Nick Waterhouse

Described by reporter Kristina Benson as "the young man who makes old R&B," Nick Waterhouse is a songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist who has become a rising star with music which recalls the pre-rock sounds of the 1950s while possessing a modern-day level of energy and cool. Waterhouse was born in Southern California in 1987; his parents were serious music fans, and he grew up with the sounds of classic blues, soul, and rock sides by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, John Lee Hooker, and Van Morrison filling the house. As a child, he studied the trumpet, but when he was 13 he picked up the guitar, and while attending high school in Huntington Beach he formed a mod-styled R&B combo called the Intelligista. The group earned a large and loyal local following, but when Waterhouse's bandmates went off to college after the end of senior year, the group broke up and Waterhouse relocated to San Francisco. He imagined the Bay Area would be a good place to launch a new musical career, but he found the local music scene uninviting; however, he did land a job at a record store dealing in rare R&B and soul singles, where he was able to study vintage sounds of the '50s and '60s at length. Soon he began writing songs and he fell in with a group of like-minded West Coast musicians; he also discovered The Distillery, an all-analog recording facility in Costa Mesa, California, and struck up a friendship with studio owner Mike McHugh. After a number of live-in-the-studio sessions, Waterhouse released a single on his own Pres Records label, "Some Place," whose press run was quickly snapped up by collectors of modern-day R&B sounds. Waterhouse then teamed up with West Coast label Innovative Leisure, which issued the five-song EP Is That Clear in 2011. In 2012, after relocating to Los Angeles and touring Europe with his band the Tarots, Waterhouse released his first full-length album, Time's All Gone. He also began branching out into studio work, producing an album for L.A. garage-psych band the Allah-Las. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi