Good Future’s Nathan Shepherd on music mashups, TikTok fame and reviving ‘80s pop
Nathan Shepherd is the Manchester-based multi-instrumentalist flooding TikTok with his unique style and music mashups at the request of his followers. The only one he couldn’t bring himself to do? Dua Lipa x The Beatles.
There’s no doubt you will have come across his videos online. NATHAN SHEPHERD, the groovily-clad mastermind behind GOOD FUTURE, has made a name for himself on TikTok with his brilliant music mashups, performing contemporary pop songs in the style of distinctive or classic artists. Self-described as ‘thought provoking synth pop mashups with an underlying awkward arrogance,” Good Future’s videos have skyrocketed in popularity over the past year and for good reason.
The multi-instrumentalist’s ability to arrange songs, play and record all the instruments and bring them together in a video while flawlessly encapsulating the traits and sounds of the world’s top musical artists is no easy feat. He’s even managed to make TAYLOR SWIFT sound bloody cool by performing Shake it Off in the style of Fleetwood Mac. Now that’s talent. Between Shepherd’s striking appearance and knack for both music and, evidently, vintage shopping, I was desperate to find out more about the mystery that is Good Future - mashups, original tunes and all.
Appropriate to both the digital times we’re living in and Good Future’s music, whose lyrics historically mine themes of technology and the state of the world, we are met with the internet hiccups that we’ve all grown accustomed to. It’s noon in Boston and I’m opposite a video-less Zoom window on my laptop. A wonderfully distinctive Mancunian accent speaks to me through the dark screen.
“I’m just trying to sort it out,” chuckles Shepherd, who’s over 3,000 miles away in Stockport - a stone’s throw from Manchester and birthplace of bands like BLOSSOMS. Moments later he appears, shaggy haired with hoop-pierced ears and dressed in a ‘70’s style polo shirt that’s reminiscent of the Bay City Rollers, retro ‘tash and all. Shepherd’s laid-back energy and Northern charm suits his appearance perfectly, a confirmation that he truly walks the walk and talks the talk. In other words, he looks fucking cool.
Charlotte O’Neill: Tell me about yourself. How did your musical career begin?
Nathan Shepherd: It was a while ago now. I started playing guitar when I was about nine. I used to play football and stuff when I was a kid and then I was like, I kinda wanna be a rock‘n’roll star, you know? I picked up the guitar at a young age, started playing that and then got into a few bands throughout my teens. They didn’t really progress that much. We enjoyed it and made some good tunes and that, but we didn’t really get out of Manchester or get known in the way that this now has because of social media. But then, we didn’t really utilise social media as much. I’m 23, so I’ve been playing for you know, a while. I probably should be better than I am considering how long I’ve been doing it for, but it is what it is.
Shepherd talks about social media as if it was slightly before his time, like some futuristic concept back in a much simpler world before masses of us became both reliant on it and addicted to it. Mark my words, when he said that he was only 23 it was the first time I’ve felt old in my 26 years of living, a corpse in the company of a cool kid. I ask how many instruments he plays. “I play guitar, bass, keyboards...I do play drums but I just have this at the moment,” he explains as he holds up his trusty drum pad to the camera. “This room isn’t big enough for an actual drum kit and I don’t think the neighbours would enjoy hearing one.”
CO: Are you self-taught? How did you learn?
NS: Yeah, I did have a guitar teacher when I was younger, but it was more or less...you know. It didn’t go how I wanted it to or whatever. I started teaching myself, and then I got another guitar teacher that taught me a little bit more and got me a bit more confident playing. But yeah, most of it is self-taught. I sort of just transferred what I knew from guitars to piano, and then bass is practically just a guitar with less strings.
The ease in which he describes being a one-man-band for the mashups makes me shake my head. Shepherd’s the goalkeeper, midfielder and the attacker; his pastel painted fingernails plucking and strumming away. “You make it sound so easy! I can’t even play the spoons,” I tell him. “Neither can I,” he laughs. “I can’t play the spoons!”
I wonder if there was a specific moment in his life where he decided he was going to be a musician when he grew up. “Yeah literally! I think I watched something on TV, it must have been T in the Park or even Glastonbury, and I was just watching these musicians play guitar in front of crowds and I was like, I wanna do that!” Shepherd has an undeniable glimmer in his eye while he reminisces, and meanwhile I try not to slip into an existential crisis as I remember I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. “Yeah, that’s when I realised I wanted to be like that. I want to be that guy on stage playing in front of hundreds if not thousands of people. So hopefully we’re going in the right direction.”
