Nico Tortorella is an artist in the true sense of the word. With a career that spans acting, writing and now music, he’s someone for whom art just drips from his every fibre.
Known for his roles in hit films such as ‘Scream 4’ and ‘Odd Thomas’, along with his appearances in TV shows including ‘The Following’ and ‘Younger’, Tortorella has further showcased his artistic versatility with the publication of poetry collection ‘All Of It Is You’ (2018) and ‘Space Between: Explorations of Love, Sex, and Fluidity’ (2019).
RELATED: Nico Tortorella – ‘born.’ review: an emotional and personal journey
As well as releasing his first children’s book ‘Olivette Is You’ this week, Tortorella today unveils his eagerly awaited debut album ‘born’. An emotional collection of deeply personal songs, it showcases another side to the multi-faceted artist and takes fans on a rollercoaster.
I caught up with Nico over Zoom earlier this week to talk about his new book, dive deep into the meaning behind his remarkable debut album, and find out about the process he went through to find his voice as a recording artist…
Firstly, congratulations on baby number two! How are you feeling about that?
Good. It’s a little wild, honestly. I feel like we’re just fresh off of baby number one. I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be a parent and continue to put things out in the world and (find) what that life work balance is. The jump from one to two is going to be very real.
At least with having the next baby not too long after the first, you haven’t gotten used to any downtime so you can just carry on as you are…
I’ve been home pretty much for the last year (due to) the strike and the industry’s been a little bit of a mess as of late. There’s gonna be a shift when I go back to work full-time for sure. Might as well do it with two (kids) right?
You’ve also just released your first children’s book ‘Olivette Is You’. What’s that all about?
It’s the children’s version of a poetry book that I released in 2018 called ‘All Of It Is You’. The poetry book is about this idea that we are all the entirety of the universe reflected back to us. When we started to try to get pregnant, I knew that I wanted to create a kid’s version that was more digestible because it’s a big idea. What does it look like to bring it all down and furthermore what does it look like to leave a legacy of sorts, and to instill this level of unfettered freedom in children? (I’ve been) trying to figure out how I want to parent and what that looks like. During COVID, I put together this idea of Olivette, this character, and just kind of ran with it. I brought it to my book agent who went to our publishers and it all happened pretty quick at the beginning, but publishing moves very slow. I wrote this book in 2020 and now it’s coming out in 2024. The timing of it all feels really crazy (now) we’re announcing that we are pregnant again, and the book is coming out the same day. We didn’t actually plan any of that. Last night, I was like, ‘oh, shit, ‘Olivette’ comes out tomorrow, too!’ There definitely feels like some divine intervention around here these days.
This idea (behind the book is) that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, we all heard that as kids. What happens if you flipped that a little bit and you already are everything that you could ever imagine being when you grow up? What does it mean to tap into that power? We’re all born with a superpower of sorts, and I think to allow that freedom of growth and expansion from a young age, who knows what the future could potentially look like?
In one week you’ve announced a new baby, released a children’s book and you’re releasing your debut album. That’s crazy!
Timed with the eclipse too! It’s just like the transition period of life. We moved across the country too. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, honestly!
I’ve followed your career for a long time dating back to ‘Scream 4’ and ‘Odd Thomas’ through to ‘The Following’ and ‘Younger’. Your announcement to release music caught me a little off-guard to begin with and I didn’t know what to expect when I played ‘born’ for the first time. I certainly didn’t expect the emotional journey it took me on. Before we dig into the tracks, why did you decide to do a music project now?
I’ve always wanted to make music. I can remember being a little kid and buying my first guitar and teaching myself how to play. It always seemed somewhat unattainable for whatever reason. Acting on the other hand, I knew that I was going to do it. The second I discovered that it was a viable career path, I just knew it was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Every actor will tell you that they had dreams of being a rock star at some point. Music has always played such a huge role in my life, just from digesting music to going to see live shows. I’ve dated musicians (and have) friends who are incredible, world-renowned musicians. It just always felt like an arm’s reach away for whatever reason.
