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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. Before we jump in a note on our content this episode contains themes and discussion that might be upsetting or triggering for some listeners. Please check the show notes for more detailed descriptions And look after yourself.
think there's a big part of ourselves that would rather present our best lives to the world, that there can be a strong tendency to want to hide away from really how hard certain [00:00:30] challenges have been. But my creativity has led me forward, you know, all the way through this process I was writing.
And that was, I noticed it. I was like, everything else is falling into pieces, but my songs like, wow, here I am now with these albums that are really calling me forward to, to be courageous in the face of that desire to, to hide away or not share.
Hey, fellow lemonade makers. How are you? Doing Great to have you back here for another episode of Making Lemonade.
[00:01:00] This conversation's a really exciting one for me.
It's with someone whose work I've enjoyed and admired for for many years now. and when they agreed to be a guest on the podcast,
I was totally delighted.
What I didn't realize was that their latest work
couldn't be more relevant to what we do here. Talking about Turning those lemons into lemonade.
my guest, this episode is the amazing singer and songwriter Nick [00:01:30] mve.
,
Imagine this. Imagine you've been accosted by somebody's elderly parents at a wedding, and they say, so who are you and what do you do?
How do you answer that question?
I'm Nick, I guess is the starting point. I'm a musician. I'm lucky to have an audience who love my albums who I make music for, [00:02:00] and I can pull. I play concerts all over the world, and I've been doing it for, probably really 15 years now, including all the early years and my origins.
And I still feel like I'm at the beginning. I don't suppose that I'll last forever, but there's a certain kind of, um, there's something I'm here to do, which I haven't done yet, which for me is the beginning of things. And if I'm so bold, I feel it's coalescing now with this moment, with my next albums.
[00:02:30] It'll be interesting to see in a few cycles time if I still have that feeling of I'm yet to do what I need to do. But I do sense in terms of recent creativity. There's been significant depth to the work or something. There's been a kind of certain. Offering in this, in these new songs I've written that do feel like, yeah, this is really really getting deeper into, into the meat of what I'm about as an artist, why I'm here.
I dunno if at this point I've lost those elderly parents who asked me the initial [00:03:00] question. If they're still with me, I'm not sure. But no one,
one of them thinks you're called Mick, but that's because their hair isn't great, so I think we can forgive them that. Okay. No, you haven't at all.
In fact, they're gonna spend the rest of the wedding telling people they've met you now.
I hope it's a good answer for them.
It absolutely is. It absolutely is. That feeling you just described of being at the beginning sounds from the way you were describing it as quite an exciting place to be a sort of a place [00:03:30] of possibilities.
Is that an accurate way of describing it?
Yeah, it is actually a place of potential. I think, I do acknowledge previous beginnings, if there has been significant steps to my career. I launched my first album 11 years ago, 2014. And that had a good arrival in the world through British music industry and really launched my career and grew my audience.
And I've released two albums since, [00:04:00] and several eps. But I think one of the reasons that I feel like I haven't yet achieved what I'm here to do and, and and therefore I'm still at the beginning of something, is about operating in my own terms and operating in a way reclaiming some.
Parts of myself and some parts of my career that have been in interrupted by um, kind of maybe perhaps quite familiar forces in the commercial marketplace of the music industry, and, how that [00:04:30]plays out in the world, how that plays out in one's own mind, on one's own kind of motivations and where the world, outer world and the inner world meet and how that all relates to like having an audience.
And obviously these, I'm scanning over a few things here we can maybe unpack, but it, it kind of feels like, there's a lot of things that can pull a young artist away from their own just pure simple path. it And I'm really on a process of of reclaiming that. And I think I'm hopeful that what I have to offer [00:05:00]next.
Is going to go further and deeper because of this reclaiming process, if you follow that.
Yeah. No, I do. And you are right. There's a lot to there's a lot to unpack and a lot to, to talk about there. Let me, if I can just go right back, what part did music play in, in your childhood, in, in the years you were growing up?
