Messed!Up
Captivating, emotional, and full of cinematic magic; that’s some of the most common ways for describing songwriter and critically acclaimed film director Nick Hampson, who composes electronic pop songs under the pseudonym Now Ex. With a background as a classically trained musician, Hampson writes lyrics that are honest and poetic, coated in synth-driven songs with a cinematic edge.
Starting a career in music during his university studies with his friend Harry Brokensha, Hampson left the pop music industry for a few years to work in the film industry. But after Now Ex’s successful debut EP, Sad Kids In America, in 2021, he shifted focus to music and Now Ex.
A few weeks ago, he released his third EP, In 2 Minds, and brought it on tour across Europe. When Hampson popped by Hamburg for a sold-out Now Ex gig at Indra Musikclub, his biggest headliner show to date, we sat down with him for a chat about the EP, writing music and lyrics, and plans for the future.
The fun in taking risks with the new EP
Let’s start with inspiration; what are your influences in music in general?
“Quite a lot. I grew up really interested in lyric writing, like the sort of serious lyricism and people like Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Nick Drake, Conor Oberst, and Elliott Smith. I felt they were predominantly wordsmiths more than they were singers or musicians in a weird sense. That was what really got me interested in this whole thing”.
“It really changed my life discovering some of those bands in my early teens. I didn’t realize you could say the things that they were saying in songs. They were coming from a classical background as well, and that worked something up in me. I started trying it and felt like I had this natural way with words of my own and was just playing around. Obviously, it was a little bit reminiscent of what they were doing when I started”.
“You always have these influences hanging over you for quite some time. I remember my early EPs, and my early work as a teenager, which sounded a little bit like I was trying to be Bob Dylan. I was this classically trained singer who was singing like them. Then I discovered Jeff Buckley, and that opened all of that up. I thought that if I can sing well I should just sing what he sings, and then I ran with that”.
“Production-wise and more recent influences for the sound of Now Ex come from bands like LCD Soundsystem and bands like London Grammar, although I’ve never felt like we’re particularly London Grammar-like. But I do think maybe a bit like Florence and the Machine, that sort of operatic vocals, but with a pop production. We could talk for hours about different influences for sure”.
You’re working as a director in the film industry as well. Is there a link between film and music, or are they completely separate for you as a person?
“That’s super linked. I would like to do more. To be honest, Now Ex has taken the majority of my time in the last four years since I started it. I made my most significant film projects before, and it’s natural, I think, in a way that these things kind of take over”.
“Film was almost something that came out of nowhere for me. It wasn’t my childhood dream, but it became a really amazing colour in my life that I love, and it’s my career alongside this. But I’ve taken every chance I can to write music for the films I’ve been working on, and vice versa. The best projects have a great visual edge these days. Everything’s on social media, everything’s online, all of these things; if you can make things look a certain way that’s distinctive to you and not just sound a certain way, that’s distinctive to you. I think that’s a huge edge or just makes it more fun”.
Your latest EP, In 2 Minds, was released a few weeks ago. To me, it looked as if an angel or a devil was sitting on your shoulder, because there’s this discrepancy between the lyrics that you wrote and the music that comes with it. The really powerful and happy music, and some painful lyrics. There seem to be two sides of you that are battling each other.
“That was the idea, and it’s present in the name as well, like the whole ethos of my project is this sort of conflict or dichotomy between two things that are pulling apart”.
“I think In 2 Minds also represents being who I am while also representing this project, Now Ex, as a sort of feeling that grows as I give more of myself up to the process of touring and releasing music and becoming this thing. That’s sort of the two minds as well. I’ve always been interested in the psychology of left brain thinking and the sort of spontaneous right brain. So, I just thought it felt like a fun territory to play around”.
Referring to the song “Artificial Flavours”; why are artificial flavours more interesting to you than natural ones?
“Well, that one again came from the lyric. I had the lyric before I had the name of the song. So in context, I dreamt that science could save us, and I dreamt of gods that crave artificial flavours. It’s always that sort of conflict, the expectation versus the reality, like gods and things that were man-made. I liked the conflict of all that, and it just sounded cool. Sometimes, that’s what matters with pop music – that it sounds cool”.
