Nick Waterhouse

Nick Waterhouse works as a songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist whose vintage-inspired pop and R&B aesthetic summons the sounds of the 1950s and early ’60s yet carries a contemporary charge of energy and cool. His recordings favor a slinky, late-night atmosphere whose organic arrangements leave room for the voice while giving instrumentalists space to breathe. Listeners first encountered him through the 2011 EP Is That Clear, and he has continued to champion analog recording methods and retro-style, qualities that surface on 2012’s Time’s All Gone and 2023’s The Fooler.

Born in Southern California in 1986, Waterhouse grew up in a household where his parents, dedicated music enthusiasts, played classic blues, soul, and rock sides by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, John Lee Hooker, and Van Morrison. He took up the trumpet in childhood, switched to guitar at age 13, and, while still at high school in Huntington Beach, started a mod-styled R&B group called the Intelligentsia. The band built a sizable and devoted local audience, yet after graduation the other members left for college, the group disbanded, and Waterhouse moved to San Francisco.

Expecting the Bay Area to offer fertile ground for a fresh start, he instead found its music scene inhospitable. He did secure work at a shop specializing in rare R&B and soul 45s, where he immersed himself in the vintage sounds of the ’50s and ’60s. He soon began writing songs and connected with a circle of similarly inclined West Coast musicians. He also discovered The Distillery, an all-analog studio in Costa Mesa, California, and formed a friendship with its owner, Mike McHugh. After several live sessions taped there, Waterhouse issued the single “Some Place” on his own Pres Records imprint; the limited pressing sold out quickly among collectors of contemporary R&B. He then partnered with West Coast label Innovative Leisure, which released the five-song EP Is That Clear in 2011. Following a move to Los Angeles and European dates with his band the Tarots, he delivered his debut full-length album, Time’s All Gone, in 2012.

During the same stretch he expanded into production, helming an album for the L.A. garage-psych outfit the Allah-Las. He resumed his solo path in 2014 with the sophomore release Holly. Two years later, after producing sessions for Ural Thomas & the Pain and Boogaloo Assassins, he issued his third vintage-styled R&B album, Never Twice; fellow old soul Leon Bridges guested on the single “Katchi.” A remix of “Katchi” by the French duo Ofenbach reached number one on the French pop chart in 2017. The self-titled Nick Waterhouse appeared in 2019 under the production of Paul Butler. After a pair of standalone singles—one of them a cover of the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard”—and the live set Live at Pappy & Harriet’s: In Person from the High Desert, he presented his fifth studio album, the expansive Promenade Blue, in 2021. He played guitar and served as co-producer on Jon Batiste’s 2021 album We Are, a project that earned both critical and commercial acclaim and received the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Waterhouse then concentrated on his own material, composing and tracking a dozen songs that became his 2023 release The Fooler.