As Wingtip, Nick Perloff-Giles Crafts Pop Gems for the Introspectively Inclined
Sensible shoes.
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CategoryArts + Culture, Music + Podcasts
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Written byRich Thomas
“Everything always seems so much more linear when you look at it in hindsight,” says Los Angeles-based, Bay Area-raised singer, songwriter and producer Wingtip (aka Nick Perloff-Giles). “But when I think about the choices that I made and the way things evolved, a lot of it was taking leaps of faith where I wasn’t aware of the risks.”
All Your Friends Are Here is Perloff-Giles’ debut full-length, but he’s lived a few short musical lifetimes since his first breakout hit, 2017’s indie-pop anthem “Rewind.” The tune’s hyper-success led to a major label deal with Republic, and Perloff-Giles quickly found himself in meetings with publishers asking quizzical questions about his songwriting inspirations and goals. “The first year or so, I was thrust from somebody who works in my bedroom to working in songwriting sessions, and there’s so much etiquette and knowledge that goes into those that I did not have,” he remembers. “I do feel like I stumbled my way through it and learned along the way.”
As a live performer, Perloff-Giles grew tired of awkwardly DJing his hits, and slowly began to move away from his dance music foundation and grow into his capabilities as a vocalist. The fruit of that transition led to the beautifully introspective Ghosts of Youth in 2018. Two years later—and a few steps further down that new path—Perloff-Giles offers up a slice of LA life that illuminates a full spectrum of emotion. We caught up with him on the eve of his album release to discuss his fantastic voyage.
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Dance music and production are in your DNA. Was it difficult transitioning into more of a traditional songwriting mindset for this latest album?
Wingtip: I was in bands and that was always fun, but what changed my life was going to this festival called BFD, which was a radio festival in Mountain View, California. It was a pop punk alt-rock festival, but there was always a dance tent. I saw DJ AM there, very early [Steve] Aoki, Toxic Avenger, all of the electro stuff. Being in a band, it was hard to motivate anyone to show up to practice so I decided “Fuck it, I’ll do it on my own on a computer.” I’ve always blurred those worlds. I certainly never grew up thinking of myself as a songwriter in any conventional sense.
So being a singer/songwriter was never the goal from the outset?
Wingtip: I grew up in an era where nobody made money on records, so that was never the plan, business-wise. It was always the DJ model: put something up on SoundCloud that goes crazy and then tour 300 days a year. Suddenly I was in this space where I was trying to make big songs. It can be fun, but it can also be unartful.
How so?
Wingtip: My first DJ tour was January through May in 2017. I was putting out pop EDM stuff and DJing it, and I remember feeling really alienated and weird. I had DJed before in college where the focus was the drop and the transitions, but now I was playing essentially front to back pop songs. I had these moments where I walked off stage feeling like, “What was that? What did I just do?”
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It sounds like you had the chops to go either way: full on traditional DJing or touring as a singer/songwriter.
Wingtip: It could have gone either way, but at the time the avenues for dance music felt stale. Also, my music listening habits started getting further and further from dance music. I will say, day one of the headline tour for Ghosts of Youth, where I was lugging guitars, amps and flight cases, I was like “Maybe I’ve made a horrible mistake! Maybe I should just have a USB drive.”
Would you say All Your Friends Are Here is a third act of sorts, given the sonic progression of “Rewind” to Ghosts of Youth to now?
Wingtip: I think it’s either a third or a continuation of the second. Or it’s like the fifth. (Laughs) This project has gone through so many iterations a wiser man might have created a different name at some point for it. I put out Ghosts of Youth and went on tour with Petit Biscuit. I thought, “Fuck, I have to sing in front of a thousand people right now.” But that was part of the baptism, and once I did that it didn’t feel as weird. Ghosts of Youth was written in the context of what I had been doing before, one step removed from dance music. Now I’m two steps removed, and I’m going even further with de-dancifying songs.
I don’t know if this is the quarantine talking but “Try” is really putting me in my feelings. Tell me about that one.
Wingtip: That one was the hardest song to write. I moved to LA in 2017; this little house in Echo Park. LA can be very quiet and still if you want it to be, and I was finding a lot of enjoyment and beauty in that. I was just thinking that you can have a life that is satisfying and meaningful without it being as big as possible. I found the celebrity and fame aspect of the music industry not particular interesting, and had values that were at odds with my dream. When I was 16, the idea was let’s be on tour for 300 days a year. Then suddenly I was like, “I think I like being very quiet.”
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