A couple of years ago, I got cast to play William on ‘City On Fire’, which was the Apple TV show. Josh (Schwartz) and Stephanie (Savage), the creators of that show – they also did ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘The OC’ – they are huge titans in the industry. I met them to talk about this project, six months before we started filming and they hinted at the idea that this character was a musician. They asked me if I wanted to record my own stuff and I was like, ‘yeah, are you kidding? That’s an absolute dream!’ I got in the studio, unbeknownst to me my first studio session on the TV job was an audition of sorts to see if I could actually sing these tracks. I got into the studio in Brooklyn with the producer Abe Seiferth, he was the New York producer for the music. I got in the studio, we sang one of the tracks and I get a call a few of hours later (saying), ‘you got the job, we’re gonna record. You crushed it!’ We recorded six or seven songs for the show. As we kept going, more songs were being written because they liked what they were getting. In Hollywood music is treated as a very different thing and there’s like a lot of cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.
We just kept getting tracks, and I just fell in love with the studio, it was my first time ever really spending quality time in a studio like this. It was also under the disguise of a character. I wasn’t in there as myself, I was in there as William and I had all this extra time to develop this character through his voice, which you don’t normally get on television. When you’re shooting TV, you are constantly chasing the clock, everything is moving very, very fast, you have to make strong choices and go with them. (During) this time in the studio I developed this relationship with the producer and there was just like immediate chemistry. We started speaking the same language very quickly. We shot for five months and by the end of this season, we found out we were pregnant too, and jokingly I said to him, ‘I don’t want to leave, can I just stay? Can we just start making music?’ He welcomed the idea with open arms. He saw something in me. He wanted to help foster that art and creativity and he was all in.
I spent two months putting demos together and building out a deck. I was treating it like a television project, which is just how my brain works. I understand how a TV show gets made so I took that into music. I built out all these tracks and lyrics, and the stories that I wanted to tell and I thought I had an idea of what my sound potentially was. I delivered this package to him and I went to go shoot a movie in Vancouver for a month. When I got back, I got in studio full-time and it was like five days a week for six or seven months. We spent time finding my voice, finding my sound and playing with a bunch of different genres of music. I was pretty sure that there was more of an eclectic folk Americana vibe originally, which very quickly just didn’t work. It didn’t necessarily feel authentically my voice.
I came in with ‘Last Summer’ and we turned it into this Lo-Fi bedroom track. We looked at each other and it was just like ‘holy shit, this is it’. That was the first track that solidified the sound for the album. We took that song and inserted a lot of different sounds that we were creating from that track into the rest of the album, and really built out from there. Once we got there, it was just like track after track after track, and we couldn’t stop. So much of this album is tied to me becoming a father and looking back at the life that I’ve created, the life that I have in front of me and the future life. The songs just began to write themselves. It really is this love letter to fatherhood and to my daughter. Originally, the album was meant to really just be for us. (I wanted) to put together a body of work that we can play during our home birth and have these songs that we can leave for her. Very quickly, we realised that there was a need to share this music with the world.
The sequencing of the album really tells the story of your life up until now. It’s interesting that you mentioned ‘Last Summer’ because that song is an interesting perspective on preparing for life to change. The song on the record that stopped me in my tracks was ‘Kilmer Dove’, named after your daughter. It made me feel really quite emotion and the lyrics are so powerful. It’s obviously very personal so tell me a little bit about putting that song together…
I bought a keyboard when I was in Florida, at my mom’s house. This was in the demo phase. I discovered this sequence and I kept playing it over and over and over and over again. We knew we were pregnant and I started dreaming the song. Kilmer came to me in this dream and started singing the lyrics of the song to me like ‘red hawk, white dove’ and there was this story of this Macaw that flew into my sunroof; all of these different birds were coming to me. I would wake up in the morning and start writing these lyrics down.
Within a couple of weeks me and this 1994 old-school Casio keyboard, and these dreams, put together the song in its entirety. I don’t play the piano. I have never played the piano. I’ve never had a lesson, I just found these notes. The original version was like 17 minutes long (laughs) and there was four more verses. I tend to throw up and then clean up. I brought it into Abe, my producer, and he has a piano in the studio so I played it on the piano for him. He got emotional too. For the first time that I played him demos he was like, ‘this is a song. This isn’t just like a track that you’re coming in with… this is a song’. We developed that track over time. We brought in the strings and played with the organ, and there was a duelling piano situation happening which references this idea of the hawk and the dove which historically stand for peace and war.