Music was very present in, in my life, like from the beginning, and I think I was probably always mu was musical, although I didn't really notice it [00:05:30] until I was about 11 or 12. And I really wanted to play the drum kit. 'cause the drums were just the coolest thing I could imagine. And then.
I was a drummer, so I started to get into the identity of music and and then as a tea in my mid teens, I wanted to play the piano. And I learned, I had a really quite significant teacher at that point who really I count as a blessing. 'cause Frank Harrison, his name was, he is a quite well known jazz musician in the uk.
I grew up in Cambridge, in England. And Frank is also from [00:06:00] Cambridge and he was a bit older than me, probably about 22 if I was 14 or something. And he really helped me understand the kind of nuts and bolts of music chords, how they're put together. And he did so without disabling too much of my just inner natural appetite and my inner natural ability.
In fact, he really bolstered that. So that I had now a lot of instincts from the drums, a little bit of intellect with the piano. And it's set the scene [00:06:30] for me a little later, actually in a way, quite late as a seven, 16, 17-year-old to pick up the guitar. And and I took off from there really. And I found a real home from my musicality, a really natural place where I was just able, the guitar just made sense.
The acoustic guitar, I picked it up when I got 16, my dad taught me some chords. I started learning, basic choose Oasis tunes or whatever. And I very quickly found I could actually channel my feelings and my expressions That is crazy to me. [00:07:00] Having heard your music and listened to it for many years now and watched videos of you playing and playing sort of live bits and bobs here and there, I just sort of assumed that you'd been you'd been born and someone had just put a guitar in the pram with you and I can play four chords badly but your guitar playing is just incredible.
So that's bonkers to me that it was so relatively late that you picked it up.
Yeah, I think some of [00:07:30] the characteristics that come through my guitar playing have been musical things that I. Was interested in for a long time before, so although I started playing the guitar when I was 17, I had been playing with patterns.
Yeah. On the piano or on the drums or on the percussion instruments, like for years and years. And I can remember even being quite young, like 12, 13, and just zoning out but valuing it, knowing it was, I used to privately, I would call my little ideas and [00:08:00] compositions, I would call them my prayers.
Like I didn't tell anyone that because I grew up in a very, loving but, and secular household. And I thought at that time I thought prayer was a bit of a strange thing, but I didn't tell anyone else, but I definitely called my patterns, my prayers. So there was already a sort of a practice, a private practice of using music to step out of.
My kind of rational mind and into a much more felt instinctive appreciation of this kind of [00:08:30]architecture and maths. And so when I picked up with the guitar, it was already quite a rich sort of process and then I was really running.
That's, that makes so much sense now you've said that and Absolutely.
The sort of the rhythmic quality of your playing. And I'm not a musician by the way. I'm just a an appreciator of music. But yeah, I can absolutely see that thread through, through the your work. So making lemonade is [00:09:00] what we're here to talk about. And obviously you can't make lemonade without some lemons.
And I know from. From some of the things that I've been reading about you and your new work recently the last few years, the last three or so years have been challenging for you.
What can you tell me about that?
Lemons are sour, aren't they? They, uh, they're not all sweet. And I think it's a great premise for any work and a great [00:09:30] premise for a podcast. And and it aligns actually very, with my moment and with this new work that I'm launching this, in fact, it's a double album.
So the album is called Dark Harvest and there's Dark Harvest part One coming very soon in June of this year, and then later in the year, dark Harvest part two. And. This work is is drawn from the last years in my life. And it really it gives expression to in a way things coming apart [00:10:00] for me, behind the scenes a lot of my life coming apart.
This music gives expression to that process and the disorientation of that process and the yeah, the the humbling of that process. And then this music also gives expression to the finding my way again to the being put back together again. Loosely speaking I've I, I've. Structured the albums as all the songs about coming apart are in Dark Harvest part One, and the songs about being put back [00:10:30] together with a clarified faith and a clarified perspective are more or less in part two.
