she’s grown immensely, and she touches on that on Avalanche.

“I just came out of that horrendous teen phase,” Reilly says. “It’s scary. It’s not fun at all, but there’s definitely a lot of personal growth that comes with becoming a young adult. That’s the biggest inspiration [for the EP].”

Reilly first fell in love with music when she was 11, after her father gave her a cajón drum for her birthday. Not much later, she got a drum set.

“I was so into the cajón, I wanted more,” she says.

Nicholson has over two decades of music industry experience working in promotions, marketing and artist management. So it’s no surprise he immediately recognized his daughter’s talent and pushed her to expand on her budding skills.

“He told me that I couldn’t write a song on the drums,” Reilly says. ”So I had to get an actual instrument with chords and progressions and stuff. So I got into piano and then after piano, I got into guitar.”

Soon, Reilly began performing at every open mic she could find. One of her earliest performances was outside of a Starbucks when she was 12 years old. While she was nervous, she quickly became addicted to the thrill of performing for an audience and coming down from that high.

“I always describe it as like a little kid who just got off a roller coaster, and is just like, ‘Let’s do it again, let’s do it again,’ after they’re scared,” Reilly says.

From then, Reilly has put in the work and become a local favorite. Though she’s not even old enough to legally drink, some of her frequent stages are bars like Harvest House in Denton, Whiskey Moon in Plano and The Rustic in Dallas.

On her self-titled debut, Reilly detailed the impact words can have on mental health on songs such as “26,” and delved into the infatuation of a young crush on songs such as “Virus.” Avalanche sees Reilly diving deeper into those emotions from the standpoint of a young adult.

Though the EP arrives four years after her debut, Reilly says she never meant to take a long musical hiatus. In fact, she wrote and recorded much of the EP before the pandemic.

“Whenever I finished the second EP, COVID happened,” Reilly says. “It was actually March 13 [of 2020]. We were in the studio that day, and [my team was] like, ‘Oh everything’s going to shut down, we may not be able to finish this record.’ And I was like, ‘Nah, it’ll be fine, we’ll be back in.’ We were never back in.”
Reilly, of course, was eventually able to revisit those recordings, while balancing her college course load with songwriting and recording, as well as performing across the country.

Though Reilly recorded the bulk of her EP two years ago, her indie-pop feels timely. Her lyrics resonate with the listener as she details universal experiences.

On Avalanche’s title track, Reilly details a tumultuous relationship, singing, “I feel the avalanche coming again / You text once and I’m buried in nonsense / I’d explain, but I don’t really want to / Why can’t I love you? Why would I want to?” over a thumping drum-and-keyboard-driven track. The chorus ends with Reilly singing, “I’d rather be cool than ever leave you.”

“That happened to be one of those relationships that you continue to fall back into,” Reilly says of the song’s inspiration. “And it’s a cycle, a toxic cycle that you can’t get out of. I explained it like an avalanche because it kind of starts off slowly, and then it collapses on everything, and it’s just a very fast thing.”

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Indie pop artist Remy Reilly is back, though she never really left.

John Nicholson

Another song, “One Chance,” shows Reilly becoming painfully aware of the emotional turmoil that comes with getting older. It’s one of the more emotionally driven tracks on the EP, as she sings over silky violin strings.

Reilly says “One Chance” was one of the EP’s more difficult tracks to put together, but not necessarily because of the song’s subject matter. It was because her father kept making her laugh while he was documenting the process.

“He likes to record everything,” Reilly says. “But he had the camera in my face, and it just made me laugh because I’m an awkward person. We had to redo the takes so many times. And we did this as a live recording, so it was very difficult for me to keep myself contained.”

As Reilly becomes more aware of herself and the inner workings of her mind through her craft, she’s also noticed some disheartening behaviors behind the scenes.

“There have been many instances where I would be at a show and I would ask [the crew] to turn something up for me, and they wouldn’t do it,” Reilly says. “And it wasn’t until my guitar player, who’s a man, would ask them to do it, and it would be done right away. As a kid, I didn’t really think anything of it, but I notice it happening more and more when I actually look for it.”

Thankfully, Reilly has surrounded herself with the right people in Dallas’ music scene, and considers many of its artists family.

In fact, many notable Dallas artists contributed to Avalanche, including Charley Wiles on guitar, Ben Barajas on bass, and Sarah Jaffe and Matt Pence, who aided in the EP’s production.

Growing up is never easy, but Reilly is lucky to have her fellow Dallas musicians by her side.

“We support each other, we listen to each other’s music, we repost or pay for each other’s music and we’re always together doing shows,” she says. “I think it’s just one big family, and there’s no better way to describe it. We all want to see each other succeed, and I think it’s wonderful.”