Indie-folk artist Nick Folwarczny’s debut EP, Who Was I, is leaving nothing unsaid. Born out of a breakup that left him blindsided, the six-song project works through questions that could keep anyone up at night. What does it all mean? Where do we go from here? With his confrontational lyrics and intense melodies, each song is an explosion that feels more intense than the last. From his college apartment in Columbus, Ohio, Nick Folwarczny is proving that he deserves a spot on playlists with artists like Noah Kahan and The Lumineers. And as autumn approaches, we know some of you are dusting off those playlists as you read this.
You can listen to Nick’s EP, Who Was I, now. And along with the release, he’s gearing up to play his first headline show in his hometown. If you can’t make it, but you’re still interested in learning all about your new favorite indie-folk artist, read on! We had the chance to talk to Nick about his EP, his process as a songwriter and producer, and more.
Welcome to The Honey POP! Can you tell us a bit about your history with music and your journey to your new EP, Who Was I?
I’ve been playing piano and guitar since I was very little. I think elementary school was where I first picked up an instrument. My uncle is a big fan of heavy metal, so when he found out I was into music, he bought me my first electric guitar for Christmas. Heavy metal wasn’t my lane at all, but I wanted to learn guitar. So I begged my parents to put me in lessons at a local store in my hometown called Music Royale. I started to lose interest in guitar after a bit because I was in a music class that was teaching us piano at the time. After finding out that my guitar teacher, Phil Smith, had experience with piano, guitar lessons turned into piano lessons. Eventually, I took up voice lessons with another teacher, Deanna Sweeney, and stayed with both teachers until the end of high school.
I hadn’t really ever given lyricism a solid attempt until that point because every song I wrote ended up not being great, but I still wanted to try. I put together a short project of six songs just to prove to myself that I could, and ended up releasing an EP that I later took down. ‘Sugarcoat’ was really the only song that I liked off of that project, so I kept that one up. Regardless of the quality of those songs, I still learned a lot about production, which led to ‘The Weatherman’ and ‘Drive Slow.’ Both of those songs helped me realize that people were connecting with what I was doing, so I kept putting out singles.
Putting out a cohesive project has (and will always be) a huge goal of mine, so when a relationship I was in came to an end, I felt the need to cope by writing about it. Each song covers a different emotion I had felt when dealing with it all, and I genuinely couldn’t be prouder of how it all turned out!
Headline Show
We’re coming up on your first headline show in your hometown, and you opened for West 22nd in that same venue a few months ago! How have you evolved as a performer since then?
West 22nd and Dipsea Flower were so unbelievably welcoming and encouraging when I got to the venue. I understood that they had their tour figured out and that they could’ve seen me as just the “local act.” But the warmth they showed me really emphasized how important it is to be kind, both as people and as artists. With my headline show being my first time playing with a full-band, it’s going to be a brand-new experience for me. The most important thing I can think of is making sure nobody feels outside of the group. Whether that’s my bandmates, our opener Harrison Goodell, or even the staff at the venue, the show will only be great if everyone feels good.
You performed your song ‘Ethyl’ at that show, and you’ve referenced your hometown in your music before. How has growing up in Columbus influenced your music?
I’m not very connected with artists around Columbus. A lot of my friends here aren’t involved with music the same way I am, so for a while, I felt separate from everyone else. That being said, I wouldn’t have started making music had I not felt that way. Because I was doing my own thing, it forced me to sit with myself and explore the kind of sound that I want in my music. I taught myself how to produce and would send some of my songs to friends who really only ever encouraged me. Once I started releasing songs and seeing people from around the world connect with them, I began to feel a lot less alone. It really helped me navigate reframing negative emotions into art.
Along with West 22nd, you’ve opened for some great artists. Have any of them influenced your artistry in any way on this EP?
