Nick Waterhouse Brims The Scene with R&B Soul and Psychedelic Colors (INTERVIEW)

It begins with a heady, aromatically sexy beat that winds its way around your hips. That’s when the movement begins as the jazzy swings swirl around your aura and before you’ve even blinked half an album has played past you. It’s like a molecular absorption, all the pores of the body reacting to the sounds engulfing it.

Nick Waterhouse would probably get a good chuckle over that analogy of his latest self-titled album, out on March 8th, but it’s that consistently good. All records try to reach this ultimate state of being within a listener and not half of them succeed. But what this California native son has done with record #4 is continue to capture an essence, a presence of sitting in a smoky, laid back New York City jazz club that is brimming with R&B soul and psychedelic colors. It’s the coolest place in town that not everybody has caught onto yet, which makes it even more addictive.

Waterhouse is not exactly a new name to music. He released his first single, “Some Place,” in 2010, his first album, Time’s All Gone, in 2012. His last release was back in 2016, Never Twice, and featured the popular song, “Katchi.” But truly, Nick Waterhouse, is his finest hour to date. With the aforementioned pulse-hoppers all over the eleven songs – including the opening track, “By Heart,” “Song For Winners,” “Man Leaves Town” and the slinky “Thoughts & Act” – this collection of songs is stimulating in ways not found on the airwaves unless you dial up something on satellite. Pop radio just continues to follow it’s warped antenna of sameness while artists like Waterhouse get ignored when really they shouldn’t.

I spoke with Waterhouse recently about his latest songs, how he hears music when new songs come to him, his continued love of literature and not caring if there was an audience for his music when he started following his artistic path.

Since your music is so distinctive, what is something different or unique you wanted to do with this new record?

I think with this record it was a little further pushed into maybe putting my vocals out front and center. I was trying also to write – I tend to lean heavily into minor blues scales – so I was actively trying to write with my friends, like Anthony Polizzi, “Wreck The Rod” and “By Heart” were co-written with him, and John Anderson, who co-wrote “Wherever She Goes” with me, in this mode of almost like a guitar and vocals record, where in the past it was almost like the song was a big blob and my vocal was just as much a part of it as the horn or the drum was. Working with those guys, especially my co-producer Paul Butler, pushed me to really be like the frontman. And then the songs, I have a unique approach in that I was always interested in the holistic aspect of the whole recording versus being the star, so to speak, of the song. This is probably a record where I really feel like I was trying to be, you know, the singer.

Do you feel more like a conductor than an artist/guitar player/singer?

Yeah, definitely. I think of myself as like a director. Sometimes when I’m recording a song or making an album, I’m way, way more focused on some little nuts and bolts detail while I’m working on the song than I may be on how I’m doing when I go sing it. Like, maybe that drum tom needs to be tuned up a half-step. That’s what I’m thinking about sometimes rather than the thing you recognize that most listeners are focused on, which is your voice and your personality.

How do you keep all these sounds that are happening at one time from sounding cluttered, cause it doesn’t sound cluttered at all? Is that an inner instinct or by trial and error?

Well, it’s 50/50. I’m really lucky sometimes with an idea I have that I don’t have the ability to try until I get everybody in the room that it turns out that my instincts were right and it just works. Maybe it’s why I have these really, really talented and amazing musicians that continue to work with me, cause I guess I impressed them in some way (laughs). I mean, there are some things that are trial and error. What I really like about my process is that a lot of times the concept, and I write really differently than singer-songwriters I know; I’m incredibly shy when I’m around other songwriters because those are the guys that are like, let’s sit around in a room and play guitar and accompany ourselves and sing this well-crafted song to another guy so we can all nod our heads and appreciate how talented and skilled this craftsman is, you know. I’m more like, I think about building a house, it’s more architectural or cinematic than it is about just a lyric and the melody and the chords.

When you hear new music in your head, how bare bones is it?

It’s not very bare bones, honestly. Sometimes I will be like, alright, I know this is the rhythm, this is the general chordal movement and this is going to be the lyric and melody but in my mind I want to hear saxes come in here and it needs to be thick and in the midrange to the low end, you know, and it will almost be like these colors where I want to hear a lot of blue show up here and then once we get to the chorus we’ll bring that back and kind of mix it in with another shade or something. And then the cool thing is, being influenced by jazz, rhythm & blues and all that stuff, that it’s also about players playing in real time off of what you’re giving them. That’s all rooted in syncopation and call and response stuff. Then the cool thing is to build a sandbox that all these players play in. Then all of a sudden a piano player is doing a little response to a chord that I put in there and it starts making it feel real. It creates a kinetic energy that then gives you the momentum to make it happen.

You do a lot of thinking on this. Your brain must be going a mile a minute.

(laughs) Sometimes

That being said, which song on here would you say changed the most from it’s original conception to it’s final recorded version?

