On the Rise
Nick Wilson

In a time of frayed interpersonal connection, holding each other at a government-ordained arm’s length, the music that has emerged has proven, once more, that we are more similar than we are different, and that though we are cast adrift, we are by no means alone.

Singer-songwriter Nick Wilson, like all of us, saw a vast expanse of time ahead of him - and with time comes thoughts, and with thoughts come all those memories. His latest EP, Love and Heartache, is an excavation of those intrusions; rather than burying them any deeper, he instead takes those fragments and holds them to the light.

Every EP of Wilson’s contains a universe. Like pockets of air frozen in ice, each is a small gasp of something from a different time and place. While his previous releases, including 2019’s A Face I’ve Never Seen Before, paints a tumultuous landscape of longing and despair that Wilson had drawn from his own experiences, Love and Heartache is quite different.

It’s funny, actually, he tells me; while he was writing this EP he was – and continues to be – in a healthy, loving relationship. It’s a revelation that feels somehow dissonant in the acoustic world of mining for your own truth. Instead, Love and Heartache was written not just by Wilson, but by a mosaic of songwriters, coming together to give their two cents on themes that are universal.

“I found it really interesting to sit in a room and hear what the other writers had to say about certain situations. I don’t think I could make music from the position of something I hadn’t been through or felt in some capacity,” Wilson explains. “Everything in this EP was reflective of something that happened, taking situations from the past and putting myself back in the shoes of a particular emotion.” Song writing, he says, is its own form of therapy, a way of learning a little more about who you are. Those exorcisms of unaddressed emotion are usually kept private, contained to the four walls of your bedroom. To open that process up to a room of writers, where your feelings - just as much as your work - is fair game for scrutiny, depended on trust.

“A lot of the time, everyone can relate to a certain feeling in some way,” Wilson elaborates. “So, if I go to a session and I talk about a break-up, even if the writer in the other room isn’t going through it, it’s a feeling we’ve all been familiar with at least once. It’s about finding that common ground, and honing in on it.” Much of Love and Heartache, has, in that sense, been written loosely from a material that would fit anyone searching to find meaning and resonance in Wilson’s music.

“Everybody But Me”, the third track on Love and Heartache, has been written with that chameleonic effect in mind. “It’s an example of all of us talking about what it feels like to be at your lowest,” he explains. It’s as much about relationships as it is trying to keep your head above water in the age of comparison on social media. “I think that’s something we all had this feeling of knowing exactly what that’s like. You naturally bounce off each other, and it helps you open up more, actually.” While he knows it may seem counter-intuitive, that it should be easier when you go through the writing process alone, he believes that with the right people onside, the work can be far more illuminating. “Writing broadly about these themes have brought closure to those situations, those feelings, by getting it down and releasing it.”

What this EP was really built upon was a foundation of experimentation. In an over-saturated faction of the music scene, it’s takes substance beyond ‘acoustic singer-songwriter’ to set yourself apart. For Wilson, Love and Heartache was a conscious departure from that traditional style he championed when he started out with his first single in 2011. On this EP, he delves into the world of pop signatures and elements of electronica. “It felt like that was where it wanted to go after A Face I’ve Never Seen Before, because that was very much a cinematic, moody sound. Everything sat in the same space,” Wilson says. “I wanted this one to play around with different things: vocoders, synths… It was about playing a bit more.”

It would come as little surprise to discover that Nick Wilson is a graduate of the school of 1989 – the game-changing Taylor Swift record, that is. Its euphoric blend of pop, built completely upon the foundation of her country roots, is something Wilson has strove to instil in his own music. This, in turn, led to his love affair with the other musical ventures of producer Jack Antonoff, the pop alchemist responsible for fronting indie-pop outfit Bleachers, as well as producing Lorde’s totemic record Melodrama and tracks on Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. But when Wilson set to work on Love and Heartache, it would be the synth-pop masterstrokes of LANY that would have the greatest influence. “I became obsessed with the whole sound of it,” he says. “My favourite thing in an album is when you can make it its own little universe, whether it's within the artist's sound or not. I really like it when there's something cohesive about it, and you can take that album and sort of live in it for a bit when you're listening to it.”

The four songs that make up Love and Heartache were chosen instinctively, rather than deliberately. “Sometimes it can feel like you’re writing with something in mind, trying to fit a particular style or concept – but with this, it happened a dream way: those four songs just fell into place for me. I didn’t try to justify it, I just went with it,” he says.

It was a kind of creative freedom seldom afforded by artists still cutting their teeth on the scene, but for his label, Never Fade Records, it was something they believed Wilson had the right to. Part-founded by Gabrielle Aplin in 2010, the indie label was intent upon creating an environment where singer-songwriters could expressly themselves candidly, no holds barred. “I’ve always loved Gabrielle [Aplin]’s music – she started out pretty similar to me, with that really acoustic thing, going on to do some EPs and then branch out more into the pop side of things,” Wilson explains. “I think that kind of sums up their style, at Never Fade. They're really good at bringing your vision and what you want from sounds and songs, and then having the capabilities to nurture it and have their own sound. I'm really lucky to have a label that's so in-line with the way I think and the way I like to create.”

While his debut with Never Fade Records was in 2019, Nick Wilson has, in fact, been a player in this game for a long time. His chops as a producer was entirely self-taught, with his first official release, Darkest Hour, put together through trial and error on GarageBand. “The tracks were pretty much demos that I was sneaking out,” he laughs. All he had, at the start, was an acoustic guitar and a voice. “I think, since then, the main thing for me is about understanding what I like about certain sounds and why I like them. Now, being able to work with a bunch of different producers and songwriters, my music has got a much more mature sound.”

