Nicole Miglis, the multi-instrumentalist and singer of the beloved indie pop group Hundred Waters, was introduced to classical piano when she was just six years old. She went on to study piano performance at the University of Florida, where she met her future bandmates in Hundred Waters, with whom she wrote and co-produced three beautifully intricate albums. (In June, the band released Towers, a collection four previously unreleased demos from 2014’s The Moon Rang Like a Bell, and FORM Arcosanti, the Arizona festival they launched to celebrate its release, is returning this October for the first time since 2019; Miglis is set to perform as a solo artist.) Following Hundred Waters’ last album, 2017’s Communicating, Miglis felt the need to explore what her creative and personal life could look like outside the context of the group. Though she released two long-form ambient pieces under the moniker Batry Powr in 2021, Myopia, which is out today on Sargent House, is Miglis’ debut full-length under her own name.
The album’s titular metaphor alludes to its blurring of desire, love, and longing, but the idea behind it – “of not seeing your potential or your power, of not zooming out; limiting beliefs,” in Miglis’ words – might also extend to one’s relationship with creativity. Miglis’ goal was to write, perform, and produce Myopia in its entirety, which she has gorgeously accomplished, interweaving gentle piano melodies and lush orchestration with electronic flourishes and sharp pop songwriting. But, along with her ethereal voice, she also harnesses the same belief in the intimate and transportive power of music that permeated her work with Hundred Waters. Given its introspective nature, Myopia could have gotten lost in its own introversion, falling into the trap of its own thematic ambition. But it’s in this rich, introspective landscape that Miglis finds herself witness to a host of new possibilities, and we’re lucky to be granted a glimpse.
We caught up with Nicole Miglis for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about revisiting The Moon Rang Like a Bell, breaking off from Hundred Waters, the making of Myopia, and more.
Before we get into your debut solo album, I wanted to ask about Towers, the collection of unreleased demos you released with Hundred Waters earlier this summer. What did revisiting and unveiling those songs mean to you?
The reason we did that is because they were from the time of The Moon Rang Like a Bell, and it was the 10th anniversary, so that got us thinking about those songs. It made me dig into all the material we had as Hundred Waters. There’s no shortage of songs or things we’ve made, or that I’ve made, and I think letting go of those things is a particular challenge for me. I make things on a very personal level, as a lot of artists do, and finding a reason to let them out into the world is a whole different mentality for me. I’ll make something and it’ll sit on a hard drive forever. There’s probably an element of perfectionism, where you always want to make it a little better. I’m learning to let go of a lot of things now.
With time, there’s less perfectionism and a little more clarity, and I thought the songs were great. I was like, “Why not share them? Why hold on to them?” I’m really trying to push myself to share more of my art and put more things out there. It’s a bit of a challenge for me to make that leap, but I’m proud of those songs. They felt right as a collection, too, I’m not sure why. I listened to hundreds of things, and these just felt like they fit together. That felt like a reason also – I love tracklisting things and songs coming together and becoming something greater. And they felt completed to me.
I also love the sequencing: starting with these indie pop songs, followed by a piano ballad, and then closing with an ambient piece. Did the tracklist have any particular significance for you?
At the time, I think it was more subconscious with those songs. But when I look back, it’s interesting how those songs encapsulate the different styles I’m interested in and the different styles of music we’ve put out as a band. I’m very much interested in pop songwriting, concise lyrics, and classic songs, but I also love experimental, long-form, abstract music. With Hundred Waters, we always tried to marry those elements. Personally, I find it hard to articulate certain things, and I find comfort in really abstract sonic landscapes that sometimes have no words or vocals. But I also love trying to crystallize those into a concise song. It depends on what comes out. Sometimes those songs come out, and sometimes they’re meant to form into a more crystallized thing. Does that make sense?
It does. In the context of Myopia, I feel like the more instrumental, abstract pieces feel like moments of comfort or peace, while the more arranged, structured songs carry a different kind of emotional intensity. With revisiting this older material, how did you reflect on the period around The Moon Rang Like a Bell?
I’m not really the kind of person who listens to – I mean, Myopia I’ve listened to it an insane amount, I guess maybe because I had to do everything myself, I had to really live with it. But with those Hundred Waters records, to be honest, writing them was so intense, and once they were done – I probably haven’t listened to that record since it came out. [laughs] I don’t revisit it. But I’m proud of those songs. At the time, I was probably striving for something and being a lot more critical of my writing. Listening back to those songs, with time, I think I appreciated the writing more, and maybe gave myself a little more credit. I was distanced from that time period, so I was able to look at it a little more objectively. It’s trippy, listening to things with time and distance. As a writer, maybe you feel the same way – when you first write something, and then you give it a few months or a year and you reread it, you’re much more objective because you’re not so in the moment.
Are there plans for more releases like Towers going forward?
Yeah, definitely. There’s a stockpile of things that I’d like to share, and that I will share. There’s definitely more where that came from.