It’s really bizarre to me that I’ve been given so many opportunities to play shows with artists I’ve looked up to since the beginning of my artist project. Everyone I’ve met has influenced me in some way, whether it’s learning more about how a recorded song translates live or how to interact with an audience to keep them engaged. But I think my biggest inspiration for how I want my headliner to go is Hans Williams. Not only was he incredible to be on the road with, but every performance he put on made it apparent that he really wanted to be in the room with everyone who came out to see him!
Balancing College Life
What was it like balancing being a college student and a musician?
I graduated college back in December, and the balance between being a student and a musician was definitely an adjustment. I majored in Psychology with the goal of becoming a Psychiatrist who works with kids to help combat mental health disorders from an early age. Everything came down to wanting to help people. I was on the pre-med track my freshman year and really wasn’t happy. I was told that if I wanted to become a doctor, it would have to become my entire life, which scared me. So I found myself skipping chemistry lectures to go practice piano and would avoid studying to write.
Throughout that first semester, it got to a point where I was struggling to care about my degree, which also scared me. Because of that, I started to incorporate music into class projects. I was in an English class at the time, and our final project was to pick one of the novels we read during the semester and convert it to a different medium. Our group chose to turn our story into a play, so I emailed my professor asking if I could write a score in addition to our group’s script. She was intrigued by the idea. So I got to work and ended up having a lot of fun with it.
It got a lot more interesting when touring came into the picture. I went out on the road with Hans Williams for a week, which wasn’t a huge deal because I was able to get most of my work done before leaving. However, I then got offered a three-week Brenn! tour that started during finals week. I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity, so I had to figure out a compromise with my professors. A lot of them understood once I showed them my page and were extremely flexible as long as I made sure to get the work done.
My favorite story that came from that was from a course called Social Psych Lab with Dr. Hines. Throughout the semester, our group project was to write a research paper on anything related to social psych, execute our study, and present it in person as the final. I was in New York the day that our group was set to present, so I had to join a Zoom link from a coffee shop with awful wifi and present my part of our study. I couldn’t see the class and had a really hard time hearing my group, so I was a bit lost during the presentation. But I managed to pull through!
Since you graduated college, are there any steps you’re looking forward to taking with your music now that you have more time to do so?
It is so nice that I’m finally able to focus solely on music. With Who Was I wrapping up, I’ve already started putting together my next project, which has some of my favorite songs I’ve made thus far. I began producing for other artists during my last few semesters, and now that I don’t have to work around or worry about a class schedule, the sessions have been so much more enjoyable. We’re wrapping up production on an album with a group called Jake Swamp and The Pine, and I’ve been working on a handful of songs for an artist named Avery Monet—both super incredible and talented people!
Who Was I
Why did you decide on Who Was I for the EP title?
The whole project is about me navigating the end of a relationship that I felt was super abrupt. I was sad—like very, very sad, and it only got worse after I saw her with someone else like a week after our relationship ended. One of the first songs I wrote about it was ‘Who Was I.’ The whole song was kind of this stream-of-thought moment where it almost wrote itself and perfectly summarized how I felt. I thought it would only ever be a single until I started exploring different parts of that song and writing songs based on those parts. It slowly turned into an EP, but the title was always going to be Who Was I because that’s the question that everything came from.
Your songs, especially on this EP, are so confessional. How does it feel to release personal songs like those to the public?
It’s odd. I don’t know how else to put it, but I figure that if I’m feeling these emotions, then someone else is, too. For this project, I was extremely on the fence about releasing ‘Sycophant’ because it’s very mean. But I think it contributes to an overarching break-up story that I wanted to tell. I think it’s very fitting that an angry, lashed-out song leads into another about blacking out and regretting what you did and said.
Outside of the EP though, I think my most confessional song is ‘Someone Around.’ The first verse is probably the most honest and vulnerable thing I’ve ever written, as it shines light on some really dark periods that I worked through. I love that song because rather than letting what I felt prevent me from being me, I was able to turn it into something that other people might relate to and feel less alone in what they’re going through.
