Track by track: Nicholas Hamilton talks us through his EP, 'Pretty Young'

Australian actor and musician Nicholas Hamilton talks us through his debut EP, Pretty Young, a radiant collection of polished coming-of-age pop songs.

Nicholas Hamilton is a wonderfully intuitive, wise-beyond-his-years songwriter. Pretty Young harnesses the potent, alive and incoherent feelings of growing up. Musings on youth, homesickness, innocence and experience, blossom throughout the record.

“The EP is really a diary of my life up until this point. The oldest song on there is two and a half years old, the youngest is under a year old, but all five songs really encapsulate my entire 21 years of life,” Nicholas Hamilton explains.

“It feels incredibly intimate to be putting it out for everyone’s ears to hear. I love that, by the way. Some part of me gets a rush out of everyone knowing who I am, about the intricacies of my life, not the characters I’ve played.”

For the past few years, Nicholas Hamilton has juggled an established acting career (appearing in the likes of Captain Fantastic and IT), with his burgeoning music career — hopping between Los Angeles and a his hometown of Byron Bay.

Pretty Young arrives on Friday, August 13th. Ahead of the release of the EP, Nicholas Hamilton so kindly gave us a track by track walkthrough of every song. Check out what he had to say below.

‘Intro’

“I’ve always loved the idea of putting together a body of work, whether it was an EP or an album, that plays like a story or movie. An example I always leant on when looking at producing the tracklist for Pretty Young was Billie Eilish’s debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go Hamilton explains. “I just love how that album seems to be laid out in such an intentional way, with every track wanting to sit where it sat on the record. Billie’s creative ideas for the album, as well as her loud, young, fun personality, shines through so effortlessly throughout the whole album.

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“A massive part of this, in my opinion, was the Intro track she decided to put at the top of the tracklist. Just 13 seconds of her and Finneas having the most lighthearted, classic sibling conversation, that leads into 42 minutes of what she focused years of her life and energy on. The thought of doing an intro myself excited me as soon as it entered my brain.”

Nicholas continues, “However, the thought of having an intro to the EP actually didn’t precede wanting a certain clip to be involved in the record in some way. There’s a video of me as a very young kid, that has floated around our family group chats for years. One of those videos that, when you think of yourself as a kid, is in the first five pieces of media you immediately recall. An incredibly low-quality, late 2000’s video, likely taken on my Mum’s blackberry, in which you can barely make out a much younger me cracking up at something my older brother had said. None of us can remember exactly what was said, but we’ve all never really cared.

“It’s the perfect video to encapsulate my childhood. Me, full of uninhibited joy, laughing so hard I’m crying, my brother egging me on in the background to get me to keep laughing, and my parents holding back their own laughter to get us under control, to no avail. To this day, no one can get me to roll on the floor laughing by doing the bare minimum as quickly or as easily as my brother. Eventually, life became eventful, stressful. I started laughing that hard less and less.”

He ads, “What you’re about to hear in the next 5 tracks is an intimate diary of experiences I’ve experienced and feelings I’ve felt since that time in my life, when I’d laugh until tears rolled down my face on a daily basis. A story that I thought was best preceded by audio of that happy kid, laughing his ass off with his family by his side.”

‘Pretty Young’

I love writing with songwriters who, subjectively, are better songwriters than me. They make me work harder, they bring out the better writer in me. Mostly though, I write alone. Sat behind my piano, crying, hoping a good song comes out of it. Pretty Young is the only song on the EP that I wrote by myself, doing exactly that.

The writing started out with the first stanza of the track, ‘When I was pretty young/I stared right at the sun/Got yelled at by my mum/”You’ll freeze your face, my son”/Oh, I miss those days’. It didn’t take long for me to realise how silly it felt to write a song about missing a time that was so recent. I still considered myself “pretty young”, why should I feel nostalgic for a time that can be so easily compared to right now?

As correct or incorrect as the idea of asking that question is, it spurred me to start the next stanza with, “And I’m still pretty young.” The rest of the song then came together fairly quickly, lyrics easily falling into place like, I believe, should happen anytime you’re writing a half-decent song.

Pretty Young is, obviously, the title track of the EP, and the only song on the tracklist that I made a proper music video for. This song means so so much to me. The only track that I cried for in the studio, while Mr. John Sorber and his phenomenal choir were recording their angelic backing vocals. It still gives me chills every time I listen to it. I hope it gives listeners even an ounce of a similar feeling.

Listen to ‘Pretty Young’ by Nicholas Hamilton

‘Different Year’

Going back to what I said about loving writing with songwriters who are better than me at what they do, I met The Voice USA Season 14 runner-up Britton Buchanan at the premiere for IT: Chapter Two in late 2019. I knew about him from social media posts I’d seen written by his cousin, Link Neal (of Rhett & Link and Good Mythical Morning fame), who brought Britton to the premiere as his plus one. A year passed after the premiere and we eventually were able to align our schedules for a writing session. At our second session together, we penned Different Year.