I would say that was probably “Black Glass.” When I was writing it, I was doing all these demos by myself and I thought I knew what the rhythm was, which the core of the rhythm is still in it, but once I started having all the players play it, it was kind of like I started subtracting. So initially it was very bombastic feeling and it almost felt like one of my earlier songs, like “Some Place,” where it was a real skip beat, like a DJ track, like a big sound. And once I had the rhythm section playing it I was like, you know what, I’m going to stop playing guitar right now so it’s just bass and drums; let’s cut out the other guitar; let’s take the keys out right now so it’s just bass and drums; let’s take even more of the drum out; let’s just have the congas driving it but it’s still on the same pattern and tempo. Once I started subtracting, I figured out what I could be adding, like the horn lines doing more triplets. That created way more of a tension.

The lyric too, once that was minimalized then the lyric steered the feel of the song and then I could sing it, again same melody and same rhythm, but it made it more tense and almost more powerful by being this push-pull feel rather than just a hammering. Then at the end, the saxophone solo almost defined it, when Mando Dorame, who is playing tenor on that, we did one of the first breaks, and I was like I know the tenor solo is going to be here and I want to drop out with the congas now that I have this little conga pattern. That was the thing that kind of sparked me and kicked into what the whole song was going to be like. That song is like if you had to understand my philosophy or my ideology, it’s all in there in that song.

You mentioned “By Heart” and it has great rhythm to it and a great flow. How did that song come together for you and Anthony Polizzi?

That’s interesting cause that song also changed a lot but I would say it didn’t change as much as “Black Glass” did because I didn’t know how that song was going to be performed. Me and Doc, I call him Doc, write songs over Imessage, like a text. He plays piano really well and I play mostly guitar. I can fool around on piano but he writes on piano a lot. So often we’ll send each other little voice memos of like sketches and if it triggers something in the other person then they’ll add to it or expand it.

He texted me one day, “We should write a song like ‘Witchy Woman’ by the Eagles.” (laughs) That’s not something that is usually on my mind. I’m not a huge Eagles fan but the thing about the Eagles is I understand their place in music history. That whole scene was a bunch of people writing in the early seventies, like a golden era, trying to write Roy Orbison songs and they were all influenced by a lot of records that I like a lot, like rhythm & blues and soul records. And I was like, oh, “Witchy Woman” has always made me think of this period in the mid-sixties before The Beatles, the early sixties where I think of “Medicine Man” by Baby Washington; all these sort of slightly fantasy movie tropes; or “Gypsy Woman” by the Impressions; stuff that could be perceived maybe a little weird and tone-deaf in terms of Native American references from watching western movies at the time. Always had that tom tom thing. So I was like, “I think I get what you’re saying, you want to do this kind of change and then go into a big chorus.” It never ended up like “Witchy Woman,” it just ended up being it’s own thing.

But I had a verse and I gave him a lyric and he immediately sat down at the piano and sang and sent it back to me and then I wrote the second verse once I had the melody that he had come up with off of my lyrics I had sent him. Then the chorus, we both had a unified front on where we both knew what we wanted to do. So it’s a true co-write. And the cool thing is, when I write songs by myself, sometimes I kind of get lost in like the fog of my own ideas. So it’s almost like when I co-write with somebody I’m getting an outside source and it’s only my job to interpret the song when it’s time for me to go do the arrangements. So I wanted it to feel like a big city record, kind of like one of those big dark Manhattan-ish feeling things that expands and extracts and having almost like taxi cabs outside, you know.

Was guitar the only instrument you played on this record?

I’ve played keys all my life but now I leave it to the professionals. But yes, I play guitar all over this record.

Which one did you use predominately?

I kind of switched around song by song. I think on “By Heart” and one or two others I used an old Gibson Melody Maker that the studio had. And it’s funny because Doc, we met the first day of high school when I was fourteen and he had one of those. It was like the one guitar that he had at his mom’s house. So when we’d be at his little apartment when we were teenagers, I’d be playing Melody Makers all the time and I hadn’t picked one up until I got in the studio. It has this kind of earthy Fender sound but it’s a Gibson. And the neck is just right for me.

When you started doing this kind of music, did you care if there was an audience for it?

No (laughs), not at all. I really didn’t choose it, like it wasn’t like I could choose vanilla ice cream or strawberry ice cream or chocolate ice cream. It just felt more like I was just doing something that made sense to me and felt right to me. I’ve had to answer a lot of questions now over the years and I guess it’s like, if I’m thirteen or fourteen and learning to play guitar at the same time that I’m like listening to like John Lee Hooker or the Rolling Stones covering Don Covay, that just felt more fun to play than a lot of the other stuff that I think was out when I was an adolescent. Like Blink 182 was just dog shit compared to like how good it felt to play rhythm & blues chords.

