Do you ever, after listening to a song, get that feeling of “I want more of this, I need more of this”? That is exactly what Nostalgia did to me a week ago, and might do to you, too. The tune lures you in with appeasing harmonies, keeps you hooked with simple yet hard-hitting words, and finishes you with some heart-wrenching piano. Four minutes and 25 seconds of pure beautiful melancholy.
But the one song is all we get for now, and that was not enough for this music lover. So I decided to reach out to the artist; and luckily for me, he seemed as excited to chat about it as I was. So we set a date, and the days following the release of Nostalgia, I’m on the phone with Alfie Sharp.
What’s most striking about Alfie is his genuineness. Whether we are talking about his story or his music, he seems open and honest about it all. Unprompted, he keeps gushing over the unexpected success of his one song, that ended up at number 2 on the r’n’b charts of iTunes in the United Kingdom (right behind Jorja Smith and Burna Boy’s Be Honest) in just one day.
“I mean I woke up yesterday morning, he tells me on October 26th, and I thought ‘Oh, I’ll just check the charts’, and it was number 6! I couldn’t believe it, I just started to scream like ‘Mum, I’m in the charts’ and then it dropped to number 7 and I was like ‘Oh, there it goes’ (…) and then I checked again in an hour, and it was like at number 4! And then my friend rang me and it was at number 3! Then it was number 2! And I was just like ‘What is going on?!’”
Born and raised in Nottingham, in the UK, Alfie has played the piano and sung ever since he was a child. He recalls gathering around at holidays and family parties, and singing together. He grew up listening to different genres and artists – old school r’n’b, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Lily Allen, Lana Del Rey… But he has only started actually working on music himself a couple of years ago. “Writing my own stuff is something that I have always wanted to do, but I never really found the opportunity, until I met some fellow artist that now looks after me, who is my manager- Nina Smith. She basically got me into songwriting.”
Nostalgia was his first. Written in two parts between a studio and Alfie’s house, the song, as we can hear today, took roughly three months to record. “I knew exactly that I wanted harmonies like that to bring the intro in. It was all in my head.” But then adjustments had to be made. A perfectionist’s way of creation. “The guy that worked with me, Tom Shawcraft, and I- we had endless conversations of me saying ‘no, we need to change this’ or ‘we need to put this in’, ‘can we add this in?’, ‘can we cut this out?’ (…) It had to be right. And I wouldn’t have released it if it weren’t right.”
As for what inspired the song itself, the 17-year-old explains that it was born out of a low point of his young life. “I thought that I’d never be able to do music because of an illness. I’m fine now, but I thought I’d never be able to do the thing I loved the most again. So I had the idea of this song. It was more emotion than anything. The emotion of fear that I’d never be able to do it again.”
Alfie plans on putting out more music in the world, soon. At least four songs are currently in the works, and he hopes on releasing them by the end of 2019. “I just want to be able to make music, I don’t want to blow up the charts. I’m just a local lad from Clifton in Nottingham and it’s like a dream to me, really. (…) If I can make a sustainable living out of it, I’ll be happy.”
Leave a Reply