[London, UK] — Episode 5 of UNSUNG, the acclaimed podcast from Audiomovers, features a deep dive with singer, guitarist and producer Nick Waterhouse. Recorded in London just ahead of a festival performance, the conversation – hosted by Audiomovers’ Matt Soczywko and engineer Jocelin “MixedByJocelin” Francis – spotlights Waterhouse’s analogue-first philosophy and his genre-blending career rooted in rhythm & blues and soul.
A native of Los Angeles, Waterhouse has built a loyal following through his own celebrated records like Time’s All Gone, as well as his production work with artists including Jon Batiste and Lana Del Rey. Waterhouse won a GRAMMY® Award as part of Jon Batiste’s We Are album, which won Album of the Year (Waterhouse served as a guitarist and co-producer on that album). Born in Santa Ana, California, he began playing guitar at age 14 and developed a deep appreciation for vintage American music early on, drawing influence from legends like John Lee Hooker, Van Morrison and Bert Berns.
Waterhouse first emerged in the Southern California music scene with his band Intelligentsia before relocating to San Francisco, where his work at the all-vinyl Rooky Ricardo’s Records and ties to the local soul scene shaped his musical sensibilities. He recorded his debut single, “Some Place,” in 2010 using fully analogue recording methods, which caught the attention of Innovative Leisure Records. Since then, Waterhouse has released five studio albums, including Time’s All Gone, Holly, Never Twice, Nick Waterhouse and Promenade Blue. He has toured extensively across North America and Europe and produced records for bands like the Allah-Las. In 2017, a remix of his song “Katchi” by French duo Ofenbach hit #1 on the French charts, expanding his international reach.
“I started playing guitar in a garage band in Huntington Beach, California when I was 14,” stated Waterhouse. “It was typical high school band stuff, but it got serious fast. At 15, we recorded at The Distillery in Costa Mesa – my first real exposure to analogue recording with a 24-track tape machine. That experience hooked me. I realized then that recording was just as important to me as playing. My parents had a great vinyl record collection. Those older records were built for their medium – tape and vinyl. That shaped everything for me, from playing to production. Even now, my whole workflow is rooted in tape. Not out of nostalgia, but because of how it impacts sound, feel and even performance. It’s like shooting on film, it’s an aesthetic choice that affects the entire process.”
During his interview, Nick Waterhouse reveals how his working relationship with Allah-Las began, from meeting Matt Correia to working on their first two albums. “Matt Correia and I met the first day of college in San Francisco, and he had written me actually when I was in England at school that he had moved back to L.A. and he started a band with some friends at Amoeba Records, which is one of the biggest independent record stores in the world. One of the first songs they did was an almost perfect rendition of ‘Early Morning Rain.’ I immediately envisioned how that could sound. I made their first and second albums. Making those records was like one big family because I would be making my album, and all of them would be playing on that. Every record I’ve worked on, I’ve played something. That’s kind of my approach too: if it’s a tambourine or an organ or another guitar, I’m usually in there somewhere. It’s like sewing my name inside the lining of a suit!”
Waterhouse also touches on his vision of the role of the producer. “As a producer, a huge thing of production for me is choosing the room, populating the room, choosing the equipment, your guitar player — ‘I think this is going to sound great with you!’ and then it’s a process of designing from the ground up with what’s at hand,” stated Waterhouse. He continues, “This is what I’ve had to learn because I didn’t have my own studio. I sort of became this wanderer. So Jon [Batiste] and I were in New York City and through friends, I took Jon into a [recording] space that he would probably never go to himself, which was a basement, a lower East side ‘garage-rock’ studio that a lot of my friends were working out of called New York Head, because they had a tape machine and they had a rack of (vintage) Ampex preamps, and it was hot and dirty and strange and not rarefied and serious and highfalutin. Once we started working in there, the code name for that project was The Swamp!”
Other topics include: Collecting 45’s and making music for the medium; aesthetics of tape; sending printed stems; producing Allah-Las; approaching different records differently; the human element of recording; how he never records using a click track; winning a GRAMMY; and much more.
Explore the full and continuously growing collection of Audiomovers’ UNSUNG Podcasts – featuring insightful conversations with top artists, engineers, producers, and studio professionals – by visiting https://audiomovers.com/unsung-podcast/.
