Q&A: Welcome To Nick Ward’s ‘House With The Blue Door’
HOUSE WITH THE BLUE DOOR—gets its name from the nickname Nick Ward and his brother gave their childhood home. It’s a fitting title for 22-year-old Sydney-based Ward’s debut album, as the work focuses on his childhood and upbringing. It’s described as a “time capsule” of Ward’s youth, and it doesn’t shy away from various aspects of early years that we all experience, the cheerful alongside the regretful.
Released on October 4, House With The Blue Door discusses family genes, anxiety, finding your place, growing up, and more human elements that make up a life. It starts with “Lum Chum” which is a short snippet of correspondence between Ward’s grandparents and their friends. Ward digitized the reel-to-reel tape and adds his own charm to it on “Lum Chum” through his signature ambient production.
It’s a way of giving physicality to the memories, which is a quality present throughout the album. Ward presents a complete integration of his personal belongings through audio snippets, his grandmother on the cover of the album, and archival footage for the videos created for the album. As the title suggests, the album is like walking through the rooms of Ward’s childhood house with the blue door.
It’s a coming-of-age album belonging in a similar world as other records around youth. Albums like Younger Than I Was Before by LAUNDRY DAY, Nothing Happens by Wallows, and Blue Neighbourhood by Troye Sivan immerse listeners in memories of growing up and remind us of our own experiences that shaped us.
Ward will actually be opening for Sivan on his upcoming Something To Give Each Other tour. The two also worked together on Sivan’s song “Can’t Go Back, Baby,” and he makes a cheeky cameo at the end of Ward’s song “Control,” saying, “Shut up, Nick Ward.”
Born and raised in Australia, Ward is expanding his reach through honest music that is connecting with listeners around the world. We spoke with Ward about how he approached putting his most personal memories into his art, the production choices he made to build a distinct environment for the album, and the friends he collaborated with to bring it to life. Read our conversation below.
House With The Blue Door album art
LUNA: The album was partially inspired by The Ten Largest by Hilma af Klint. What about that collection of paintings sparked inspiration?
WARD: It was the childhood series of the paintings that I saw at an exhibition in Sydney. I was really moved. I already had the seeds of the album in my head and [the idea of] making a project about childhood, but seeing the paintings—especially in order, the childhood paintings, then adulthood, then old age—I realized, as an artist, your discography is so much like that. Your first record is about your childhood and adolescence and everything in your life up until then. So I took a bit of thematic inspiration that way. Also texturally, they’re really timeless and still feel super modern. Even just from an aesthetic standpoint, I really love them.
LUNA: When art leads to the creation of more art, that’s the best thing. You mentioned the album is about childhood. I feel like coming-of-age albums always really stick with listeners, almost permanently. They have this way of finding the right listener at the right time.
WARD: Yeah, like being a teenager, your emotions are so big. I feel like you find a lot of solace in music because a lot of it is those exaggerated emotions. You can really hold on and grasp onto those feelings.
LUNA: Do you have any albums or musical memories that you referred to in the making of your own coming-of-age album?
WARD: I think with this album, I wanted to reference a lot of music that I listened to growing up. I don’t think it was necessarily just coming-of-age albums. There was a lot of The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, The Beach Boys, and Pink Floyd. A lot of 60s and 70s music. I remember American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story by Kevin Abstract was a really big one for me which I think, inevitably, inspired this album in a way too.
LUNA: I really like “Father Son Holy Mountain” on this album, especially the lyric, “This song was written way / before I was ever born, / but it’s the one I play.” In the same song, you mention your grandmother, your mother, and your father. Tell me about your writing process specifically for this album. It can be difficult to share the experiences that are quite literally within us.
WARD: I think when it comes to writing, for me personally, it can never be forced. I’ve tried to force writing, like filling a verse with random words or rhymes. But it never goes anywhere for me. I need something to come out organically and without much thought to it, to be honest. When I’m writing something that I really enjoy, it usually ends up writing itself, then you have to chisel away at it until it feels complete. I feel like the songs that really stick with you, it never feels like an active process of making it—it’s more like channeling it.
LUNA: That’s really interesting because it doesn’t come across that way. It’s so personal, so it feels like something you would contemplate or make specific decisions about how you’re going to shape it.
WARD: It’s definitely the stuff I think about a lot in my life. The stories that I tell on the album and the emotions, they’re things I think about all the time. So I think it’s a case of something that I’m contemplating all the time, once I actually am sitting down to write, all those thoughts can come out.