Going into Myopia, you’ve alluded to feeling the need to see what life could be like outside of Hundred Waters, in which you started experiencing “a bit of an identity crisis.” I’m curious how that presented itself to you – both the moment of crisis and the solution to it.
I think I just needed to find that relationship with myself again. When you’re in a collective or group, and you’re presenting yourself to the world as a group, it’s natural – anybody in a band probably feels the same way – you kind of have to really know your part in it and know your role. With Hundred Waters, to be frank, I think there were elements where I felt maybe not credited for some things that I would do. It was this blurriness where I didn’t really know who was doing what. I think to solve that, I just needed to go off and do things myself, to see what it was that I was doing and find my identity again. That’s the short answer.
There are a lot of elements to what I do and enjoy doing creatively – visually, production-wise, lyrically, in terms of form. I just needed to see those things through and see what an album would look like with just my own vision. It gave me a little more creative control, and I could learn more about myself, my strengths, and my limitations. I think learning your strengths and weaknesses is really important; you’re not as hard on yourself for the weaknesses because you know your strengths.
Now that the album is finished, do you feel like that blurriness has cleared up a bit? Do you see your roles in the band in a new light?
Totally. I think when you challenge yourself to do things alone, you have a lot more appreciation for the things that other people are doing. It spun things in a new light for me. It made me see a bit more clearly what elements everyone was contributing, appreciate them, and just live my own existence and find myself again. With Hundred Waters, we really lived and breathed that band so fully. We lived together, I was in a relationship for half of it with one of the bandmates, we toured together. We really were enmeshed as a group, which was great for the art. But on a personal level, I think it was good that I found a bit of my way outside of that.
Some of the songs on Myopia came together while you were still playing with the band. Did that complicate what you were working on outside of it, given that you wanted it to have its own identity?
A little bit. It was just a decision to keep the songs to myself instead of sharing them and making them live within the band. I was a lot more private with them. This album feels pretty personal to me – it’s like a diary. I just kept it to myself, worked on it myself, as opposed to even sharing them with someone or showing them to the band.
How did joining Bonobo for their global tour in 2022 inspire you, not just vocally and creatively, but also in terms of the places you got to visit? How much of that inspiration ended up seeping into your personal process?
It definitely influenced something. A lot of the record was pretty much recorded by the time I went on that tour, so sonically it didn’t influence it much. But it definitely influenced new songs that I wrote on that tour and the next record that I’m starting to work on. Traveling had a huge influence on me. I got to see a lot of places I’ve never been to, experience a lot of cultures I’ve never experienced, meet a lot of people. That tour was huge for me, but I’m not sure if it influenced this record a ton. I shot the music videos during my time off from that tour, so it was a part of my life. Also, the group and the community and the crew of that whole experience – I just learned so much about so many things and ways to put a show together. The level of production on that tour was really inspiring and new to me.
How did it feel different from the sort of entanglement of being in a band? Was it refreshing?
Just having one role – just picking up a microphone and singing those songs – I didn’t have any equipment to set up. I wasn’t loading in and out of a venue or driving a tour van or all the other elements of touring that we did as Hundred Waters. It was really refreshing to just do one thing, and the level of those shows afforded that luxury of only wearing one hat, really. Everyone was in their own specialized role, which was really nice. As a performer, I really appreciated it because I only had one thing to think about, which freed up a lot of space. I could put more time into the performance or the costuming. And it wasn’t my project, which was a bit refreshing too, so I could detach a little. I do crave playing my own music because that’s where my passion is, but it was nice to simplify and separate all those roles. There were so many people making it happen, and they’ve worked together for over a decade as a band and crew, so they really knew each other and how they worked. It was a really well-oiled machine.
I know you gathered a lot of field recordings while making Myopia. One moment that really stands out to me is what sounds like street noise set against the harp instrumental ‘City Rats’.
That was actually me at a bus stop with my iPhone. I wrote a lot of the album in New York, and that’s definitely the city I associate it with.
Were there influences that were outside of New York or that felt like an escape from your environment at the time?
When you phrase it like that, the music is that place. I was moving around so much. We were finishing the last Hundred Waters record, and that’s when I first broke away from the group a little bit. I went to New York to live with a friend and experience things and find my way. I hear the sounds of New York, the sirens, the garbage dump, all these crazy sounds all the time. It’s a very chaotic place, but the one thing that always centers me when I travel is the music. The music is that oasis.
With the harp song in particular, I actually took that harp with me all over New York. It was a little mini harp. I was trying to learn that piece for weeks, I had to practice it all the time. I would take the harp with me in a cab to the park, I would just play that thing everywhere. The harp was the thing that centered me, a place I could get lost in. I really love learning pieces and getting things under my fingers because it is a kind of meditation. You just blank out and practice this thing over and over until your fingers can do it. It’s an abstract answer, but the harp was the island that I would go to and take around with me. I do love being outdoors and going to parks, but the idea of going somewhere for a vacation or respite – to me, it’s the same thing if I can get lost in practicing something.