CO: Being from the Manchester area, you’ve had no shortage of local musical influences. Which artists or bands have been the most inspiring to you?
NS: It’s been loads! My mum and dad have been a massive influence on my musical taste. They were teens or young adults in the ‘80s so they had all that scene. So I’m massively inspired by the ‘80s scene, and obviously massively inspired by the Manchester scene as well. It probably doesn’t come across in the music that I create now, but it has had a big influence. I’d say now, there’s loads of artists I’m inspired by. I love pop, like chart music and stuff like that, because I just love writing songs. Pop music’s obviously got it down to a T. There’s loads, I could go on about it forever.
CO: How did Good Future come to be? Is it mainly a solo endeavour?
NS: We had a band previously called The Nix which disbanded, mostly due to musical differences and people wanting to do their own thing. And I made Good Future from that, started that on my own making my own music. Then we kind of came back together again and said: ‘Let’s keep doing it, but let’s not all be writing songs, we’re just all gonna help each other out.’ I still play with my mates from the previous band, plus a new drummer, and they basically play the songs that I write. That’s why we call ourselves a collection of musicians, because they still have their own projects as well and write their own stuff.
@goodfuturemusic Reply to @babe_edr ‘in da club’ except it’s ✨led zeppelin✨ #indaclub #50cent #ledzeppelin #fyp #summer ♬ original sound - good future
Good Future, which started in 2018, only did a handful of gigs before Covid hit, putting them practically under the radar. “That’s when I decided to take a little bit more control and try to get myself out there more,” Shepherd explains. It was the global pandemic that led to the birth of the mashups. After a heavy songwriting phase in the first lockdown, Shepherd realised he had an album’s worth of songs but nobody to release them to nor a platform to release them on. “I literally just thought, ‘fuck it’,” he shares in the most cut and dried Stockport pronunciation. “I’m not gonna care what people think about me or what people have to say. I just thought, I can do it, I can make the videos, I can film myself and I can do it in front of a camera.”
Shepherd then went on to download TikTok and his first video hit 30 thousand views. “From there it kind of snowballed,” he says as he scratches his head. “I kept doing it, kept up with it.” At the start, he wasn’t confident enough to do the mashups and sing. “I saw other people doing it,” he explains. “It’s not original what I’m doing and I know it’s not.” What the other people don’t have, though, is Shepherd’s unique look nor his impeccable impersonations. Whatever confidence he may have lacked at first has now found its way back to him, and it’s evident in each new video posted. The hip sways widen, the camera eye-contact intensifies, the impressions more dramatic.
“I’ve got to a stage now with music where I kind of just need to do it and not hold back or have any doubts about it,” he says. His first mashup was Zac Efron’s Bet On It from High School Musical, but in the style of TAME IMPALA. The days of Zac Efron singing on Disney Channel may feel light years away, and yet Shepherd seamlessly paired one of movie franchise’s most memorable tunes with some of Australia’s most psychedelic sounds. Genius. “Yeah, that one did alright,” he says modestly.
CO: How do these infamous mashups come together? What’s the process of deconstructing and reconstructing the sounds and songs?
NS: I find the key of each song or the chords in each song and build on it from there. So if we’re going back to the first one - the Tame Impala one - I was going to start a series where I was gonna take Disney Channel songs and turn them into popular songs. So Bet On It was, I think, in the key of C, and then Borderline by Tame Impala was also in the key of C. So then it just kind of fell into each other and it just kind of worked.
CO: What’s the most difficult mashup request you’ve received? Have you ever attempted one and given up because you couldn’t hack it?
NS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think all of them come with certain levels of difficulty. Someone asked for the Beatles except it’s Levitating by DUA LIPA. I’m a massive Beatles fan, and because of that, I think I was so self-conscious that there are also other massive Beatles fans out there, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried it in so many different styles, like early Beatles when they did all the head bobbles and that, and later Beatles when it’s a bit more trippy and psychedelic and I was just like...I can’t do that right now. I might try and come back to it one day but yeah I think I was just being too much of a critic on myself.