I wish I knew exactly what it was that I discovered in writing that song. It came out of thin air almost. It was there in front of me, I grabbed it and that was the song. For me it is the most special song on the album. As we were pregnant and at home, we had a piano at home, and I would just play that song over and over and sing it to Bethany and Kilmer while she was still in the womb. Any time that song comes on in the house, Kilmer’s higher energy shifts; she knows that that’s her song. It’s just such a special song and it was meant for us. Then to hear you have somewhat of a similar experience with that song… that’s why we put music out in the world. That’s the whole point of it. That’s why I knew that I had to share this music with more than just my house because it really is the only medium in the world that, I believe, can transcend and bring people together in ways that we didn’t even know we needed.
Music is the connecting fabric for most of society and most of the world. When I think back to most of my friendships and relationships, it goes back to music at some point. There’s always music in there…
You know that when you listen to music, but once you start making music you unlock these hidden chambers and these secrets. For so long, I’ve been looking for a medium that I can tell my stories in and with, and have them be more digestible than maybe some of the things that I’ve done in the past. When people started hearing this music, I was like, ‘Oh, my God! this whole time, this was it. This was here, it was right in front of me. and I didn’t put the pieces together’. I feel so lucky to have found this, even at this point in my life, and I’m just getting started. It’s the first time I’ve ever made music in my life and I can’t imagine a world without it at this point.
On the last track, ‘La Santa Madre’, you’re so untethered and you’re so unleashed. It’s the rawest that we hear you on the record and it’s such a contrast to ‘Kilmer Dove’. It’s the perfect end to the album. Where did that song come from?
My buddy Max Milner who plays the villain in ‘City on Fire’, he’s an English musician and a musician first, and he’s one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever spent time with in my life. He can just pick up any instrument and start playing it. He’s got this voice that just takes your breath away. He was in London for a month working on this Disney show and he left a bunch of his instruments at my house in the city. He had this older Martin acoustic, pretty beat up, and I brought it into the basement one night, where I would conjure up a lot of this music. I just started playing these two chords next to each other and it had this Spanish flair to it. It sounded like classical Spanish music and I just started singing differently than I had been singing, in this lower register and this intense vibrato. Within an hour, I had this whole song written in Spanish. I went running upstairs (and said to Bethany), ‘you’ve got to hear this song. I have to play this for you right now’. I started singing it to Bethany and she was like, ‘where the fuck did that just come from? I’ve heard you speak Spanish before but you don’t write songs in Spanish and you never sing in Spanish’. The whole song is about this mother Saint and as I was writing it, I knew that Kilmer was going to be born to this song. I started having all of these visions of her being born as I was writing the song.
I get on FaceTime with my Mom, and I play the song to her and I FaceTimed with my brother. And like, it was just very clear that there was something else happening. There was something special here. I brought it in to my producer and he was kind of like, ‘I don’t know, there’s like one thing that’s not like the others in this lot. Yeah, it’s pretty, but when you’re putting an album together they all need to be of the same vibe’. I was like, ‘no, this needs to be the end of the album. If it’s not the end of the album, this needs to be the first track’. I was really gunning for it to be the first track of the album but he was like, ‘we can’t open with this fucking song’.
Cut to March ’23 and Bethany is in labor, and we start putting the songs on throughout the house. Lo and behold, La Santa Madre is on and it was the only song that she wanted to listen to for the last three hours and Kilmer was born to La Santa Madre. (Nico stops to catch breath and his eyes well up with emotion) We had a house full of midwives and everyone by the end knew the lyrics to the songs. Kilmer was born, Bethany was on the floor, we had this circle of women surrounding us and everyone was singing the song as this child is brought into the world. It was just pure magic, I can’t explain it any better. It was exactly where we were supposed to be at that time.
We filmed the birth and we had audio tracks of the birth. After she was born, we spent a month not leaving the house, just the three of us in the house, taking it all in. I started playing with the audio and I married the audio of the birth to the song. I brought it into the studio, we built out that whole intro for the song and the outro. Even still my producer doesn’t have kids so the magic of birth is a hard thing to explain to someone that doesn’t necessarily want kids. He knew there was something special there but I was dead set on this being in the album. I found a music manager a couple months later and he too was kind of like, ‘you know, this just doesn’t really match everything else’ and I wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. Then we announced the pregnancy and we put together this whole video for that song. I put it out in the world. I didn’t tell anybody about it; I didn’t tell my producer, I didn’t tell my manager and everyone was like, ‘we had a fucking plan! What are you doing? This is not supposed to be the first song that comes out!’ It just needed to happen. In the context of the rest of the album, first of all thank you for forgetting it, it represents so much of how I got to where I am with this music. I’m so happy that it’s there.
