Reid and Will Nichols (PHS class of 2022 and PHS class of 2019, respectively), the brothers at the heart of country music band 12/OC, have come a long way since they were playing for candy money as kids. On December 20, they’ll be headlining a holiday homecoming special at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland.

Will (left) and Reid Nichols

“Our family always played music at family gatherings and holidays,” Reid said. “My dad played guitar and we learned guitar from him. My mom had a karaoke machine that she loved. She made me do karaoke one night and was like ‘OK, you can sing!’”

The brothers first performed publicly at the Old Goat in Richmond. Their father had signed up for an open mic night and the brothers, then around 10 and 13, joined him. That was the start of the brothers’ music career, going on to do shows for $25. They would use the money to buy Mike & Ikes at Rite Aid. By the time Reid was in his teens, the two brothers were playing bar shows around the state.

“We took it really seriously,” they said. “We had a good group around us. Our drummer, George Chaison-Lapine, went to Portland too. Sammy went to Cheverus, but we’ll let it go. We were friends who wanted to do this and it never really stopped.”

Reid was encouraged along the way by Jayne Sawtelle, his music teacher, who’s since retired and been elected to the school board.

“I was terrible at math, I was terrible at science, I was terrible at everything besides music and sports,” he said. “Ms. Sawtelle let me get my grade by playing music all over the place. She gave me time to really focus on my passion and do what I thought was important to me in school. I think that’s really hard to find. That was really huge for me.”

The brothers were performing every weekend from the time Reid entered high school. They called themselves 12/OC, a reference to a carpentry mishap in the brothers’ youth. They accidentally framed a bunkhouse at their camp at 24 inches on center, i.e., leaving two feet between the center of one joist and the next. This was off from the standard 16 inches, so that the floor was bouncy. They fixed the mistake by reframing it at 12 inches on center—12/OC.

“I think I was playing bars every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, when I was like 15 years old,” he said. “It got to the point in high school where, around graduation, we were opening for artists at the Pavillion in New Hampshire and I almost missed my graduation because we were opening for Kane Brown.”

After Reid’s graduation, it was “go time,” he said. They played 280 shows in a year. They performed at least five shows a week. On busy weeks, they would be booked every day, with double shows on the weekend, doing nine shows in seven days.

“It started out as a small circle in Maine,” they said. “It started to grow to New England—we’d go to Boston, Connecticut, and then Vermont.”

Their first ticketed show was at Aura in Portland. The concert room was capped at 1,000 people. It sold out in a day. That’s when they realized things were getting real, they said.

The brothers moved to Nashville last year to take their career to the next level. 12/OC now performs up and down the East Coast and in Canada. Last year, they sold 6,000 tickets for their performance at Thompson’s Point in Portland. Their Cross Arena performance will be among their largest venues yet.

You can listen to 12/OC's new song "Peace of my Home Time" here get tickets for A Hometown Holiday with 12/OC and Friends here.