Did you always picture yourself with a big ensemble?

Oh definitely. I don’t like the pressure of being the guy with the guitar. Again, this is where I feel more like a director. It’s like if I was a film director and went to do a one-man show on Broadway where I just talk onstage for an hour and a half. I’m not really interested in that. The power of what I like in music was sort of when all these people worked together to realize a bigger vision. You understand there’s a giant wall of energy to tap into that only a bunch of people together can get; even if one person has the idea, you’re all executing it together and it makes you feel like part of the brotherhood.

Tell us about your love for the Allah-lahs. What made them so special to you?

Well, especially when we were making their first album, we all kind of had the same intense love for really pure, sort of non-retrospective creation of music that was rooted in our influences. Matt Correia, the drummer, is one of my dearest friends, and there was a time where, even in 2010, to make a record that just had a groove like that, nobody was doing it and nobody around them could understand why you would want thinner sounding guitars but still have some edge to it. They got on board with me and I got on board with them and for a while we had a system of beliefs that we were acting on together. I think a lot of their sound has bled into more mainstream stuff now; I hear traces of all their stuff influencing what is kind of more popular now but at the time it was pretty radical.

Is your love of literature still influencing your music?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I don’t think that goes away. All these things I have now have like the framework that I perceived things through, and that’s not going to really change. Maybe being around the business of music and the entertainment-industrial complex to an extent has like dulled my edges. I guess I feel a little dumber after a couple of years (laughs).

So who are you reading?

Well, right now I am reading this biography on John Berger, who wrote Ways Of Seeing. He was like a British art critic. It’s interesting cause like Berger and Howard Zinn were two people outside of literature that were writers but helped me adjust my perspective to maybe approaching music or my process. Fiction-wise, appropriately enough, I just bought a bunch of the new translations of Kafka cause I hadn’t read a lot of those since I was in my early twenties and it seemed like a good time to reread like The Castle. His short stories are so good. I always have a non-fiction book in rotation. Ann Powers has a new book about American music called Good Booty that’s very good. That’s a pretty typical cross-section of my tastes, I would say.

So what were you going to do with your literature degree? Be a professor?

It would have been fun but I also was finishing that degree like the month the stock market crashed in 2008. I knew all these young professors – I was going to a State school, I wasn’t going anywhere fancy – but some of the young professors were explaining to me how bleak the future was for academia. They were getting rid of tenured positions; funny enough, it’s almost like a cloud that follows all of us around in my generation. You go somewhere and you’re like, okay, the other place was not so good and things were getting really bad but this seems okay; and sure enough, one to three years later the creep comes in where like the cost of living goes up, the attitude of employers is do more with less and then things are getting cut and cut and cut and that seemed terminal to me. I actually had a day job that I quit to do this that was at a news agency as an editor. It was definitely an internet-oriented news startup that had all this funding from all these groups and sure enough it turned into this cancerous blob that was actually just aggregating data instead of, you know; it had some journalism but I don’t know, I suppose I would have been like any other millennial where I would go from job to job every three to five years.

What is your biggest goal as an artist?

My biggest goal as an artist is just to make records as long as they can be made. I don’t know, I have a funny relationship with music where a lot of the songs or records that deeply affected me were almost like a message in a bottle from somebody else. Like some bus driver in Lafayette who made one record when he was like twenty-four probably didn’t realize that thirty-five years later somebody like me and a bunch of my friends would be really touched by his work; and maybe he didn’t even live to know that, you know. And I guess I’m that person. I don’t really care much for the fantasy of being on the Grammys performing. That stuff doesn’t appeal to me. It was more like, I just want to make records that I stand by and people can engage with that world of mine somewhere down the line.

I don’t think being on the Grammys is many people’s goal anymore.

Everything continues to feel grubbier and grubbier in that world. I never really wanted that in the first place. Actually by having a music career, I’ve had to interact with much more stuff that I don’t care about than before. I try to be an open-minded and friendly-hearted person but it’s just tiresome sometimes, you know (laughs).

Does it fuel your lyrics more?

Of course! I mean, all lyrics should be a reaction to your environment, I guess.

But you don’t want them to be all negative

Well, there is that great essay T. S. Eliot wrote about what modernism was, which was the articulation of the atmosphere you live in even if you’re not saying it directly. I don’t think of lyrics in terms of negativity or positivity. I think that’s also kind of a dumb way to write. But I can see that what you’re doing is making a product that is supposed to make a person that is listening to you feel good or bad, which I think I’m more interested in the spectrum of human emotion and experience than I am in being somebody’s cheerleader.

Are you going to be on tour most of the year?

Yes, I am. There is a whole string of dates on my website. When the record’s out I think we’re going straight to the UK and then we do two weeks in Europe and then we do a US tour in April. So I’ll be out on the road seeing everybody I can.

 

Related Content

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter