Next Paperback Hero Releases New Album

Next Paperback Hero. Photo credit: Sahan Jayasuriya.

Bear, a black Labrador mix, laid exhausted on the floor. She had just gotten her second TPLO surgery – an operation that her veterinarian predicted she would eventually need to have done. Her owner, Milwaukee singer songwriter Nathan Honoré, sat close by – acoustic guitar in hand. As he comforted Bear, he began playing songs from an album he had been working on for the past year. Fully embracing this stripped down acoustic approach, with a healing companion as his only critic, Honoré began rearranging and reworking those songs.

“It very quickly pointed to these songs not only feeling good to play, but they relate to one another – one song went into another and it was super smooth,” Honoré says. “With only a guitar, I had to make those songs different and change things so that they didn’t all just sound the same.”

The byproduct of that time spent rearranging those songs is Waves, the second full length album from Next Paperback Hero, Honoré’s stage moniker.

Unlike Next Paper Back Hero’s debut, Morning Skies & Heavy Eyes, which was meticulously produced and recorded by Honoré and then sent out for professional mixing and mastering, Waves was recorded entirely on a four-track cassette recorder. The result wears its grainy imperfections on its sleeve, but allows the listener to experience raw energy and emotion that would otherwise have been lost in the occasionally sterilizing production process.

“I dug out my old four-track recorder from high school and two hours of messing around with it went by so fast,” Honoré says. “It just blew my mind how much fun I was having as opposed to the recording process of using my computer and interface.”

Across the eight tracks on Waves, Honoré explores the ebb and flow of the depression, anxiety and self-confidence that he experienced in 2023. He recalls getting ready to leave the house to go to a show, car keys in hand. But at the door, he froze – he couldn’t bring himself to step outside.

“I had these crippling emotions and it called a lot of things into light,” Honoré says. “A lot of the lyrics (on Waves) deal with the highs and the lows – the good and the bad.”

Waves opens with “Tip of My Toes,” a bouncy number that offsets its chipper tone with lyrics about having anxiety about the unknown. Thanks to the limitations of the four-track recorder, the few instruments that are present are allowed to truly shine. Honoré’s guitar takes a back seat to an organ part that stays busy, walking up and down scales in place of a bass guitar. Honoré shows restraint in his vocals, a departure from his vocal style on earlier releases, and it feels as if the listener is right there in the room with him.

On “Rainy Afternoon,” Honoré is joined by his wife Kristen Honoré on a tune that deals with accepting that sometimes things just aren’t going well. As their voices intertwine and sing lines like, “On this rainy afternoon/I’ll wait by the radio with you,” it’s a gentle reminder that we all have our struggles and being there for someone goes a long way. And in the same way that the couple’s voices compliment one another, a finger-picked guitar line and a piano work together to create a gloomy but hopeful atmosphere.

There are songs on Waves that feel so fleshed out and full of energy that it’s easy to forget that Honoré took a stripped down approach to this album. “Aftershock & Vibration” is a highlight among the eight tracks, and you can feel a certain level of honesty in Honoré’s performance permeating throughout. And that’s thanks to the single-take approach he took while recording – it’s easy to imagine Honoré taking his third or fourth attempt at a full playthrough of the song, locking in and really tapping into the emotion he pours into his music.

Waves is an album about the spectrum of emotions we face in our day-to-day lives, whether they’re positive or negative, and thanks to such a raw and honest collection of songs, the listener is able to truly connect and relate with Honoré. The minor mistakes in the recordings, whether they’re only noticeable to Honoré or not, become an important part of the delivery of this album. It becomes a metaphor for the waves we deal with everyday – none of us are perfect, but we embrace our flaws as part of the journey. Next Paperback Hero has driven that point home with some of his best and most honest work yet.