It's, it's, It's a little bit simplistic, but that's how I've approached it. That's
a journey there.
So you, yeah.
my appetite for music and my gifts with music meant that a lot of doors open for me very easily when I was in my twenties and I made a band and we had success. It was called Portico Quartet. And we, our album got nominated for a Merky prize and we were up and running with a career in music.
It was very exciting. And I was in my [00:11:00] young, in my early twenties,
it was very exciting to have this kind of traction in, in music and to receive a lot of doors opening with success. And music and career and success became full sided for me and things were coming to me very easily.
And I. Of that was really positive. I was making good music and doing things in a good way, but not everything was positive. And in fact, the success I was having then in my late twenties as I went into a solo career and kept on having success that was kind of [00:11:30] masking that certain things in my life were not built on solid foundations.
And I guess it, those
unsolid foundations were kind of exposed in the last few years. It's been a, it's been a time of deconstruction for sure, and a and quite a reckoning for me. And I'm quite passionate about sharing that with my listeners.
'cause I think it's naive to think we are the only ones going through hardship.
Yeah.
I imagine most, most people listening to the podcast, we've been through personal [00:12:00] reckoning. So it's it's something that I'm singing about and it's something that I'm passionate about sharing.
I'm so grateful to you for, for sharing this stuff with us and sharing the work that's come out of it.
And I know from my few years in the television industry I've seen what that kind of quick success can do to people and, and where it can lead people, but often leave them as well, not always able to cope very well [00:12:30] with all of those trappings that come with success and that elevation.
you know, having success and that success kind of masking the fact that, pursuing my career and. Touring a lot meant that a lot of my key relationships weren't in great health with my people who know me the longest.
I had good money rolling in which meant that I could actually overlook the fact that my finances weren't in great order. I always had yeah, a lot of exciting kind of inspiring things happening, [00:13:00] and I was less drawn to the, less glamorous and structural aspects of my life.
No surprise, that was gonna catch up with me at some point. Now that point really happened to be having two young kids. Having the success I had, I felt like everything I was doing was a success. It was turning out really well. Unbeknownst to me, I was racing through, into um, into marriage and then young kids, all of which were big blessings.
But like I say, the structural stuff around [00:13:30] them was not was not solid. And I could get away with a lot for quite a long time. But not with the, quite surprisingly rapid arrival of our second kid. Now, the demands of having two kids and the extreme sleep deprivation was quite a kind of leveler, was quite a brutal exposure of all of those kind of gaps and blind spots in, in, like I say in, in the more structural sides of life.
Um, experienced the kind of quite some damage in the [00:14:00] relationship, my key relationship with the with my wife. And our relationship suffered and we separated. So it was really going through a a split in this core kind of, of my young family.
at the same time as experiencing a financial tragedy, which meant that like the cushion of money we lost was was no longer just kind of holding their to rely on.
And my brother died. That was another thing that was a huge part of those years. So it was like of the kind of the key areas of. Everyone's life, [00:14:30] core relationships and family finances and yeah, career as well because I was waking up to the fact that my, my career was being really mismanaged.
And I was in, in pieces. My, my life was in pieces. And then, I can, I think times of crisis are valuable because your capacity to sustain what is false is gone.
You're just under so much like. Pressure now that it is, you [00:15:00] have to get real. You just have to get real across your life. So that was a kind of a it's a continual process o obviously forever on a daily way going forward. But it's been a process in these last years across all these area, different areas of my life from really attending to the health of my key relationships with my siblings and my mom and dad, which is great.
And we've done so much. And and a lot of my closest people who've known me the longest and the clearing out of the kind of toxic managers and accountants that [00:15:30] it wasn't a good scenario. It's been extraordinary, like the actual turnaround in these last years. But things had to really fall apart for me.
And I wouldn't have chosen any of, any of this to happen, but I wouldn't necessarily change it.
