To say that listening to Nick Ward is an “experience” feels almost like a cop out, especially given how emotionally riveting, ambitious and dynamic his music is.
The only other way I can think to describe his music is “out-of-this-world” or “otherworldly”, which still feels a bit ironic given how grounded and rooted in humanity his writing and storytelling is.
At the heart of it, Ward’s music doesn’t need any oversaturated or excessive descriptor – the music is an indication of someone who feels everything first, all at once, then thinks about how to transfer it into a piece of timeless, archival art.
Nick Ward’s creative process is ever-changing. After the release of his compelling EP BRAND NEW YOU in 2022, Ward has worked meticulously on the project that would follow it up: “I think I need to change my process every single time I make a project, just because I get really sick of repeating myself,” he tells The Music. “I have a very short attention span when it comes to my own music, so I feel like it always just needs to be a bit different every single time, just the way I’m approaching it.”
His forthcoming debut album, House With The Blue Door, out tomorrow, symbolises this evolution both lyrically and sonically. While the physical process of making most of the album in his bedroom studio remains, House With The Blue Door is a fully formed shadow of Ward—a reflection of his family history, his childhood, the traumas that have influenced the artist, and the convoluted relationship he has with the past.
On a single like I Wanna Be A Mother, Ward imperiously muses about family dynamics, matriarchy, and the bloodline he carries on, almost washed with a sense of shame and yearning to be the motherly figure that uplifts and nurtures.
I wanna be a mother, but I don’t have what it takes / I take, I take, I take with nothing to offer
There’s pieces of me in your heart, and you will decide which ones you want / Whether I like it or not
Breaking down the parts of you that you’re not proud of and placing them in the context of children who will carry that is a hard pill to swallow. It’s a confronting revelation to come to terms with, but it’s one of many raw, tumultuous moments that make up Nick Ward’s debut album.
Though, it’s interesting to think that the House With The Blue Door we know now is far from what it first appeared to be.
“House With The Blue Door started as an EP because I think if I told myself that I was making a debut album, I just would not have been able to do any work on it without overthinking,” Ward reveals.
“Working on this record definitely took longer than I expected because I lost it halfway through in, like, a hard drive muck up. That was an interesting time because it just felt too random to not feel like some sort of sign that I needed to take stock and think about everything I learned from making the project.
“When I make a record, I spend a lot of time just making a lot of music where I kind of work out what the palette or sound of the record’s going to be, and then at some point, I figure out what’s actually going to turn into a real song and what isn’t just like a cool production trick or something.
“I think losing all of that music made me sort of realise what the core of the album actually was. If I didn’t remember a song or a demo that got lost, then I thought it probably wasn’t worth remembering. I feel like at any other time, I would have just completely melted down. But for some reason, I was actually kind of hyped.”
Ward’s auditory knack for storytelling correlates with his admiration for visual storytelling. Seeing Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s collection, The Ten Largest, at an exhibition in Sydney set the foundation for what House With The Blue Door would reveal.
The collection dedicates itself to four stages of human development: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Tied together by vibrant spirals, flowers and text filled with words either invented by Klint or “received by spirits”, the collection tracks the intricacies of human growth: the innocence of our youth, the formation of the self in our adolescence and the completion of our life’s circle in old age. It’s a sentiment that launched the thought process behind the album.
“I was really struck by the size of them when I first saw them, but what actually inspired the album was the idea of a body of work about a specific stage of life,” he said.
“I’ve always loved movies like Boyhood or Moonlight or movies that are painting, ‘Okay, this is what old age is like, this is what childhood is like, this is what middle age is like.’ And I think after seeing her paintings about childhood, and actually kind of understanding it, or seeing where she was getting at, and kind of relating to those feelings, I think I realised that I kind of want to treat my discography a bit like that – like creating a record for almost each stage of life as I kind of go through it. This being my first album, I just thought that this should be about everything that’s happened up until now.”
While it’s easy to draw the connection between naivety, playfulness and joy in one’s childhood, it isn’t easy to find the words or sounds to seamlessly translate the parts of childhood that ultimately impact the person you become.
Ward recalls the intention to make the album a “sunny, kind of happy project”, but the organic self-discovery and revelations he had in making the album, as well as the moments of turbulence he was experiencing in real time, evidently wove itself into the music.
“Inevitably, what you’re going through at the time is always going to make its way into the music,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I was shocked by it, but I think there are definitely times when you listen back to a lyric that you write, and you’re kind of like, ‘Shit, I guess I can say that.’
“Even when you look back at music years later, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I was already starting to work that out.’ Sometimes, you record something that feels like it’s random or a bit of a placeholder, and then a couple of months later, you’re like, ‘Wait, that was the most honest thing I’ve ever written.’”
The growing pains that come with self-development, working on music that revisits the traumas of your past, and painstakingly wanting everything to be precise and intentional evidently made the album-making process a “bad time” for Ward, who recalls becoming “obsessive over each element as soon I called it an album in my head.”
The cure to this almost always came from the people closest to him: his friends, Full Circle affiliates and long-time collaborators Sollyy and FRIDAY*, and his brother Tom.
“We finished the album together in a couple of days. It was nice just to have that – honestly, I think that was one of my favourite memories from working on the album.
“Not only were those guys actively helping to finish the music, but they were also pushing me to kind of be in the headspace to finish the music. Anything you’re working on, you’re always trying to get it like 5% better. It’s nice to have people there to tell you that you’ve done enough on this, and you can just move on.”
Through the journey of starting, losing what he had and starting all over again, Ward’s process of healing from the past extended itself into the art process, having to regenerate and detach himself from something outside of his control. While Ward is at a point in the release of the record where everything still feels “naked” and “exposing”, House With The Blue Door helped put a microphone to the things that he once thought couldn’t be articulated.
“When you’re making music, you’re usually writing from the perspective of the person you’re trying to be,” he said.
“When I was making this album, I wanted to make something very undeniably just myself. And I would just realise all this music that I’ve grown up listening to my whole life – whether it’s The Beatles or Green Day – should meet, should sort of make its way into this record.
“I hope that by listening to it, people can see some of their own childhood in it but also get a better understanding of me, what my references are, and the stuff that I pull from. Once I had, like, eight or nine songs, when I was making it, I was like, this is definitely my debut album.
“I don’t know what an album is if this isn’t one.”
Nick Ward’s debut album, House With The Blue Door, is out tomorrow via EMI Music Australia – you can pre-order/pre-save the album here. Alongside playing support for Troye Sivan’s upcoming tour this November, Nick Ward will embark on his House With The Blue Door headline tour following the release of the album. Tickets can be purchased here.
Nick Ward
House With The Blue Door Tour 2024
With support from Dylan Atlantis, FRIDAY*, Juice Webster and King Ivy
18 Oct 24 – The Night Cat, Fitzroy
19 Oct 24 – Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley
25 Oct 24 – Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst
