[Cover photo credit to Nicholas Mycio]
Please Plant Flowers is the upcoming album by New York-influenced, Los Angeles-based guitarist Nicholas Mycio, which was recorded as a trio with bassist Kyle Colina and drummer Sam McCarthy. The music took shape over an extended stretch of time, while “war, displacement, illness, and death were ongoing realities in Mycio’s life and in the lives of people close to him.” He simply kept writing throughout this period.
Mycio explains:
Music lets you express things very directly because it’s abstract. You don’t have to litigate how you feel.
Born in Brooklyn, Mycio began playing under the guidance of his father, guitarist and music theorist Wasil Mycio. That foundation carried through his time at Berklee College of Music, where he studied withTerri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Nir Felder.
Mycio’s recorded output has reflected a lot of range. His debut album, Secrets from the Streetlights (2021), paired original compositions with standards. NONSTANDARD (2024) pushed further, placing familiar material alongside breakbeats and electronic textures.
With Please Plant Flowers, the instrumentation is reduced to guitar, bass, and drums, and the trio recorded live, preserving what happened in the room. The single “Siniy” is out now.
During the period in which Mycio wrote the music, his cousin was killed after being lured to a party and shot. Soon after, the war in Ukraine began, and since Mycio had lived in both Kyiv and Moscow and had family members in Ukraine and Russia, he and his wife watched relatives escape as places he had spent time in Kyiv were destroyed.
Meanwhile, his sister faced invasive brain surgery after her medication stopped working, with uncertain odds. His great-grandfather died and his grandmother suffered a fall.
He says:
It felt like everything was happening one after the other. Nothing seemed like it could let up.
Mycio chose the guitar trio for the music “because of the responsibility it demands.” Without a piano, the guitar carries the harmonic weight, and Mycio avoids prearranging parts. He brings lead sheets into the session and lets the group determine shape and direction together, playing improvised music.