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Nick. I'm, that's such a lot to go through. I'm sorry that you've had. So many different challenges piling on top of each other. It's really easy for us, I think, I'm not saying you're doing this, but I think it's really easy and tempting [00:17:30] for us sometimes to downplay what we're going through or to do that hierarchy thing of, oh yeah, no, you know, I'm, I'm in pieces, but what you've been through is much worse.
Or, you are here and I'm here and, but actually whatever it looks like, whatever those lemons look like, they're still lemons for us, aren't they? And they still batter us.
Yeah, absolutely. I think we'd all, there's a big part of ourselves that would rather present our best lives to the world, that there can be a [00:18:00] strong tendency to want to hide away from really how hard certain challenges have been. But my creativity has led me forward, you know, all the way through this process I was writing.
And that was, I noticed it. I was like, everything else is falling into pieces, but my songs like, wow, here I am now with these albums that are really calling me forward to, to be courageous in the face of that desire to, to hide away or not share.
And I I think it gives such point of [00:18:30] connection to my audience who are also going through their own reckonings.
And it's powerful, isn't it, when we share and when we hear other people sharing the stuff they're going through.
Yeah. It helps. We help each other by sharing, I think.
Hundred percent, and that's part of what I'm so passionate about, my concerts at my gigs. It's a real time to community together. Like I think there's certain processes and feelings that like we [00:19:00] can't have by ourselves just in our own internal process.
It's a it's, it's a specific kind of energies and processes that happen when we're in 200, 300, 500 people, a thousand people. It's a time to drop in and be real and raw on mass. And this kind of amazing stuff happens, um, this elevation It's a participation thing. When you come to a Nick Marvel concert, it's a chorus. I can create a space for transformation to [00:19:30] happen. And so I have this kind of very visceral, literal experience of that great fruit that comes when we share. Amazing. And yeah, so I'm passionate about it.
Was it a natural progression for you to create work with those lemons
it was a real natural process. Yeah. I mean, As a musician, my work is to take my feelings and my and I process them and into music.
That's what I do. And of course, like [00:20:00] times of adversity and like even despair and challenge, are some of, they're definitely not the only range of strong emotions, but they are some of the strongest and the richest. I like to write music from joy and and also and the whole range.
But this was clearly a very fertile time in my life and plus no doubt it was a key part of keeping my sanity, keeping my emotions moving and, and, and, and, and in, good health. and then it kind of [00:20:30] interfaces in a.
In a way that's not actually negative with the practical requirements of my life. Like part of what fell apart was had a career and financial aspect to it. no one had to tell me that I needed to, in a way create my way out of this part. A part of it was about like I need to
get busy creating. So those are commercial pressures that actually I welcome. They're not negative ones. They were just like, just real ones about living in the world and having those pressures.
That's really interesting. 'cause lots of [00:21:00] the conversations I'm having are people saying this happened and. Then, I found myself doing this, or I felt I could, or I felt I, needed to do this for myself. But you're right, sometimes there is that element of, actually I need to do this.
And sometimes those pressures or encouragement, I guess we could call them, come internally or externally, and there's no right or wrong with any of that, is there?
Yeah. I'd seen a documentary recently about Leonard [00:21:30] Cohen's song, hallelujah. And that whole story of that song is just a fascinating, it's worthy of a film.
Indeed. There is a documentary just called Hallelujah. It's a brilliant watch. And he found himself in some crisis 'cause a crooked manager had taken all his money, which meant that he had to go touring. basically as an old man. But that just happened to be, while there was this like, incredible groundswell of success with this song, hallelujah.
Through Jeff Buckley, through the film Shrek, this kind of coalescing of conditions that meant [00:22:00] actually we got both an incredible amount of Leonard in his richest most sage, final years of his life.
He couldn't just retire and disappear and, he had to be active and probably hundreds of thousands or millions of people saw his arena concert tours and, he and it all, and there was a great, it was just grace everywhere. In this instance,
I feel inspired by that. And like I also feel again from the faith piece, the God is not absent from these, these conditions.
I've had a kind of a set [00:22:30] of conditions that have meant that like I have to I'm, I've been tenderized in my life. That's the way I describe it. A tenderization 'cause it's a very loving word, tenderization. It has the tenderness in there, but it also does imply like a battering.
Yes, it doesn't it? Yeah.
It's the right word for my situation. And you can imagine, you know, as a piece of. State gets tenderized, like the tissues get pulled apart. There's more space, there's more. It's brutal, but it is also for the best It. I've [00:23:00] been tenderized and that just means, that's just that as an artist that's just likely going to produce good work and good results.
'cause all of those resistances or kind of agendas or those things from the mind that make for lesser are just a bit more deconstructed and out of the way. Plus then a kind of holy urgency to my career in this moment going, I have to recover financially from a really difficult period of my life behind the scenes.
Yeah, it's been a, it's been a wholly humbling and and I wouldn't choose [00:23:30] actively a lot of what's happened to me, but I I wouldn't also change what's happened in my life. It's a kind of a paradox I think, that we can understand. It's part of that lemonade, lemons, lemonade thing.
It is that's a question that I've asked many of the people that I've spoken to for this podcast.
You what you've been through, whatever it is. Would you change it given what's come out of it? And it's a question I ask myself a lot about what I've been through. I, of course, I wish I [00:24:00] hadn't been through the trauma as a child that I did go through. And of course, I would love to have had a life that hadn't been Yeah.
So affected by it and yeah, colored by it. But at the same time, I really like who I am and I really like what I do, and I wouldn't necessarily be this person doing these things were it not for that is a paradox. But I also know, like you just said that for a long time [00:24:30] I held my own personal experience quite far away in my work.
And the moment I let it in and I let it I let what was inside me out onto the page for my writing, it took off. It became so much more real and elevated. I can totally relate to what you're talking about there. tell me about the name Dark Harvest. I read the, was it a friend that suggested it to you?
That's right. [00:25:00] Definitely came from a friend that she didn't exactly suggest it. It was something that she just said in passing. We've written some songs together and she's a really great friend of mine and a big support when things are falling apart.
And yeah, at one of those low points, probably 2022, she said to me, there'll be a dark harvest to all of this. There will be treasures from these struggles that will make it all worth it. Straight off the bat. I thought to myself, that's an excellent title. That, boom, I thought that's a really good [00:25:30] song title.
And then shortly after the call, I thought to myself, wait, that's my album title. And the interesting thing about that for me was that I hadn't yet written any songs at that point. So this is the first time that I got the central title defining point of a work before any of the songs have been written or finished.
And I'm sure that's connected with why I think this work has come together with the clarity that it has. they're not the. The successes in [00:26:00] our lives, the harvest in our lives that are in the light, that are visible, those harvest might be the job promotion or the new house, or the marriage, or your fine clothes. The things that like are visible, are easily rewarded by society or applauded by your community and your friends.
And this album is not about those. This album is about the Dark Harvest. And the Dark harvest are the are the private inner growths, the [00:26:30] private inner e evolutions that no one sees and applause.
Dark Harvest are when you don't snap at your kids. You don't shout at your kids because you have been working on that. And no one's there to applaud that, but it's massive. It makes a huge difference. Dark harvests are when you receive help and you've been used to pushing help away. Dark harvests are the fruits of the spirit is having more patience, more compassion, more self-discipline.
And I think they [00:27:00] are the true offering of this work. They are truly valuable qualities worth celebrating in these days, in these times
that will make so much sense to me. when I talk to people about the lemonade, I'm very keen to say that it's exactly that for some of us, it's really visible and obvious.
You and I. And lots of other people make things that we can tangibly share and put in front of people. But sometimes [00:27:30] that making is something that is invisible to everyone else, isn't it? It's, I like to say it's making sense of something, making peace with something, making something of yourself that you didn't expect to be able to do or other people wouldn't have expected.
It's all making, it's all creation.
It's massive. It's, we know from inside our own lives that when each of us have those private victories and overcome those personal hurdles how it then plays out in [00:28:00] our lives, like the quality improvement in our lives and our relationships and our, gratitude for life.
And the, it's all, huge stuff, but less, less obvious to the world, I think.
Yeah.
What do you hope people listening to your upcoming albums, what do you hope they take away from them?
Mm-hmm. I hope people find solace in this work. I think I'm writing from a level of depth A [00:28:30]universality to it, even though my experience is particular with my life. And everyone else's is different underneath it all. There's deeper layers at which we can connect.
And so I hope this album I know this album's going is creating connection and through that connection solace that would be really really meaningful to me. there's more things I hope people taking this album, I, I know that in my life, reaching a rock bottom, I had to deeply reassess my own inner kind of [00:29:00] orientation around how I was moving in the world, how I was looking at the world, and a lot about my own spirituality.
I think that's another specific point here. 'cause I know a lot of my fan base, not all, but I know a lot of my fan base have been spiritual seekers and are spiritual seekers just like I was. And there's a level at which I think everybody is, in, to a degree you could say. And everyone's seeking happiness at some level.
But yeah, there is also gonna be a segment of my audience who are spiritual sees to the point of [00:29:30] like, being quite like, I was quite caught up in a, a carte new age, spiritual seeking kind of culture, which perhaps it's a different podcast for a different day to really go like deep into that 'cause it's a very rich topic.
But one of the most important dark harvest for me from this time that, that then runs through all of this music is about faith. And I realized that I I. When I was seeking in this kind of a car, pick what you [00:30:00] like, self-directed spirituality. That I was the chief of my own life.
I was the chief of my spiritual seeking. I was in charge of the search as it were. And only when my life was in pieces was I able to really see the folly of that, the FARs of that, and the joke of that, like I am just me. And I, I don't wanna be the chief of my life. I have a daily [00:30:30] down to earth intimacy with the creator.
I every day I ask the one who makes this universe and who makes the rivers, and who makes the, the whole, although it's a fallen world, I believe it's a majestic universe.
And I, I have had a clarified faith through this. and this music is about finding, and my life has been about finding of late, which is just the best thing, I hope that's a valuable process for my listeners who will be somewhere along those lines themselves,
Well, I'm so grateful to you for sharing your work with us [00:31:00] and sharing so much of yourself in this podcast with me and, and the listeners.
and I hope I haven't. Come across as too much for a fanboy, because I've been a huge fan of your work for years now, and it is a real honor to speak to you.
No, it's great. It's been a pleasure to chat with you, mark.
Thanks for the opportunity. so enjoyed that conversation. you could probably tell, [00:31:30] and I really did spend most of it thinking, Calm down Mark. Just because you're talking to a bit of a hero.
It's weird, you know, I was brought up in a very religious family. both of my parents, even though they came from different places, were from really strict Catholic families, and that was a huge part of our life growing up.
And I'm one of those people that has completely turned away from it.
It didn't seem to align with who I was or [00:32:00] what I believed and with what I thought was right.
and I reckon a couple of years ago if I'd been doing this then.
Someone talking so passionately about their faith would've been really uncomfortable for me.
But it's absolutely at the core
of what's happening for Nick and of what makes him who he is and guides him. Through his life and his work
and something I'm learning all the time with this podcast is that
[00:32:30] there's no right or wrong.
There is just what works for us as individuals,
and that's important.
I can't wait to hear. Nick's new albums coming out this year, and in the show notes you'll find some links to Nick's work and also some information about his upcoming tour.
thanks again to Nick and thanks again to you For being here for the conversation, and please don't forget that you can be part of it. Send [00:33:00] in your stories, your experiences, your thoughts, whatever you want to say about lemons and lemonade.
The Making Lemonade Podcast was presented and produced by me, Mark O. Sullivan. See you next time.