When he’s onstage performing one of his typically swinging, groove-indebted soul or R&B numbers, Nick Waterhouse might appear overly excited, exuberant even. To the musician, being locked in to his bandmates is “the most beautiful thing” he could ask for.
“That feeling is like getting in a fight,” he says recounting such pleasures without a hint of irony.
For Waterhouse, a demure, nonconfrontational presence in his everyday existence, those moments — playing off his fellow musicians, unsure where a song is headed — are few when he’s free to live outside his head.
“You get to live in this fight-or-flight sensation,” he says of playing live, “without having to be in any real danger.”
No labels, please
Since emerging in 2012 with “Time’s All Gone,” a jolt of restless energy expressed through the southern California native’s love of classic soul, jazz and British blues, Waterhouse has been fighting, principally against what he calls “misinterpretation” and “dissection” of his craft. From the outset, critics have been quick to label the self-admitted disciple of Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Bill Evans and Booker T. Jones a “retro” or “throwback” artist. To that end, Waterhouse says his second album, last year’s “Holly,” a more nuanced, deep-rooted effort, was a direct reaction to that struggle.
“If you listen to ‘Holly’ a lot of those songs and a lot of my delivery in that was really rooted in being wounded by that,” he says from Los Angeles. “My music is so … personal. So to have that maybe attacked or demeaned or trivialized is the thing that turns me even further inward. If I hadn’t had to go out and deal with tons of (nonsense) relating to all the songs on the first record I would have made a second record that was much more buoyant. I definitely think I am creating in response to my environment. I go out on tour and I have everybody who saw me after ‘Time’s All Gone’ complaining to me that they wanted Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis freaking out on stage in front of them. ‘Oh you want a wild man?’ Now you’re going to get a calm, sophisticated … guy.”
‘Escape route’
The struggling, academic, tortured artist — Waterhouse casually references Arthur Miller, T.S. Eliot and esteemed music critics in conversation — is a personification and identity Waterhouse has come to embrace. His best songs reflect this take-no-prisoners mentality to his craft.
“Ain’t quite saying it’s do or die / But anyway / You’re gonna get killed,” he sings on the horn-inflected “This Is a Game.”
Hearing him talk of his work on an untitled album due in May, it appears he now views this characterization as something with a sense of romance attached to it.
“I forgot that at three points in your record-making process you feel like you’re having a nervous breakdown and this isn’t going to get done at all,” he says. “I was reading an interview recently with Francis Ford Coppola who said every film he wanted to commit suicide five or six times and that’s how you know it’s just part of the process. Once you’ve gone through wanting to commit suicide you really have a healthier perspective that you’re going to get out on the other side.”
Waterhouse says he finds solace in his production and songwriting work for other musicians, most notably his longtime friends, Los Angeles surf-rock outfit the Allah-Lahs.
“It allows me to not have to live in one place all the time. It’s like always having an escape route.”
When not existing within those unadulterated, freewheeling moments onstage, Waterhouse prefers to live and record according to a more workmanlike code: It informs what he does and pays homage to the artists he grew up on.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to see what I do as talent,” he says. “Honestly most of what I do I see as getting the job done. It’s what I recognize about so many of the records I like. It has a real spirit to it. That’s definitely what works for me.”
