Nick Waterhouse Drop Visualizer For “(No) Commitment”

A place filled with 45s produced by people like Bert Berns or released on Scepter, Wand, Atlantic and Verve and heard on the jukeboxes in iconic San Francisco institutions like Tosca, Specs and Trieste in North Beach

The title of the sixth album from Californian singer-songwriter Nick Waterhouse is more than just the name of one of its tracks. The Fooler is both a clue and a red herring. The Fooler is the observed and the observer, narrator and subject, truth and lie. The Fooler is the shadow and reflection of a city the artist knows sufficiently well to wander with his eyes closed, and a place which very possibly never even existed. The Fooler is not so much an unreliable narrator as a constantly shifting perspective.

The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it’s a lot. Recorded by Mark Neill (Black Keys; Los Straightjackets; Dave Cobb) in Valdosta, Georgia, it’s a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizens. “Many of the stories come from a feeling of plasticity,” says Waterhouse. “What is memory? What is time? What is love between two human beings like in this imaginary city? A phase shift occurred writing this record. I had a breakthrough in how to tell stories in songs, like an epiphany. I started realising how I could bend time in a lot of the things that weave through the record. I have a perspective as a narrator now, instead of being the occupant of the songs.”

Today Waterhouse shared the final album single “(No) Commitment,” which he explains, “The party is on the third floor: all the hallways are dingy and the steps’ runner threadbare. You hear the music blaring through the walls from the stairwell corridor. Behind a decayed blue door it’s all the same faces as the last long barroom you’d passed through. The same words, the same patterns, the same concerns. They’ve played out on screens almost as much as they’ve hung like smoke in these leather and denim realities. Heavy, hairy heads hanging down to hear words from slouching corner bound figures… Tune in, like a radio antennae, to the din of the room, the chatter and the laughter and the poses, the murmur and rumble of dingy apartment rooms crammed full of these hanger-outers. The double bass turns everything slow motion and descends, the hard hand of the drummer pushes his stick into his ride cymbal in time with the snare.. a bell tolls with the lowest piano hammer of your mind.”

Waterhouse also released four other album singles/visualizers for tracks “Late In The Garden” which he describes, “This came out quickly, on a gut string Gibson guitar I’d grabbed propped up against a baffle in the studio in Valdosta, Georgia. This is the kind of tune that starts life as a poem in the notebook and as the sessions unfolded and my fingers unconsciously found the rhythmic pocket all of it made as much sense as the epiphany unfolding in the words.”

Heartbreak soul tune “Play To Win,” which he co-wrote with Doc playing the piano and producer Mark Neill, who both took the artist to a place he had never been in his career before. As well as “Hide And Seek,” a song which puts you in the city of dreams that The Fooler unfolds in and the sound is the place. Plus title track “The Fooler,” which is about how your own heart and your memories can betray you in really nice ways.

Live:
25 April – La Boule Noire, Paris (FR)
28 April – Rough Trade East, London (UK)
29 April – De Oosterpoort, Groningen (NL)
30 April – Roots & Roses Festival, Lessines (BE)
2 May – Privatclub, Berlin (DE) (sold out)

Source: thoughtswordsaction.com