Ones2Watch Home

Photo by Carly Hough

A great band can come from anywhere. Friends, family, strangers, all have come together to create great bands. Nicole Rowe and Omar Akrouche, better known as Worthitpurchase, have their jobs to credit for their band’s creation. Both were staff engineers at Tiny Telephone in LA and worked on their own music in between projects for other artists. The duo joined us from LA via Zoom to talk about their upcoming self-titled album, playing live shows, and cringy 2008 YouTube videos. 

OnesToWatch: Who is Worthitpurchase? Both as individuals and as a band?

Omar: Worthitpurchase is an experimental recording project based in Los Angeles, California comprised of Nicole Rowe and Omar Akrouche, two home recording enthusiasts. Who also happen to be best friends for a long time. My name is Omar. I record and mix. 

Nicole: As individuals we both produce music and record music and mix music for other artists as well. We’re both, hmm who am I as an individual. I like to think I’m a nice person. I don’t know.

Omar: Nicole’s answer can be “I don’t know yet.” My answer can be “listening enthusiast.”

Do you want to describe each other as individuals? 

Omar: Nicole is a master of aesthetics as you can tell by her background. The most evocative songwriter that I know. Style master.

Nicole: Thank you. Omar is also a very incredible songwriter and I think writes in ways that surprise me and inspire me. He also cares deeply about the aesthetics of sound and tone and is a great person to work with. He’s a really funny, quirky, strange man. 

Love it! Sometimes it’s easier to describe someone else rather than yourself. This is the first album where you intentionally set out to curate a collection of songs over several years. What was it like creating a body of work in this way?

Omar: This is the longest amount of time we’ve ever had to make a record. This is our third album. Our first two albums were very much made under the classical constraints of making a record which would be money and time. In our case mostly time. We have always worked in studios, we have always found ways to work during the day in the studios on what we’re working on as a laborer and then in the evenings, or off days, or other sneaky times, we’d go in and make our own stuff which is how Worthitpurchase started just making stuff in a studio at night. We made our first two albums really fast and then this album we kind of made our own studio and made our own album in our own time. Which took longer and we also had more life stuff happening. This is the first album we’ve made as adults. We’ve made so much music and are sheltered from the world in a way and I feel like this was an album where we had so many constraints and it was a learning curve. 

Nicole: There was a version of the album that existed before that felt a little rushed and not cohesive. There are songs from that original version of the record that we’ll still put out and that we’re really excited about but they just didn’t all work together and it didn’t feel like a statement. It just felt like a bunch of songs. It was our first time where that stylistically didn’t work. When we had made records before that it was just whatever we were writing at the time as a collection and it ended up making sense, but this time it didn’t. It took a little bit of a rework and in a way we had to make a record over again and piece it back together. It was very frustrating because it’s not like a decision we made for ourselves, it was something that happened to us but we’re really happy now with how it ended up and we’re really excited about it. 

That’s a trend I’ve noticed the more artists I speak to there’s a lot of “I didn’t intend to make this it just kind of happened.” I think that’s part of the art and it’s interesting to hear how many artists that happens to. 

Nicole: I know. I think making a record in a lot of ways, when you’re doing it yourself without support from a label or any external support in that way, it ends up being a purge. You write in a burst and record in a burst and then release it. This was the first time we didn’t really do that.

You touched on this a little bit but you were both staff engineers. How does your background in engineering tie into your creative process when creating your music?

Nicole: I think it’s great. It’s great because we can record each other, we can record ourselves. I don’t really know how it wouldn’t tie in to us recording our own music. I think if we were recording with other engineers as well that would be great and just as fun. What do you think, Omar?

Omar: It’s the only thing I know how to do. We’ve always recorded our own music. It’s a very iterative thing.

Nicole: We’ve always recorded our own music even before we knew how to record music. 

Omar: Yeah, I feel like we literally learned how to write songs by the act of self recording. For us it’s very, very intertwined. I would never sing in front of people for years, I was too afraid, but I could record and happily, proudly play a recording for people. It’s not like we started a band and we played at houses and coffee shops. It was very much like we were obsessed with recording and then had to learn how to play shows. We kind of did it the other way around. So self recording is the whole ethos of the band and is also very tied in to how the songs are written. That’s changing a little bit now because we’re playing more.

Nicole: I don’t think we're writing our songs with playing live in mind. We figure out a way to play live. A lot of our production and the way that we record is just as important as the songwriting. We used to finish songs in the studio, we don’t do that anymore but a lot of the parts that we write are spur of the moment while we’re recording.

I wanted to talk about playing live. You’ve expanded Worthitpurchase into a larger live band but it doesn’t sound like that’s impacted your approach to creating music.

Nicole: I wouldn’t say that we’ve expanded into a large live band, I would say that we’ve become a very modular live act and we can expand when we want to. In New York we’re playing as a duo but in LA we’re playing as a five piece band. 

Is that dependent on venue size? City? How do you decide how many people are going to be on stage?

Nicole: It’s how many people can play with us that are available. And how much of a big deal we want to make the show. Sometimes if it’s a last minute show or it’s something where we want to figure out how we can do something just us, it’s intentional as a two piece. But then sometimes we’re like “No we want these various parts to be heard and not played as tapes. We want them to be performed.” It is dependent on the venue a lot of the time too. 

You both provide vocals on the album. How do you decide who sings what? Do you sing what you wrote?

Nicole: We usually only sing what we write. “Something New” was interesting because I contributed lyrics to that song but Omar mostly wrote it. That one was like, this should be a trade off song or else it might be a bit too mean. It made it more fun that way. Usually we’ll sing what we write or we’ve also worked on verses together but the intention was I wanted Omar to sing on a verse and then he will.

Omar: Nicole is my biggest advocate for singing. I’ll usually just sing whatever I write or when Nicole has a line that I love that I want to be back up on, I’ll dub with her.

I love that you’re like “That’s a great line I also need to sing it.”

Omar: Yeah, it wants to feel very reinforced. When we do play with a live band, everyone, even if they don’t have a mic, they’ll always sing their favorite lines and that's a Worthit insider world, anyone can sing anything at any time. 

In your artist bio you mention this return to cringy, nostalgic YouTube videos from 2008 to find a source of comfort. Who were you watching on YouTube in 2008? What cringy videos do you return to for comfort?

Nicole: I love watching really old karaoke videos but like with comic sans lyrics and all the pictures and it’s just so fried looking now. That, or old music videos that haven’t been remastered. That’s not as cringy, but some of them are cringy because they’re so in their time. Those comedy edits of a penguin slapping another penguin but it’s also in montage and it has the editing where it’s flipped around. Just random things that aren’t even famous like Charlie the unicorn, the things that remind me of your everyday YouTube search back in the day. Those are the most nostalgic for me.

Omar: So I was 10 in 2008, I can barely remember what the hell was going on back then but I can remember the song lyric videos that was a blue background and the scripty font. I can remember all sorts of supremely cringe, not cool cringe, videos that were big. 

Nicole: We were talking about Salad Fingers the other day. 

Omar: Yeah, that world for sure.

Who are your OnesToWatch? Who are you listening to? Who do we need to be listening to?

Omar: Jordan Patterson, new album just came out, produced in this very room that I am in.

Nicole: Weshrunk, is a great band out of LA. World Pearce and Brookelen are two members of that band and they’re both incredible musicians and producers and songwriters. 

Omar: I’m also going to shout out my friend Max DiRado, that guy is crazy. He says things on songs that no one would ever say.

Nicole: Also, huge one, Joe Evil.

Omar: Also, Joe Evil! Should be the headline, no shade.