You talked about your voice and the way you were singing. When I listened to the latest In 2 Minds, I noticed that it had a lot of distortions and altering effects on it. Why did you choose to pick that instead of just using a natural way of singing?
“This EP I felt like a chance to take some risks. It’s my fourth EP, and some of these songs, like “Premath (Intro)”, I wrote before I had released anything at all four years ago. But in a way, I was creating some of my more progressive or avant-garde work when I first started the project, because obviously you don’t have any constraints, I was creating this stuff that I knew I really liked, but I felt was too much of a statement to start with. People wouldn’t necessarily know what I was about if I was leading with that. So, I put them in the cupboard for a while. But now, when I’ve proved that I can sing, it’s so fun to play with different tones, different textures and sounds and music”.
“I hate the idea that you should be limited. If you are a good singer, you should be limited to just doing what you do right all the time, I think it’s better. It’s cool to have proved that you can actually really sing. No one doubts that I can do it now, and then you can mess around with it because no one would think he’s doing this autotune thing because he can’t sing. So, that has actually been a fun way to look at it for me – to take more risks”.
What makes you proud of your latest record in comparison to the records that you released before?
“Oh, that’s a really good question. I think we all like to feel like the newest thing we’ve done as an artist is the best. The newest thing that you’ve done, you feel inherently is the best. But actually, that’s too much of a simplification”.
“But I don’t think it’s linear like that. Some of the ideas, some of the poetry of “Artificial Flavours” is a real personal triumph for me as a writer. It goes to places that my music hasn’t gone to before. In 2 Minds has some concepts that are quite difficult, big concepts that I feel have been handled quite eloquently on the EP, because I think the risk with some of those concepts is that they are so big that you can get lost in them a bit, and then it becomes a bit meaningless. How do you retain that personal thing, that relatability, to things like gods and dreams? There are some quite dramatic storylines and narratives. How do you keep that grounded and explorative? I’d like to think this EP does that quite well”.
When you write songs, what makes you pick specific instruments?
“I tend to write almost exclusively on the piano, which surprises people because Now Ex is quite a guitar-heavy or sort of synth rock-heavy project. But I just find I’m better at the piano than I am at the guitar. I’m just so much more diverse than the colours that I seem to find in the guitar”.
“Production-wise, I work with a few different people that I know will bring a certain thing out of a song. I tend to take specific songs to different people based on that. So, Tom Leach, who’s like my right hand guy, he mixes everything. “Artificial flavours” as an example; I knew he was the guy that you give something that starts as a quiet, kind of soulful, stripped-back piano idea. He’s the guy that somehow makes that sound really intense. And again, that’s the conflict of Now Ex. How do you take that small, pretty, mesmeric thing and have it punch you in the gut as well? And he’s the guy that does that for me – such a great producer”.
“On this EP, my writers who did the London Grammar debut album, the platinum one, are incredible with this sort of thing. They did “Sad Kids in America” and like all these different songs, obviously. So, they bring a certain thing as well”.
“Once I’ve got some song ideas and things start coming together, I think, ‘Who am I going to take this to because of what reason?’ And that’s a fun process to go through, isn’t it? These people are so good that they almost always hit the bull’s eye. It’s always going to be something that is unexpected but also relatable for me”.
But what comes first, composing music or writing lyrics? Do you think of the lyrics while listening to the songs that you wrote?
“When I was a kid and I wrote on the guitar, which I don’t do anymore so much, I would always have to have the lyrics for the section of music I was making before I would move on to the next part of the music. So, I would actually have the verse fully written before I even knew what the chorus, melody, or chords were, which is a pretty weird way to go, I see now, but at the time, probably natural and probably because I was so primarily interested in lyrics. But I felt like I can’t possibly just go on in this song without having had the lyrics down, and that then influenced what I was doing with the chorus, whereas now, I’m much more likely to have the whole song in my head musically, more or less, and then sing”.