But we can trace Wilson’s emergence into music further back still. Growing up in a large family of seven, his house was an auditory buffet of classics, from Queen, to The Beatles and Mariah Carey. In 2009, when he was gifted his first guitar, it seemed only natural that he’d try recording covers and posting them to YouTube – “I put them up as a means to practise, literally just for me,” he insists. While at the time he wasn’t aware, Wilson was tapping into the goldrush of YouTube musical discoveries that, with a Disney-like swish of a wand, would see teenagers scouted and transformed into global sensations overnight. After a few years of steady uploads, Wilson’s music began to gain traction. The slowly mounting compliments from the online scene gave him the confidence to try his hand at something original.

Those first original releases, he admits, were “absolutely terrible”. Navigating the mundanities of distribution, licensing and so on had him fumbling around in the dark, yet sure enough, a trickle of bedroom demos began to appear. “I put them out, but they didn’t do anything – barely any streams. At that time, though, it didn’t matter. It was a way for me to try stuff.” It was only until 2016 that Wilson hit the first of many breakthroughs, getting picked up by a playlist in Norway – the rest simply fell into place. “I hate being too cliché,” he says, “but it was a nice, organic way to do it. Starting out for six years and getting nothing off the back of it, and then things finally growing and expanding felt better.”

When I ask if there was a moment where he felt everything shifted in his favour, he tells me that it wasn’t so much down to a moment, but a person. Meeting his manager, Bjorn, in 2016 was his first taste of management that completely aligned with his intentions as an artist. Every achievement, Wilson says, can be traced back to their meeting. “I think, for me, it’s about treating it as a friendship, almost, and having complete trust within each other,” he says. “Everything else can be worked out if those things are there as a foundation.”

Growing up in Great Missenden, a leafy village tucked on the outskirts of London – but just far enough to know peace – Wilson was disconnected from any local scene. It was YouTube where he would carve out his own community, where the confines of your hometown couldn’t weigh you down. “I think that was extremely valuable for not only my confidence as an artist and as a musician, but also just me as a person, having people to connect to and talk about music with. I always joke that where I’m from is just filled with old people and fields, so it was great to go beyond that just through a shared passion with strangers around the world.”

It was not London, but Lincoln, his university city (“I actually studied drama, and I don't know why. I didn't want to do music, but I was like, what's the second most unreliable source of income?”), where Wilson would make his first foray into the live scene. He turned to busking, which though difficult, proved to be invaluable to his development as an artist. “You're going about your day-to-day, and someone's just there, so you really have to hone that art of being able to be that person who can grab people's attention, but also be able to blend into their lives,” he explains, unwittingly capturing his own appeal. For the most part, though, performing on a stage is a new phenomenon for Wilson, who appreciates that it’s quite unusual to find an artist not acquainted with every pub, bar and venue in their city. Now though, he’s making the stage his home, having been taken under the wing of friend Gabrielle Aplin to support her on tour before lockdown.

Life, as they say, is what happens while you’re making other plans. While many see their creative pursuits fall by the wayside, Wilson stuck to music determinedly despite those six stagnant years. Did he ever doubt his turn for success? “One-hundred percent – and I still have those times.” It has taken him years to set a healthy metric by which to define success. “I set small goals, and then everything else is a bonus,” he explains. “For me, for even ten people to listen to my music feels amazing. When any more than that are listening, it’s a complete bonus I can cherish. Patience is absolutely needed – it’s a long game, and it takes time. The scariest thing about it is there’s no guarantee it could pay off, and it could all be for nothing; you need an underlying passion to make it all worthwhile.”

Wilson firmly believes that if the music is good enough, it will find its audience. “As musicians, we have a tendency to think things will happen quickly, and if we’re not getting certain things back then it’s not working,” he elaborates. “But what it really comes down to if you work on your songs, the best songs you think you have, then success will naturally come about. That’s a testament to the way I’ve done it.”

Sure, from time to time he drives himself insane – just as all of us do. “Sometimes I have to rejig my brain a bit and zoom out, see everything as a whole, and think, ‘As long as I’m making music, then I’m happy.’” Success, in that sense, is not a destination for Wilson, but is something he lives everyday. “For me, it was always about being able to create music and live off it. I think there’s something really lovely in being able to put yourself in your art and self-sustain it. Money, exposure – everything else, after that point – is just a bonus.”

I bring up the idea of an album – hypothetically, of course – as he tries to tread carefully with what he reveals. While he won’t necessarily say he’s setting his sights on that particularly, he can promise that “bigger things” are on the way. The as of yet non-existent album in question, however, will be a holistic experience. “I’d want it to be a culmination of the sounds I love,” Wilson shares. “I want to play around with things more… intros, outros, interludes, and bring them together with certain aspects that run throughout my EPs and make it into something cinematic, almost, and cohesive.”

But there’s no point in thinking too far ahead, is the lesson I’ve learned from my time with Nick Wilson. We look, instead, to what we have here, right now: Love and Heartache. His ambitions are simple: “When I’m writing things that are very personal… I hate using the word, but when they’re honest, and from the heart, there’s nothing better than when people resonate with it. There’s something wonderful about seeing a bit of yourself reflected in the music you listen to.” That’s what it’s all about, for him: a perfect distillation of a feeling that can’t be contained to words.