Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha
The Figments run through a few songs. From left are Andrew Keitt, Pete Nice and Shea Rives.
It started the way most things start at 70: with coffee, a guitar and no particular plan.
Lifelong Mountain Brook resident Pete Nice had been playing music around Birmingham for the better part of five decades. So had Andrew Keitt, on guitar and mandolin. So had Shea Rives, who handles guitar, bass and kick drum. The three had crossed paths in other bands for years. About two years ago they started meeting up to write, with Kelly Simpson eventually filling out the drums.
“It was a songwriting project,” Nice said. “Coffee with a guitar. And then one day we looked up and we had all these songs.”
Someone offered them a gig. They played it. And they became The Figments.
The rule, from the beginning, was that everything would be original. No covers, no filler.
“I take great pride in doing original stuff,” Nice said. He writes the chord progressions and usually starts from a phrase rather than a melody. “Voodoo Honeymoon” was one. It turned into a song about being bewitched by love. Others in the catalog — “Break Bone Fever,” “Looking Away from the City,” “Oh No” — arrived the same way. One came from a newspaper item he read about something that had happened fifty years earlier to the day.
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha
Pete Nice practices a few songs.
The band figures out the instrumentation afterward. A song might sit for weeks as nothing but a chord chart and a title before anyone decides whether it wants a mandolin on it or a kick drum. All of them sing, which means most songs end up with harmony lines stacked on top of each other.
“That’s the part I love,” Nice said. “Making up harmony lines and building things.”
Keitt’s mandolin is often what separates a Figments song from the rock records the three of them made in their younger years. It sits high and thin over the guitars, and it tends to show up on the saddest material.
“Something happens when the three of us start playing together," Keitt said. “Some of our best lines came up with all of us just batting things around. We always know when we hit one. It can be humbling.”
They are not, they’ll tell you, in the business of cheering anyone up. The twelve songs they’ve assembled are about sweet love, loss, and tragedy. “I’m not making people happy,” Nice said, and he means it as a description, not an apology.
THE HISTORY
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha
Pete Nice uses a slide guitar among other instruments.
Some of that comes from where he’s been. Nice goes back to high school in the early ‘70s with Anthony Crawford, the Alabama musician who would go on to play alongside Neil Young and Dwight Yoakam. Nice’s own stretch of years included opening for Yoakam, playing City Stages and sharing bills with Bruce Cockburn. He calls it a big, joyful time. He also calls the period around it the hungry years, when audiences came to listen rather than to be entertained at — when a band could count on a room full of people who wanted the songs more than the spectacle.
That’s part of what living room concerts get back. Thirty people on couches, no stage, no monitors, nobody talking over the quiet parts.
Nice is a builder by trade — he framed and hung the addition on his own house — and a musician the rest of the time. The two occupations have run in parallel his whole adult life, and he doesn’t describe them as competing. A song and an addition both start as a rough idea and get finished one measurable piece at a time, and both are the kind of work where you can stand back at the end and see whether you did it right.
Nice lives with his wife of 42 years, Lisa, who also grew up in Mountain Brook. When asked what their secret is to a long-lasting marriage, her answer sums up their story in an endearing way.
“We’re two peas in a pod,” Lisa said. “I have always enjoyed Pete’s music back when he did covers and now even more with his original music.”
The Nices have two grown children, Cayman, 30, and Alice, 26. Lisa is currently taking care of their elderly parents, who also live in Mountain Brook. She appreciates her community but says it’s missing one important thing.
“I love living in Mountain Brook. It’s cozy and convenient,” Lisa said. “But we do need more diversity in this community. That’s very important for Pete and me.”
THE SONGS
For Nice and his band, much of the writing comes from pain. A recent song came from Shea Rives losing his mother. She died in April 2024 after about six months of decline. He was holding her hand at the time.
“I told her I loved her,” Rives said. “I’m not sure if she heard me.”
Those sentiments would end up in a song. Then Rives, along with Nice and Keitt, ended up writing twelve other songs.
“Shea’s mom loved music, and the pain he experienced at losing her just opened the floodgates,” Nice said. “Deep pain is a powerful thing.”
Photos by Karim Shamsi-Basha
The Figments include, from left, Shea Rives, Pete Nice and Andrew Keitt.
What The Figments want now is modest and specific. They want to record — Spotify eventually, though nobody’s in a rush. They want to keep playing living room concerts, the format that suits the material best. They’ve played the Seibels Cottage in Homewood, where Kelly Seibels hosts intimate gatherings for singer-songwriters, and there’s a November open house on the calendar. They’ve played the courtyard at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.
Mostly, though, Nice describes the goal in terms that have nothing to do with a career.
“We just want to continue to be happy,” he said. “Invent songs. We love that. Make up harmony lines and build things. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”
For a man who spent his working life framing walls and hanging additions, it’s a familiar verb. He’s just using different material now: three friends, four decades of shared history and 12 songs about what it costs to love people you don’t get to keep.