Music is very much like therapy for a lot of people, both listening to and making it. It helps me work through a lot of stuff. It’s been a funny process, now having to roll out the music and have it be this thing that I’m promoting, even though it was an act of therapy for me.
LUNA: The discussion of generational impacts on the album, it’s very self-aware to think of oneself in terms of things we can’t ever control or see, like DNA.
WARD: Going to therapy and starting to analyze myself, I was starting to see threads of behavior and things I noticed in myself that I could also see in my parents or grandparents. I think for a while, that really terrified me. That’s what “Father Son Holy Mountain” is about. The feeling of being locked or trapped into destiny, or feeling like you can’t break that cycle. Later on the album, like in “I Wanna Be A Mother,” it’s like, “Wait, you actually can choose which parts you want to continue forward…you have an active choice in that.”
LUNA: In the same way, you take control through making something out of the experiences. You get to choose what you want to present and how. I felt that through the visuals associated with the album. At the end of the “Go!” music video, the studio environment shows a blue door, so it takes on a new meaning through the video. I was looking at some of the other videos as well, like the official audios on YouTube. How did you make decisions around the visuals?
WARD: There’s a couple of different threads going on with the visuals. We have a lot of the Super 8 and archival footage that I found in my grandparents’ home which I was able to digitize and incorporate into the visuals. But there are also the music videos which are about me as a film director trying to create a film about my own life and finding this little boy to play my younger self. It felt like a good metaphor for what it was like making the record and looking back through all these experiences, then channeling it through art.
LUNA: Like the archival footage, you use a lot of what’s going on around you, integrating background noises. You bring in external elements like conversation or the children’s voices on “Speak.” Tell me about that part of your production. It makes everything sound very organic and lived-in.
WARD: I record everything in my room so it’s not a perfect acoustic environment. I like to leave the windows open and stuff. When it comes to the audio snippets all over the record, I found this reel-to-reel tape that my grandparents’ friends had sent them. Back in the day, people would correspond by recording a one-way conversation onto a piece of tape for, like, 20 minutes then mail it to their friend and kind of take turns. I was able to find that and digitize it. There’s someone talking to my grandparents and calling them by their names. I thought it was a moving thing to put over the record. There’s also stuff from my parents looking after me as a baby that I had. There’s Troye Sivan telling me to shut up [laughs]. There’s a big mix of different stuff.
LUNA: Did you look for those after you started the album? Or was there an original idea of integrating them?
WARD: When I’m making music, I have a big folder on my computer of different sounds that I record, whether it’s on my phone or things found on the internet. I like that textural side. All the demos and beats I make always need to have a texture or strange sound in them. Otherwise, I can’t imagine them existing in any sort of world. I need those cues to work out how I’m going to finish the song and what I’m going to write.
LUNA: It makes its own world.
WARD: Yeah, and it’s been cool seeing people really respond to all those voices on the album.
LUNA: One song we hear it on is “Control.” That’s a faster paced song which I feel sonically shows a balance between ups and downs. You created this album with a few of your friends—that’s part of the “ups,” creating with the people we love! What role did collaboration play in finding the right shape for the messages of the album?
WARD: I love starting songs with people, or starting ideas and instrumentals with them. Then I take it home and finish it. It plays a big part on the sound of the record, and even just who I am as an artist—that collaborative spirit. I think people are always going to teach you something and are always going to have a different perspective on your work. It’s so useful, especially in the initial phase when you’re coming up with something. If I sit down at a piano or a guitar, I have a finite amount of stuff that I’m going to be able to do. So having someone else there only expands what’s possible.
LUNA: The last track is “All Your Life” which ends the album with well wishes; it’s a perfect wrap up. A self-love question—with live shows and touring coming up, with the album fresh off the press, what is one well wish you have for yourself?
WARD: I definitely have been thinking about that a lot. I think I need to be less hard on myself. I think anxiety, self-criticism, and doubt are very much lenses you can choose to take on or take off. Well, not necessarily choose, but you can alter. Everything is just perspective. With enough work, you can control how you feel or not be controlled by your emotions so much.
I think over the last couple of months and years, it has very much been an active effort of choosing love and trying to see the best in people always—choosing positivity. I think that’s what “All Your Life” is about and that’s why I wanted to end the album with it.
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