By Josh Rhodes
Back in 2022, those who frequented the lounges at two UC Santa Barbara dormitories, Santa Cruz and San Miguel, could not have known they were the first to get a taste of what today is one of Isla Vista, California’s hottest bands: Big Hungry.
After winning this year’s Santa Barbara Battle of the Bands competition in late February, the band made its festival debut earlier this month at Shabang, an annual music and arts festival near San Luis Obispo.
Lead singer Nolan Guss, a UCSB Music Studies student, performs with his band Big Hungry during a set at a packed Isla Vista house show.
Big Hungry was born during UCSB’s 2022 summer orientation after the band’s guitarist, Stiles Fraser White, overheard Nolan Guss, a third-year Music Studies and Anthropology double-major with a minor in English, chatting about Isla Vista’s vibrant band scene.
“This guy in front of me in cowboy boots and a David Bowie shirt was like, ‘you want to start a band?’… that guy ended up being Stiles, our guitarist,” remembers Guss, who went on to become lead singer. “[It’s] something I've always wanted to do,” Guss replied to stiles.
The band’s name came from an off-handed comment by a friend who was “big hungry” for food at De La Guerra dining commons on campus. After a few jam sessions on campus pianos, the now five-person band has become a standout for many music lovers in town.
Since then, the alternative-rock band has performed at more than 60 shows throughout Santa Barbara County, according to Guss.
Callie Banta, a third-year economics major at UCSB, watched Big Hungry perform live at Shabang recently and is a frequent attendee of Isla Vista band performances. “I love seeing them at shows … they have great stage presence and bring amazing energy,” Banta said.
Guss sat down recently to chat about Big Hungry’s creation, studying music at UCSB, and how he felt to perform in front of his biggest crowd yet at Shabang. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What made you want to get into music? Is it something that you've always been interested in pursuing at UCSB?
A: My parents have some great music taste. I've grown up listening to a really diverse set of different artists, genres and styles of music, and while my parents don’t play any instruments, they appreciate music a lot. In fourth grade I started playing clarinet in elementary school and continued through high school. I've also enjoyed singing a lot throughout my life, and I didn't think I would ever do singing in a choir or anything, but I joined a choir in eighth grade and did that throughout high school. When I was applying to college and universities in California, I was applying for biochemistry, but I saw UCSB had a very developed Music Studies and Ethnomusicology program, and I was like, ‘all right, I'm just going to apply to UCSB and see what happens.’ When I got in, I just decided that this is the place where I wanted to go.
Q: Is there something special about the local band scene in Isla Vista and UCSB that makes it special and prompted you to participate in it?
A: I think something about the music culture here that's just so amazing is that there's so many people who love many different kinds of music. No matter what type of music you listen to or enjoy, you're always able to find that style or genre being played by a local band sometime on the weekends. I don't think a college music scene exists like this anywhere else in America, just because of how many students we have in this area and our ability to throw house shows. It was something that drew me initially to UCSB, knowing that there was this type of music scene here. But I didn't actually understand exactly how big it was until I got here and I started going to house shows. I was like, ‘Wow this is really cool.’
UCSB Music student Nolan Guss of Big Hungry plays the keyboard during a a house show in Isla Vista, California.
Q: How have the music classes you've taken at UCSB while pursuing your major helped you grow as an artist?
A: [Music studies] is a lot about understanding music history across the world. I've taken western classical music classes, world music classes. There was this one class that was really interesting called Ecomusicology with Tim Cooley, who's one of the music professors at UCSB. It’s a really interesting class about the combination of sound and your natural environment. It was something that just made me think about sounds and a soundscape in a completely different way. The environment that you're in and the sounds in your environment play a role in who you are as a person, how you interact with others, and also the music that you make… I utilize a lot of the ideas of a soundscape and put weird ambient sounds in the background of my music, but I also like it to be a part of the key structures of the music we make.
Q: Describe your experience at this year’s Battle of the Bands? How had your time at UCSB helped prepare you to win that competition?
A: Personally, I don't think music and arts in general really should be competitive. Like, it definitely makes things more interesting. But I was more attracted to the idea of playing a show at Soho with four other amazing Isla Vista bands. That's an experience that you don't get access to very often. And all the other bands - The Sweeps, Dislocated, BirchWood - they're all very talented and dedicated music artists, and it was, like, definitely a pleasure to just play a show with them. We weren't really going into it with the idea of winning. Of course, that would be nice. But it wasn't the main reason that attracted us to play the Battle of the Bands. Still, we were definitely very, very excited after the fact, when we found out that we won — just for the opportunity to play at Shabang… because we never played at a proper festival like that.
Q: How did you feel before getting on stage at Shabang? Did you plan something special for your set?
A: A little nervous, but I was excited for the experience. Being able to play a show, but also just appreciate more live music from all those different bands in California, and outside of California as well that flew in for the show. I was very, very excited, pretty stoked. We dropped a song right before Shabang called “Afraid of Fire.” It's a new original, both written and recorded, and it's a really good song and we were excited to release it right about the time of Shabang.
Josh Rhodes is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Political Science. He conducted this interview for his Digital Journalism class in the Writing Program.