Bill Nershi of genre-blurring band talks Jersey roots,
30 years of band longevity and new music before Oct. 28 Basie show
By Alex Biese
RED BANK – The road is bringing Bill Nershi home.
Nershi is the Bergen County-native guitarist for the long-running ultra-eclectic jam rockers The String Cheese Incident, and the band returns to New Jersey for an Oct. 28 bow at the stately Hackensack Meridian Health Theater at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in downtown Red Bank.
For Nershi, returning to the Garden State offers a welcome opportunity to reconnect with lifelong friends and familiar territory. Nershi was born in Teaneck and grew up in River Edge; he took his first guitar lessons and developed his initial passion for music during his teenage years.
“I love going back East,” Nershi said in a recent interview with The Two River Times. “I’ve already been talking to some friends that are going to come out and check out the show and who I haven’t seen for a while.”
Although raised in North Jersey, Nershi’s early musical influences leaned heavily toward Southern rock. “My influences were kind of southern living up there,” Nershi recalled. “Maybe that was a cultural thing, that some people had a love for Southern rock. Being from the north, it was a little romanticized. But that’s what I was into when I was up there.”
His New Jersey roots extended slightly further south when his parents moved to Toms River; Nershi has spent considerable time visiting, “So I know the area,” he said.
INDEPENDENT BLUEPRINT
Spanning more than three decades, The String Cheese Incident has built a massive national following while pioneering independent music business models. In the 1990s, as the traditional major-label system began to falter, the group spearheaded grassroots growth by establishing its own ticketing company, merchandise outlet, fan travel agency and record label, SCI Fidelity Records. They were also among the earliest acts to embrace digital distribution and live show downloads.
Sustaining a touring group over 30 years requires more than industry innovation. According to Nershi, the secret to the band’s longevity comes from an early commitment to open communication among members.
“First of all, it was a commitment to really work things out interpersonally and to not let things get away from us and not let any interpersonal things fester and get bad,” Nershi explained. “When we first started touring, we were out on the road all the time, so you had to work things out together out there because we were just in the bus together for months at a time.”
That personal cohesion allowed the Colorado-based six-piece ensemble to cultivate an expansive musical identity, seamlessly blending elements of bluegrass, rock, funk, electronic and Afropop.
“We’ve really encouraged everybody’s musical interests to be incorporated in the music,” Nershi said. “There’s a lot of diverse musical tastes in the band and you can hear that in our music. Everybody feels like they have a vested interest in the music and that really keeps people motivated.”
FESTIVAL ROOTS, FRESH DIRECTIONS
That genre-blurring philosophy stems directly from attending multi-genre music festivals during the band’s formative years, and it is an approach they in turn brought to flagship events like Electric Forest and Suwannee Hulaween, where they earned a reputation as live music vibe innovators.
“We were influenced a lot by festivals where you might see lots of different styles of music in one given day or night,” Nershi said. “I feel like we try to make every night feel like you’ve heard a weekend festival, and we’ve gone on a journey through different styles of music.”
Rather than relying on past accomplishments and resting on well-earned laurels, Nershi and his bandmates remain dedicated to creating fresh material. Following a six-month winter break, the band gathered at their recording facility in Lewisville, Colorado, to craft new songs specifically designed for live performances.
Instead of assembling a traditional full-length album, the band is releasing the new tracks individually as singles, including recent drops like “Lightning Sky” and “Fête-Tama.”
“We wrote a new group of songs, not with the intent necessarily of creating an album, but more with the intent of having new material for our live shows,” Nershi said. “We took six, seven songs and developed them and arranged them and recorded them, and now we’re popping them out one at a time.”
For Nershi, continuously introducing new compositions on stage is essential to keeping the performances invigorated. “We’ve been playing a lot of the new stuff on the road,” Nershi said. “We’ve been playing a lot, for a long time, and we don’t want to go out and be doing the String Cheese hits, like a nostalgia band. We got to keep the new material coming and feel invigorated on stage.”
Doors open at 6 p.m. and the show at 7:15 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 28, at the Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre at the Count Basie Center for the Arts, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank. For tickets and more information, visit thebasie.org/events/the-string-cheese-incident.
This article originally appeared in the September 24-30, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
