John Mark Nelson: Hideaway EP Bio

In the summer of 2019 John Mark Nelson and his wife found themselves packed into a hatchback driving west with all their belongings. Still in his mid-20s, the Minnesota native was already reaching for a new beginning. His last proper full-length album had been released two years earlier, and he wasn’t sure what the future held for his own music. Hopes and excitement were high, but little did they know that right as they’d find themselves further from family and friends than they’d ever been, the bottom would drop out of life as everyone knew it. Yet, just as many made the best of comparatively bleak times, Nelson dove into what brought him fulfillment to tune out the dissonance. Little things like hiking and camping his way through the natural beauty of California, or working as an engineer on Taylor Swift’s re-recorded Red album. But more on that later.

Nelson’s musical journey started in a somewhat novel way, being more intrigued by his father’s dusty recording equipment than he necessarily was the instruments that surrounded it. He found excitement in layering sounds together, and was on a path to mastering the art of tracking before he came close to being proficient on guitar or piano. Early on he took inspiration from Bon Iver who was making music one state over. And it wasn’t long before he was uploading his early songs to a nacient Bandcamp, taking a cue from another midwest artist he looked up to, Sufjan Stevens, who was an early adopter of the service. Nelson would subsequently be discovered and anointed by the local Minneapolis NPR affiliate (The Current) as a kind of musical wunderkind while still in high school. He was thrust into a spotlight of sorts that opened several doors regardless of his own readiness to walk through them with much forethought. Something he can see clearly now with hindsight. Just as quickly as he secured a booking agent, signed to a label, and went on tour with a newly formed band, things would begin to unravel as they often do.

As Nelson was having bouts of wooziness with the ups and downs of his own career as a performer, he was also finding new avenues of creativity as a producer and engineer among his circle of musician friends and peers in the midwest. Word of his skill and inventiveness as a collaborator in the studio spread, eventually leading to Jeremy Messersmith singing his praises to none other than Dan Wilson. Known to many for his band Semisonic’s ubiquitous hit “Closing Time”, but more recently as a Grammy winning producer and songwriter for artists including Adele, Mitski, Leon Bridges and among many others the aforementioned Swift. It was an opportunity to work with Wilson at his production studio in Los Angeles that found Nelson and his wife uprooting themselves for the 2000 mile drive from the Twin Cities to Los Angeles.

Thus began the story of the Hideaway EP, with Nelson reinvigorated as an artist, the songs were equally inspired by and conceived within the  competing forces of isolated pandemic living and his experience working at one of the most currently relevant production studios in the world. Lyrically, allusions are made to the intimacy and comfortable safety of the one room apartment he and his wife shared when they first landed out west, and were subsequently forced to withdraw from everything. The title track “Hideaway” drew inspiration from a conversation with Nelson’s friend and sometimes collaborator Jenny Owen Youngs where they ruminated on the confined and isolated nature of existence during the early days of the pandemic, and how entire worlds shrunk down to our domestic confines. The song was recorded and produced for the most part in Nelson’s apartment, with him forced to play all instruments as a result of the lockdown. 

The songs also find Nelson examining the dynamics of relationships; how people can seek to reinvent themselves through them, and how they can grow stronger or codify into staleness over time. On “Bright”, a simple fast picked classical guitar swells to a massive soundscape as he contemplates the brightness his at the time newlywed wife brought to his life in the otherwise dark days during a downward moment in his career as an artist. “Perfect Stranger”, a song built around swirling, ambient piano, reappraises the word stranger to describe the perfect person to meet in the perfect moment as a chance for renewal and a path towards a future ideal, as opposed to the more standoffish interpretation of the term. While “Don’t Look Back” taps into the equally enticing trap of nostalgia, and our collective tendency to pine for the rose colored hue of the past when it comes to relationships or otherwise at the expense of a present that will take its place in time.

Nelson attributes much of his growth in both songwriting and production to his experience working with new artists every day, and describes the time under Wilson’s tutelage as the most concentrated learning period of his entire life. He began to experiment with approaches that fell outside his established habits. Such as pushing a song’s tempo faster than felt comfortable, adding distortion to any track that would stomach it, or vacillating the levels on the sound board to impractical highs and lows just to hear the results.

After two years in Los Angeles, he found himself with so many of his own ideas to pursue, that it made sense to step back from the job that brought him out there in order to more fully focus on his own songwriting and recording. And Nelson has been decidedly prolific in the time since. The forthcoming EP is also joined by the recently released ambient LPs Signa One and Signa Two,  collections of instrumental compositions inspired by the natural world that he plans to add to as an ongoing series, exploring a path opened to him when he began delving into the works of Goldmund, Riceboy Sleeps and Jon Brion. Once again, Nelson is plunging into the unknown. “I don’t really know what the future of my career as a performer looks like,” he shares, “but I know I have tons and tons of music to make.”