“I tend to sing phonetic sounds that sound right to me, because lyrics have to sound good, and that’s a weird thing that people overlook. So I sing the sounds and I have a whole song of just that, that I’ve done over and over and over. I’ve got thousands of voice notes on my phone, but I never listen to them.
“It’s really weird, I’ve never ever listened back to them. But I do that, and then I put lyrics into it and place them in, and that shapes a lot of the music. It carves in a sort of symbols into the music that you’ve created. So, that’s much more the way I do it now – music first”.
What’s your favourite Now Ex song? I can tell you mine; it’s “We Had It All”.
“You know, sometimes you release a song and it just grows into something. It doesn’t happen straight away, overnight. I think sometimes releasing songs is a bit like New Year’s Eve or birthdays or something. You expect something to feel a certain way or to be a certain thing, and it isn’t, and then it kind of becomes you”.
“That song has grown into a real moment for the project, and you’ll see that tonight. That song just feels like the energy changes somehow. That’s definitely one of my favourites. I think “Artificial flavours” is up there as well, just like “Sad Kids in America”. I inherently feel like it’s the best song I’ve written”.
It is the most popular one, isn’t it?
“One of them, yeah. When I’m thinking about songs and talking to the producer, sometimes I like to informally use the term ‘God tear’, which, to me, means something you’re aiming for. Like the God tear of songs. And we all know what songs are in the God tear. Like “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, or “Stairway to Heaven”. There’s a God tear where there’s something about the song that you cannot put words to, that makes it that good. That’s the thing you’re always striving for”.
“I think “Sad Kids in America” is for me one of the closest things I have to something that is inexplicably like God in that way – for me at least. That’s probably my favourite if I had to pick on a desert island kind of thing”.
A growing fanbase in Europe
How do you envisage the band’s future development? Where do you see yourself and the band in two years time?
“Well, it’s not really a band. All my touring is with a two-piece band with a bunch of cool electronics and different things going on. But it’s ultimately just my project, there’s no other members in the project. I guess I never know what to call it. It’s easier to say a band, but I don’t really relate to it as a band, it’s almost like a solo project”.
“I guess you always just want to reach more people, and I really like the way things have been moving, like doing lots of small shows. I get to see towns around Europe, and Germany has been my most prolific touring. There are lots of small towns, and we’ve been all over the place, and each time we come back we seem to double the size of the people or the room or whatever. It’s not like an overnight success. It’s not like a viral moment. But I do like the consistency of that and feeling like we’re coming back and it’s making a difference. And we’re really connecting with everybody on such a personal level right now”.
“I think that’s something that is easy to take for granted when you’re a small artist because if things do go a certain direction, you really lose that connectivity with all the people. I know a lot of people coming to these different towns by name, just people who are fans of Now Ex, and I’ll be able to sign a setlist without them having to tell me what their name is. I know what it is. That’s something that I think is really beautiful. It may not last forever, so I’m really just enjoying this moment right now”.
But what is more interesting to you? Is it writing and recording music or presenting the music to others at concerts and festivals?
“I think the latter. Playing live, I guess, because it’s like the reason why you do it, at least for me. I grew up as a performer in the classical world, I did six or seven performances a week for fourteen years all over the world, and I was doing opera and classical voice stuff from the age of seven”.
It’s in your family?
“Yeah, my grandmother was a concert pianist. My mum was good as well, but she gave it up to pursue other things when she was young. So that’s what I’ve always known. It doesn’t mean I don’t love writing, but writing is quite painful, just like drawing things”.
“I remember Bowie talked about this a lot. The process of creating can be really lonely and really painful, but has great moments. It’s like a difficult, arduous process to some extent, whereas performing is different, having already done the hard work. This (performing) is the joyful release of all the built-up difficult tension of being at home and writing and working on this stuff and then coming on tour. It’s the reason why you do it, and you’ve got to share that with everybody who hopefully also shares that with you; that’s the dialog and the connectivity of the live performance”.
“In a way, that’s why it always will have an edge over film, because in film you don’t really ever get that. Even at a premiere or something, you don’t really get that connection. The audience being a part of the project, a part of the show, that’s what I love the most”.
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Photographer: Guido Rangnitt
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Now Ex pages
