Young & Sick
You can’t really call Young & Sick a band. Or an artist. It’s the realization, perhaps, of the imagination of Nick Van Hofwegen. It’s a music and art project, a cross between the visual and the audio, the sight and the sound.
The four-person group only recently started playing live shows together, but it has already made the festival rounds at Coachella and South by Southwest this year. Like the rest of the project, its live performances are a collaboration of music and visual art, featuring backdrops created by Van Hofwegen.
“The visual element is very important to us,” he says. He creates the backgrounds for each song specifically for each set. “I try to tailor them (the backgrounds) to the areas that we’re going to.”
He’s taken the surroundings of St. Louis into account and has started working on his Loufest visuals months in advance.
The project’s first full-length album came out in April, a synthesized rock release with a lighter sound. Van Hofwegen says the response to it has been overwhelming.
“Your first piece of work, your first catalog, it’s a scary and beautiful thing to do,” he says.
Van Hofwegen doesn’t shy away from the experimental. For live shows, Young & Sick plays around with the length and structure of songs. The visual elements of the show are inextricably tied to the music and vice versa. The process of creating either type of art is the same, Van Hofwegen explains.
“I don’t see them as apart in an way,” he says. It’s why he chose to keep the project’s name the same for his art and its music. Van Hofwegen has done album art for Foster the People, Maroon 5 and Robin Thicke. It’s always been both art and music for him, for as long as he can remember.
“I always drew, and I always sang and played guitar,” Van Hofwegen says.
Guitar was the first instrument he learned how to play. In high school, Van Hofwegen took his talents to a series of bands that didn’t quite make it.
“I had all the friends who were angry 16-year-olds, and I would pretend to be angry with them and play loud rock music,” he says, adding “And that taught me a lot.”
Van Hofwegen spent years playing his guitar in bars. An avid vinyl collector, Van Hofwegen released his debut album as a vinyl LP. Inside some records were original works by the artist himself. He’s constantly tying together his art and his music.
He loves the two equally and values putting art over image across the board. For him, this means focusing on what he and the project are creating, rather than the way it might be perceived. Van Hofwegen concentrates on the integrity of his work and lets it go from there.
“I like the fact that art has to speak for itself,” he says.