A moment that I will never forget was during a show in Minneapolis. I was having a very off day, which made me feel awful about my performance. I went down to the green room to recollect myself and had a notification from someone who shared that they were battling addiction and would use my music to calm them down any time they got overwhelmed. In that moment, I realized that I was helping someone feel less alone through being vulnerable. I always find myself questioning if I’m doing this right, but regardless of how odd it feels to put some very personal songs out into the public, that message will always remind me of why I want to.
You’ve mentioned that you’ve been working on a few of the songs on this EP for a while. What was it like to go back to some of those songs and complete them?
I’m always working on new music, which makes it a little harder to stay excited about songs I’ve kept in the vault for a year. That being said, ‘Blackout’ is probably the oldest song on this EP, yet it remains one of my favorites. I was listening to a lot of Jake Minch at the time, and his writing definitely influenced how I approached that song. It was super short, I think around a minute and a half, and only had three verses without the huge bridge section. I didn’t think I would ever release it, so I forgot about it.
Once I started working on Who Was I, I was in some alternate tuning and came up with this picking pattern that I couldn’t put lyrics to. For some reason, ‘Blackout’ kept popping into my head. So I sang that melody over the fingerpick, and I ended up really liking how it sounded.
Another thing about working on demos is that I always find myself becoming too comfortable with how a song is sounding, making it harder to want to change certain things. With ‘Blackout,’ I was about to finalize it until a friend told me that the song felt too short and that I should add a bridge. I didn’t want to mess up the flow of the song, but I also found myself wanting to hear more of it any time I listened to the demo. So I tried it out and fell in love with the song even more.
I think the hardest song to get “correct” was ‘Who Was I.’ I avoided working on it for so long because, personally, I began to hate how my production sounded. So I ended up re-doing everything but the chords and lyrics, giving me roughly a month and a half to finish the song (that’s not a long time for me). I am so glad I committed to it because it turned out to be one of my favorite songs off of the project!
Production
Along with writing, you also produce your own music. How do you get into producing?
I found Ableton, the software I use for production, in seventh grade when my parents bought me a Launchpad. I was obsessed with those light show videos and wanted to make my own, so I started looking into YouTube tutorials on how to remix songs. That sparked a huge interest in EDM production, which taught me a lot about layering chords and making songs feel huge.
That rabbit hole eventually introduced me to Jon Bellion’s “behind the scenes” YouTube videos where he’d document his entire process of writing and producing. I watched each of those videos dozens of times, trying to replicate what he was doing. Everything from that point led to ‘Sugarcoat.’ But it never really clicked that I wanted to do my own production until I booked a studio session that resulted in a song I was not happy with.
I bought a pair of Universal Audio SP-1’s during the summer after my freshman year of college, putting my head down and completely involving myself in the process. I could hear my sound getting better, and I was confident enough to post one of my demos, ‘The Weatherman,’ on TikTok. All of the positive engagement helped me realize that I loved having control over my production, and it became so much fun to experiment with different ideas and sounds.
What is your process for transforming a song from a written draft to a fully produced song?
Every song on the Who Was I project began as a voice memo that I’d later turn into a produced song. I don’t really do anything special, more so just figure out a comfortable tempo and record some guitars, lay a rough vocal down, and then add more instruments wherever I want to hear them. With a handful of the songs on this next project I’m working on, I’m producing them as I’m writing them, which is a little bit more fun. I’ve found that it can be a little easier for me to come up with lyrics if I have a solid idea of how the instrumental sounds in those sections. But my process is different for every song I work on!
Finally, because we saw you also posted a song on TikTok about another OSU bar, Out-R-Inn, we have to know which bar is your favorite between that and Ethyl? (Asking as someone who also graduated from OSU)
Easily Outer. I haven’t been to Ethyl in a while, but I’m always down to hit Outer!
Nick’s EP, Who Was I, is out now. If you’ve ever felt lost, been heartbroken, or snuck into a college bar, this EP is for you. Listen here and discuss with us at @thehoneypop on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT NICK FOLWARCZNY:
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