I love how you introduce your definition of myopia on the album simply by making it the subject of the opening track, ‘All I See Is You’. I’m curious how that idea started to resonate with you more broadly – not just as a metaphor for relationships with other people, but also in how you perceive yourself and the world.
Yeah, that’s honestly more of how I think of myopia when I think of the word. I know it is quite literally – love is blind, obsession, how you only see one person when you’re falling for them. But for me, I’ve always been interested in the role of the self in love for somebody else. Particularly with Myopia, it’s about how myopic we are in general with how we see ourselves and challenging the lens we see things. For me, this life is about expanding as much as possible – expanding your view, expanding your perception, expanding your awareness. And those things do take work. I’m always trying to check myself: Am I really seeing the full picture? Am I really seeing things as they are? How much am I in my own head?
I guess that comes with making music or art in general – you spend so much time with yourself, creating your own world. Snapping out of that world, then, it’s like, what is real? What is perception? These are just ongoing themes in my life. As an introverted, creative person, what is the full picture? Also, in terms of how we see ourselves, I think we can be really limiting and critical. We can be really hard on ourselves and not see how amazing we are or how amazing the things around us are. It’s really trying to work on unlearning the things we’re taught that put limitations on us. Especially now, all of our information can be quite myopic too, in these streams and channels that are fed to us. I do try to at least pick up books I would never pick up or do things that break the cycle a bit, that challenge me, so I’m not completely in my bubble.
Another thing I love about the record is the way some songs tend to dissipate and pick themselves back up. ‘One and Only’ ends with this recording of – I’m not sure who it is.
My goddaughter, she’s a little kid.
Tell me how that came about.
I had the kind of ballad version of the song, and I was trying to reimagine it with something a little more upbeat to see what it could become. I overheard a beat at a restaurant I was at, and I was like, “That’s the vibe I’m going to put to the chords.” It happened very naturally and became its own separate version of the song, and then my friend’s kid came over and literally sang this bit into the microphone unprompted. It just felt really natural to put them together, I don’t really know why. It kind of gave the track listing a bit of a lift and helped it transition into ‘Autograph’. A lot of the record was very instinctual and serendipitous – what happened happened, and I kept a lot of it. I also got rid of a lot of it. Weeding out things that didn’t need to be there was a particular challenge, too.
I’m fascinated by the relationship between electronic, classical, and pop music on the album, which seems to affect the overall flow. The two singles at the center of the album, ‘Autograph’ and ‘Lure’, which revolve around this push-and-pull of desire, are also the most pop-forward. Do you tend to reach for or associate different sounds or instruments depending on the emotional dynamics you’re bringing out? You said it’s pretty instinctual, but looking back, do you feel like there’s a thread there?
Subconsciously, probably yeah. A lot of what I write is probably also circumstantial and depends on what I have around me at the time. My environment and instruments change so much that it’s probably more about what’s right in front of me. Once I started collecting little synthesizers and drum machines to travel with, that’s probably where I started making more of the sound you hear on ‘Autograph’ and ‘Lure’. I don’t think of it super intentionally. In my mind, all these different genres, classical and dance music, are really similar to me; they just exist in different time periods. Even the idea of time – I don’t know how to articulate this and it probably sounds really woo, but I don’t think of classical music as the past music and electronic music as the future music. It’s the same thing, just different tools. Classical music – those were the pop songs at the time, those were the dance songs. People were waltzing to this music at parties; it had a different place than what eventually became art museum music. Because my process is so serendipitous and instinctual, I have to trust there’s a reason those tools are there, or that there’s a reason I picked up that guitar or drum machine.
You talked about how so much of this record was about doing it yourself and having creative control. Do you feel the need to stick to a similarly solitary process in the future, or does it lead you to bringing other people into it?
I think it gave me a much clearer sense of what I’m good at and what maybe someone else might be better at in certain areas. The short answer is no, I’m not interested in working completely solo. I did it and learned what I needed to learn. But the next record I think is going to be much more collaborative, it’s going to have a lot more input. Because I have a clearer sense of self and identity in what I can bring to the table, that will only make collaborating easier moving forward. I want to open up that process again, for sure. I have a lot more respect for the more technical side, I know what someone else could do that maybe I couldn’t. I’m interested in exploring that more.
In what ways has it made you more confident in yourself?
I’m more confident asking for help, because I know how far I can take something, and I know how much time it will take. But I do feel that I challenged myself to do this project in the way I did, and I’m proud that I did it. I know there’s still so much more I have to learn. I wouldn’t say the record made me more confident; it opened up just as many areas where I want to learn more. It was humbling.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Nicole Miglis’ Myopia is out now via Sargent House.
Source: Our Culture – ourculturemag.com
