Nick Waterhouse: Modern Art

Nick Waterhouse isn’t a revivalist. He’s not retro. He isn’t trying to recreate anything. He doesn’t record his music live and on analog because it makes his records sound vintage or anachronistic, and he doesn’t wear high-waisted pants and thick frames because of some longing for a bygone era.

“I just do my best, and do what I know, and what I want to do and trust that people enjoy it,” Waterhouse explains. “Everybody’s like, ‘I bet you love Mad Men,’ and it’s like, ‘Why? Because I look this way?’ I mean, it’s a great show, but what does it have to do with me?”

Since the release of his debut full-length album, Time’s All Gone, the first thing most people bring up when attempting to describe Waterhouse’s music is that it sounds like it came straight out of the ‘50s or ‘60s, and you can’t blame them. From the lively horn section, to the cooing female backup singers, to Waterhouse’s own soulful wail, the songs on Time’s All Gone harken back to an age when R&B was king, before anyone had ever heard of The Beatles or ‘Stones.

But just because Waterhouse’s songs remind people of a specific, distinct period in music doesn’t mean they’re static. It doesn’t mean they’re dated or that what Waterhouse is doing today, in 2012, is not modern. All it means is that he’s drawing from an era that contemporary musicians don’t typically draw from, and so, as a result, the associations with that era are going to be particularly pronounced.

“People who are making retro music are kind of tied down to emulation, and I want to openly challenge anyone who talks to me about being a retro artist to tell me what my songs sound like,” says Waterhouse. “What do my vocals sound like? What singer do I sound like to you? There’s too much variety and there are too many disparate influences. The same way that any painter or writer can have elements of other things in their work. It’s not like you listen to me and you only hear Little Richard or something. I talk to people and it’s like, if your mind’s shut off already, I’m not going to try to convince you anymore. The best convincing I can do is to have somebody be in the front row at a club when I’m playing, because that’s sort of the fire moment. That’ll burn away all your conceptions.”

Waterhouse also has a particular predilection for the era’s aesthetics. His records’ packaging and art is minimalist and mod, much like that of New York’s Daptone Records (Sharon Jones, The Budos Band, Charles Bradley), and he frequently posts pictures or videos emblematic of the era’s vibe to his Tumblr and Instragram accounts. He wears tucked-in, button-up shirts, Buddy Holly-style glasses and possesses an old-school swagger that you won’t find anywhere else in modern music.

“I think it’s important to know that I’m not this crafted persona,” notes Waterhouse. “This is my real life. I wear what I think is cool. I’m not an invented character like Mayer Hawthorne is a creation of somebody else.”

Waterhouse’s musical and aesthetic influences came together gradually, beginning when he was attending high school in Huntington Beach, Calif., just south of L.A. After buying his first 45 when he was 15, he began working at a record store and eventually formed a band. When its members left for college, Waterhouse moved to San Francisco where he spent most of his time “shuffling around” before eventually deciding that he wasn’t going to be a musician.

Then, “a perfect storm of events and a bit of self-reflection” caused Waterhouse to come to an important realization.

“I was kidding myself by saying that I didn’t want to be involved in music,” he remembers. “I think what I was doing was giving myself an easy out not to succeed.”

He put out a 45 of a rollicking, hotly energetic song he had written called “Some Place,” which is also featured on Time’s All Gone. The record made it’s way around the San Francisco music scene and Waterhouse quickly sold out of copies of the pressing. Before long, it was going for upward of $350 on eBay. “DJs dig for stuff that other people don’t play and it was really this sort of exclusive sounding record,” Waterhouse explains. “And people would dance to it.”

Riding the success of “Some Place,” he got a band together and began to rehearse and play shows. From the very beginning, he was well-aware of how people would pigeon-hole his music as retro and revivalist.

“I was ready, and I was a little scared. That’s part of why I think I wasn’t trying to play, especially in San Francisco; it was a scene that has this air of like, fake Brooklyn, where people need to be really art-y to be doing anything meaningful in music. And I think that’s horse shit, because there’s just as much art in what I’m doing as in what The xx are doing, or something along those lines. I think it’s unfortunate that something like ‘retro’ has to become this overarching, nuanced thing, but to me it’s really funny. When people ask me about that, usually they like electronic-influenced music, and it’s like, well what is dance music to you? Is it Moby? Or is it Aphex Twin? There’s a huge difference between those two worlds. Why can’t you let room for nuance exist in music that has some sonic comparison?”

Part of the nuance that exists in Waterhouse’s music is in the way it was recorded: entirely analog, almost entirely live and without a computer chip in sight. It’s a process he values greatly, both for the “feel and dynamic of people playing together” and because of a certain “x-factor” it brings to his music.

“The x-factor is the living thing that’s going on when you’re playing together,” he explains. “Analog music is physical, it still maintains the physicality of sound. Sound is a wave that is a physical thing. If you record it that way, it’s the closest thing you can do to creating a cast of something. You can almost touch it.”

He continues: “The most important thing to me, honestly, was having the girls, all three of them singing around a mic right next to the drummer. That is amazing to watch, you know. That shit comes across on record.”

Last December, Waterhouse moved to L.A. to be closer to some of his frequent collaborators, namely the Allah-Las, whom Waterhouse has been producing and releasing 45s for on his own Pres Records, a label he founded to release the “Some Place” 45 when he was just starting out in San Francisco. Like Waterhouse, the Allah-Las are commonly labeled as revivalists (they play mellow, 60s-inspired psychedelic surf pop), and Waterhouse took them to the famed Distillery studio in Costa Mesa to produce and record their forthcoming full-length debut. Like Time’s All Gone, which was also recorded at the Distillery, the Allah-Las album was cut live and on analog.

He’s also been working on new material himself. “I’m constantly evolving. This next single I’m working on doesn’t sound like anything I’ve recorded to date, but it sounds like me.”

Whether it’s with his own music or with the Allah-Las, Waterhouse is only doing what comes naturally, and his message is simple:

“I’m proud of pushing this agenda, you know. I just want cool shit out in the world. I want more and more people to be interested in it. I want to share whatever I can with people who are interested, and I can only hope that I’ll influence one or two people.”

Mad Men-era associations aside, I think it’s safe to say he’s succeeded.