I love writing with artists who are more comfortable in genres other than the genres I’m comfortable in. Blending genres to make a song that could be sung by either writer, yet is somehow in a genre separate from either of our favorites, can be such an exciting thing. Britton’s a country-pop artist, and I tend to write sad-pop songs. In turn, Different Year turned into an acoustic, synthy, vibey pop tune that lies somewhere inside the Venn diagram of our writing styles, while being outside both of our comfort zones.

As much as Different Year is about the year 2020 and the feeling of being stuck inside (and single) during a pandemic, it also details how I feel when I’m going through any tough experience alone. My mum and I have always said that if we were to be in a plane accident (morbid, I know), we’d just want to curl up and go to sleep, just so we didn’t have to experience it. The hook of, ‘If I go to sleep, can I wake up in a different year?’, feels, to me, like the ideal blend of childlike innocence and poppy earworm. Again, like Pretty Young, the rest of the song then seemed to effortlessly fall into place.

‘noRoom’

‘noRoom’ actually acted as the catalyst for the forming of the EP, without me planning it to be at all. I’ve known California-native, angel-voiced Savs for well over 2 years now. We met via Twitter DM’s when I put a call out on my Instagram story for songwriting collaborators at the start of 2019. We met up for one jam session in my very recently moved into Los Angeles apartment, fell in love (professionally) and, as you do, didn’t see each other for over a year. Eventually, our mid-pandemic schedules aligned and we booked an Airbnb in her hometown of Visalia, three hours drive north of LA. We called it our “songwriting retreat” which, on the first full day of housing us, was where we wrote noRoom.

Sitting at the dining room table, surrounded by my dog Nala, Ralph’s grocery bags and an improvised placement of amps, microphones and guitars, Savs and I started talking about our love lives. We happened to be going through eerily similar romantic experiences, being told by someone we really liked that they had “no room” in their hearts/heads for us, as that space was being taken up by their own issues within their lives. Which is different than being broken up with. We’d both been, inadvertently, put on hold by someone who never verbally told us to wait for them to have enough room for us, but was someone we wanted to wait for anyway.

That night, we went out to dinner with some of Savs’ friends, Caleb Carr and his wife, Sarah. We showed them a very rough, acoustic version of noRoom, and they seemed to really connect to it. Enough so that Caleb, who was juggling producing and teaching at the time, offered to take a crack at recording and producing a few demos of it for us. We said of course, and the rest is history. The poppy, synthy, happy-sad duet tune was born.

‘Everything To Lose’

The only unreleased song on the EP is the funky, bass-and-synth-heavy Everything to Lose. Easily the most recent song on the tracklist, written by Britton and I in September of 2020, it’s essentially a two-years-later answer to track six, ‘In Line.’

Like most sessions, Britton and I started by chatting about life. It came up that I was debating moving back to Australia, and he was doing the same but to his home state of North Carolina. We both shared a fear that, by moving back to our birthplaces, we would be sacrificing the reputation the people we grew up with might have formed while we were “chasing our dreams in the city of angels”. Would that reputation be shattered if we returned home, tails between our legs, head hung low? Would we have to lie and say we were just home to “explore the opportunities home provided us”, knowing full well that home provided us with exactly zero opportunities? These inner thoughts became the basis of Everything to Lose.

It ended up being the first and only song I’ve released where I use my natural accent throughout, half-rapping, half-singing, with some fun harmonies slotted in. This decision was mostly made by the primary producer on the EP, Arthur Pingrey, who thought it added character to a song that was literally about moving back to the only country where I speak with my Australian accent 100% of the time. I agreed.

Everything to Lose is my version of a pub song that you can scream the hook of at 3am in a dingy, sticky-floored, alleyway venue. That’s how I see it, anyway.

‘In Line’

To wrap up the EP, I chose a song that I wrote in Australia with my first-ever collaborator, my guitarist and high school friend Ben Kuhl, right when I started writing my first ever songs. I stand by the idea that it’s the first good track I wrote, as much as Ben may disagree. We also still disagree on who came up with the melody that started it all, the bassline that runs throughout, best written as ‘dum-dum-da-dum-dum/dadum-dadum-da-dum/dum-dum-da-dum-dum/dadum-dadum-da-dum’. Think I nailed that.

Serving as the first part of a two-part song, answered by ‘Everything To Lose,’ I started writing the track when I was gearing up to move to the US in late 2018, about just that. My fears, trepidations and excitement surrounding moving to the other side of the world at 18 to “chase my dreams in the city of angels”. I found myself questioning my own thoughts. Thoughts I’d had in my head since I started acting at age 11. Thoughts of making my own life happen in LA, and doing it with confidence. Thoughts of finally leaving my tiny hometown in northern NSW. Eventually, those thoughts overtook the questions and debates in my head, and I moved to LA with confidence and made my own life happen.

From the moment Arthur sent me the first demo of ‘In Line,’ I knew it needed to make the EP. It’s funky, it’s fun, it makes you move. The bassline is really prominent, which was super important to Ben and I. The chorus/hook is easy to remember. It’s a song that I’m more than happy to be wrapping up this EP with.