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Next Paperback Hero. Photo credit: Sahan Jayasuriya
Kuma, a black Labrador mix, lay exhausted on the floor. She had just had her second TPLO surgery. The veterinarian predicted that he would eventually have to undergo this surgery. Her owner, Milwaukee singer-songwriter Nathan Honore, was sitting nearby with an acoustic guitar in hand. As he comforted Bear, he began playing songs from an album he had been working on for the past year. Honoré fully embraced this stripped-down, acoustic approach and began arranging and reworking these songs, with his healing companions as his only critics.
“Not only did these songs feel good to play, but I quickly realized that they were related to each other. One song fed into another and it was very smooth,” says Honoré. “I had to use just the guitar to make those songs different and change them so they didn’t all sound the same.”
The byproduct of the time spent rearranging these songs is Waves, Honoré’s second full-length album under his stage name Next Paperback Hero.
While Next Paper Back Hero’s debut Morning Skies & Heavy Eyes was meticulously produced and recorded by Honore and then sent for professional mixing and mastering, Waves is entirely a four-track cassette. It was recorded with a recorder. As a result, grainy imperfections remain on the surface, but listeners are able to experience raw energy and emotion that would otherwise be lost in the sometimes sterile production process.
“I pulled out my old 4-track recorder from high school and played around with it for two hours, and the time flew by,” Honore says. “I was surprised at how much fun I had, as opposed to the process of recording using a computer and interface.”
Across the eight songs on Waves, Honore explores the ebbs and flows of depression, anxiety, and self-confidence experienced in 2023. I remember grabbing my car keys and getting ready to leave the house to go to a show. However, he froze in front of the front door, unable to bring himself to go outside.
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“I had all these terrible feelings and it brought a lot of things to the light,” Honore says. “A lot of the lyrics[on ‘Waves’]deal with highs and lows, good and bad.”
Waves opens with “Tip of My Toes.” This bouncy number offsets its chipper tone with lyrics about the anxiety of the unknown. The limitations of a four-track recorder allow the few instruments present to truly shine. Honoré’s guitar takes a backseat to the organ part, busily moving up and down the scale in place of the bass guitar. There’s a restraint to Honoré’s vocals, a departure from the vocal style of his previous releases, that makes the listener feel as if they’re in the room with him.
On “Rainy Afternoon,” Honore and his wife Kristen Honore sing a song about accepting that sometimes things don’t go well. As their voices intertwine and sing lyrics like “On this rainy afternoon/I’ll be waiting by the radio with you,” we all have our own struggles and are there for someone. It’s a gentle reminder that being here means a lot. And just as the couple’s voices compliment each other, the finger-picked guitar line and piano work together to create a dark yet hopeful atmosphere.
There are songs on Waves that feel so fleshed out and full of energy that it’s easy to forget Honoré’s pared-back approach to the album. “Aftershock & Vibration” is a highlight of the eight songs, and you can feel a certain sincerity running through Honoré’s performance. And that’s thanks to the single-take approach he took while recording. It’s easy to imagine Honore taking a third or fourth try at a full playthrough of a song to really lock in and really bring out the emotions he puts into his music.
Waves is an album about the range of emotions we face in everyday life, both positive and negative, and thanks to such a raw and honest collection of songs, listeners can truly connect. , you can empathize. Honoré. Small mistakes in the recording, whether noticed only by Honoré or not, become an important part of the completion of this album. This becomes a metaphor for the waves we deal with every day. None of us are perfect, but we accept our flaws as part of the journey. Next Paperback Hero drove that point home with some of their best and most honest work to date.