We’ve met for the first time today and from talking to you I can see how much this music means to you. I’ve interviewed many artists over the years and I don’t think I’ve ever chatted to anybody that’s spoken as passionately about their music as you have to me. It’s nice because there’s nothing cynical with this body of songs. It’s all personal. It’s coming from a good place. There’s a deep message behind it. It takes your fans into places with you that maybe they’ve not been before. I think it’s a special record…
Thank you so much. For real, thank you.
You mentioned about finding your voice and how that came during ‘City on Fire’. How easy was the process for you? From what you’ve said, a lot of this album came to you and you’re almost like a vessel for getting it out there…
In a lot of ways, I think that I still am finding it. There’s multiple processes of putting music out in the world. There’s the initial inception, then there’s getting in the studio and crafting the songs, then there’s putting the album together, then there’s releasing the album. The final frontier, which is almost the most daunting, is performing. I’m having very serious conversations right now about what that looks like and where we start. Do I start opening for people? What does it look like to put a live show together? Even as a kid, I did a lot of theater growing up, when I would go audition for a musical the only thing that would ever make me nervous would be singing. I do know why… there were a couple of people early on that didn’t think that I had ‘it’ so to speak with my voice so I’ve always been somewhat reserved in a world where I am not a reserved person. It took a minute to discover the sound.
I think if you listen to the album in its entirety there are a few different sounds in there. I’m singing in different registers, and there’s different tones, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of my favourite albums, you hear that, but if you listen to one song next to another they could potentially sound like different people singing these songs. As an actor (that) makes a lot of sense to me. Bringing that to the performance too (hesitates and laughs)… I am definitely going to perform live, tt has to happen. We’re pregnant again so I’m already writing new material. It will be interesting to see how that shifts once this album comes out and what people are more into (and if that’s) where I wind up going or whether I find a whole new sound. I always just go back to this idea that there is no right way to do this. There’s no right way to sing a song. I’m gonna just put this little story in here because I think it’s important.
When I first started meeting managers, there were kind of two different camps of ideas. One being (that) you get one shot to put out a song (so) let’s hire the one of the best songwriters in the business, who writes all these top 10 hits, we’ll get 10 producers in here, we’ll do it this way, that’ll be your first song, and then you can go do whatever you want. That just felt so authentic and I couldn’t get behind it at all. I wrote everything. It’s all me. My producer helped me shape all of the songs for sure and find the musicality but every melody and every lyric, it’s all me. I just can’t imagine limiting myself in the future. I think all singers should be constantly finding new sounds. I don’t think we see that often enough honestly.
This is kind of cyclical isn’t it because, like the title of your poetry collection, ‘All Of It Is You’. You had the answer right there all along…
I was talking about that comparison the other day. I’m so happy you put that together. Me putting this album out is Olivette. Through and through, that is the message of this kid’s book. You already are doing it. Just tap into it. That’s it!
We get taught at a young age that we have to strive hard to find that one thing we’re good at, when actually if you take a step back, you already have the tools and the skills you need. You just need to give them time and let them flow…
Yeah, and if you don’t focus too much on what other people say or get too worried about what people might say. I have spent years talking shit and people have said all of the things. Especially as an actor, the amount of rejection that we experience constantly, not to say that it’s more than other people, but it’s a tough industry. I’m just starting to learn what the music industry is and that’s a whole other beast that I am meeting face-to-face at this point. I feel like I’ve been well equipped over the years to to handle whatever, especially being a parent too, you just never know what the fuck you’re gonna discover on any day. It’s just much easier to go with it than fight against it.
Nico Tortorella’s debut album ‘born’ is available to stream and download now at https://linktr.ee/nicotortorella. He can next be seen in ‘The Mattachine Family’ and his new book ‘Olivette Is You‘ is available now.
