Members of the band Naiswan Matt Naughton , Sarah Owens , Sarah Badiee, Jesse Broman and Kyle Firlik on stage for a performance. Photo courtesy of Nicole Rahn.
Five former MSU students decided to sacrifice everything and move to Los Angeles with the hope of building a successful music career. They are now the band Naiswan.
Naiswan, pronounced "nice one," was formed in East Lansing in February 2011. The five members of the band are Sarah Badiee, Jesse Broman, Kyle Firlik, Matt Naughton and Sarah Owens.
The members of the band said they are very proud of the fact that Naiswan has existed for almost six years.
“We are all close friends, we are all best friends, so we have that going for us," Badiee said. "Coming from Michigan to California in itself shows how committed we all have been to each other and to our music."
It started with the band’s first performance at the Lansing Loft Party at The Loft in July 2010.
Prior to the show, Badiee was working as a resident DJ for Neon Tuesday at Mac’s Bar in Lansing. As a DJ, she was offered a gig at The Loft in Lansing and decided to ask the four other band members to act as instrumentalists for her DJ set.
The band’s first performance had an audience of about 500 people.
“It was really fun, we had a ball, I deejayed and the four of them played a company DJ set,” Badiee said.
Badiee is an East Lansing native and the oldest of the band members. Badiee plays bass guitar and synth keyboard.
Jesse Broman is the band’s drummer and graduated from MSU with a degree in jazz studies.
Firlik is one of the lead vocalists for the band and also plays the guitar and keyboard.
Naughton plays the guitar, saxophone and keyboard and graduated from MSU with a degree in telecommunication.
Lastly, Owens is another lead vocalist and also plays cello. Owens graduated from MSU with a degree in education.
Naiswan’s music can be categorized as electronic rock with jazz, hip-hop and indie influences.
Another one of Naiswan’s notable performances was playing for almost 1,000 people at Wompapalooza in April of 2011.
The name of band was created by coincidence. While the members were trying to figure out the perfect name, one of the members suggested an idea for the name of the band. Another member responded “nice one.” The thought of creating a phonetic variation of that phrase intrigued the members. After a lot of discussion, they settled on Naiswan.
Badiee was living in Los Angeles before any of the members of the band decided to move. While Badiee was home to deal with family matters in East Lansing, she posed the question to the rest of the members and asked them to move out to California with her.
“The timing was so perfect," Badiee said. "Everyone else was finishing up school and wondering what to do next and where do we go from here."
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After Badiee extended the offer there a collective agreement that they would all move out to California.
A few months prior to the move, Broman got married and at first he said he felt somewhat uneasy about the move.
“I was a little bit nervous about the new marriage, moving across the country, and not having lived in a big city before, worried about the financial stress of living in a big city," Broman said.
The band members knew they would eventually have to move from East Lansing, but they were waiting for the right moment to act. Everything ended up falling into place and, near the end of 2012, all five of the members were officially living in California.
The Naiswan EP is expected to be released on July 8. This EP is five years in the making and members said they put a lot of hard work into creating the highest quality product.
