Popular music performance sophomore Nolan Heilman — currently performing under the moniker Nolan Jack — has his mother to thank for his music dreams. 

“My mom forced me to do piano lessons when I was really little, like six, seven, eight, and I did it for maybe two or three years,” Heilman said. “Then I decided, ‘I hate this. I hate practicing music, this is not for me.’ And then I started playing guitar a few years later because my mom was like, ‘You have to do something.’”

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Despite his early distaste for music, Heilman listened to his mother and continued with guitar, eventually loving it enough to start attending a music school an hour away from home.

Another thanks to his mother, Heilman had some great company growing up in rural Pennsylvania, such as Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles and Johnny Cash, lending him an appreciation for folk and country songwriting from an early age. 

“My mom takes credit for my music taste — as she really should,” Heilman said.

As music and songwriting began to take center stage in his life, Heilman’s influences began to sharpen into a reflection of the woods behind his house and the guitar in his hands — classic folk greats like Bob Dylan were eventually joined by modern indie folk artists like Hozier, Fleet Foxes and Gregory Alan Isakov.

With these songwriting masters in his ears from an early age, Heilman has enjoyed songwriting as long as he’s been playing music — especially after enrolling at the Thornton School of Music and discovering a community in which student songwriters are constantly collaborating and experimenting.

“You all want to do the same thing. It’s in different ways, but at the core of it, everybody wants to do music, so just getting to exist in a space where everybody is so willing and able [to be there] for each other is just so invaluable when you’re trying to do something as complicated and as difficult as a career in the arts,” Heilman said. 

Being around so many multi-talented students like himself has also made Heilman a jack of all trades. He supports several fellow student artists with his diverse skills. 

“Being in school [at USC] has really made me brush up on my playing skills,” Heilman said.

As fellow sophomore popular music performance major and frequent collaborator Asher Belsky put it, Heilman is “like a Swiss Army knife.” 

“He can play guitar, any keys part you throw at him,” Belsky said, “and taught himself pedal steel over the summer just because he wanted to.”

Though Heilman described himself as a “much less detail-oriented songwriter” before enrolling at Thornton, he’s begun to appreciate the art of songwriting with other students as a source of growth within his own identity as a solo artist.

“When I came [to USC], I was like, ‘I totally want to write my own stuff, I want to produce my own stuff, I want to record my own stuff…’ And that is still cool, but also, I’ve been sitting in on co-writes more,” Heilman said. “I’ve been writing songs for other people, thinking, ‘I’m never going to sing this. This is for you,’ and that is really fun for me. I get the same joy watching someone perform a song I wrote as performing it myself.”

As Heilman continues to grow as an artist, he’s learning to find the balance between what others find to be efficient songwriting and what informs his personal experience as a lyricist.

“People will say that you just kind of let the lyrics hit the paper and the spirit will flow through you, and I think there is merit to that, but there are also people who are like, ‘You’re going to write a chorus, and the chorus has to have three repeating lines because the brain likes repetition,’ and I think that’s stupid too,” Heilman said.

Rather than be tied down by genre when approaching his songwriting, Heilman likes to pull from his different musical roots, like the storytelling aspect of country and the introspective lyricism of folk, to make his own unique and developing sound.

“I grew up on that storytelling, and I obviously like it enough to have a pedal steel, which is the most country instrument of all time. And I just love listening to a country song and being like, ‘I see the title of the song is this neat play on words from a phrase that you use everyday,’” Heilman said. “But on that same thing, I love how Hozier paints this beautiful picture of a mountain stream, or this metaphor is so brilliant that you have to [just] sit there.”

Heilman’s ability to weave in and out of genres makes him a songwriting force to be reckoned with and an excellent collaborator, according to fellow second-year popular music performance major and close collaborator Sawyer Rabin.

“I think what separates Nolan from his peers is that his music is rooted in traditional folk,” Rabin said. “He fuses this with the more modern songwriters of our time like Hozier to create a musical palette that stretches through time. He is a lyricist unparalleled to anyone I’ve ever met.”

Evidently, Heilman is in it for a love of the game — folk, country or pop, the genre’s not an obstacle for Nolan Heilman as he pursues his dreams. Music is his life, and he will stay with it in any capacity, whether as a writer or performer.

“You do what you love,” Heilman said, “in hopes that it leads you somewhere … If it’s music and I’m able to support myself doing what I love, then I couldn’t care less.”