Radio X shared Good Future’s Dua Lipa Don’t Start Now in the style of the ARCTIC MONKEYS mashup and said it blew their minds. I’m curious to find out if any of the artists Shepherd’s featured have reached out to him. “Erm...no,” he replies quizzically, stroking his chin. “OH, yes!” He turns and points at the camera, eyes widening. “I tell a lie!” We both burst out laughing as he tells me that actually, Julian Casablancas, of all people, had slipped his mind. “I know, I know, humour me,” he says, eyes lit up. “I freaked out a little bit.” The Strokes frontman had seen and commented on one of Nathan’s mashup videos in which he was impersonating him, and convincingly so, while performing a JUSTIN BIEBER song.
The power of virality on the internet is incredible, which of course is no surprise to anyone, but the past two years of this strange new world have accelerated it. Take young UK-based multi-instrumentalist NANDI BUSHELL who, at the ripe age of 11-years-old, is now rockstar-level famous after her drum-heavy covers of songs made her an internet sensation. After a year or so of Bushell’s videos blossoming in popularity, she’s being brought on stage by Dave Grohl and having home jam sessions with Matt Helders. One thing Bushell and Shepherd have in common aside from their remarkable cover videos and musical talent? Radio X has shared their viral videos to their 345k Instagram followers. The correct eyes are certainly watching over Good Future.
CO: Have you got stopped in the street yet for being recognised from TikTok?
NS: I had that on the weekend, yeah! I have that when I go out now, which is funny. I’m hoping one day to be known as the guy from Good Future. But no, TikTok guy is cool, you know, at least people are recognising me! I can’t knock that.
We discuss how eerily specific the TikTok algorithm is, and how neither of us fully understand it. “One day one video could get, like, 10 thousand views, which is still good,” he shrugs, “but then yeah another day, one could get 500 thousand.” Or try millions of views, as he humbly received with his 50 Cent In Da Club in the style of Led Zeppelin mashup. Nathan admits he thought it was rubbish at first: “I hated it but, you know, everyone loves that one.”
CO: Your thought-provoking mashup videos highlight the importance of musicians having a unique, distinct style, allowing them to be instantly recognisable upon listening. How would you describe Good Future’s sound?
NS: I think for what’s on Spotify and stuff out there at the moment, it’s probably a bit more indie/ pop-y. Quite a few times, people have related the style of that music to that of The 1975. I can agree it was. I think at the time I was writing it, I was a little bit too obsessed with The 1975. There’s probably loads of inspiration in those songs that I don’t realise. It’s synthy, pop-y, ‘80s inspired, with the newer stuff probably even more so.
CO: On the topic of distinct style, you’ve got your look nailed. If you could raid someone’s wardrobe, who would it be?
NS: I think you know already, it’s HARRY STYLES, innit? It’s got to be Harry Styles.
Shepherd’s lips turn up into a side smile as he states this matter-of-factly. If there’s one person on this planet that can bring us all together, all opposing parties and forces and groups, it’s Harry Styles and I’m certain of it. So is Shepherd. On the question of fashion’s role in music, Shepherd declares that for him, it goes hand in hand. “I think without fashion, music kind of loses identity, in a way. Ever since I was listening to The Clash and The Jam and stuff like that, and I wanted to be a mod and a rocker at the same time. Yeah, it’s a massive thing for me.”
As well as Shepherd’s fashionable clothes and locks, part of his look is the numerous quirky tattoos he’s dotted with. One that stands out is the ‘1967’ on his bicep. I have to ask this Beatles lover if it’s a Sgt. Pepper tattoo. “I do make the joke,” he grins. “All my friends know I’m Beatles obsessed. So I do make the joke that it’s a reference to the Beatles, to when John Lennon met Yoko Ono. But it’s not, it’s the birth year of my mum and dad.” I’ll admit, I fully thought I had that one in the bag. I was prematurely patting myself on the back for my Beatles knowledge there, only to be crushed by the weight of a far more adorable and sentimental explanation. We’ll let him have it...
CO: What’s next for Good Future?
NS: Essentially just gigging! We’ve got a gig in Manchester on the 24th of September. So getting gigging, releasing some songs which will be released over the space of however many months. And keeping up with the TikTok.
After requesting an Elvis mashup to pay homage to my American roots, I ask Shepherd my final question which cuts him deeply. But as he’s Mancunian, it has to be done. “Gun to head,” I ask. “Noel or Liam?” With a sharp inhale, he flings his head back, palms to his face, and lets out a giant Oh my god. “Such a divide, innit,” he says. Sitting there for a moment in thought, we eventually agree it’s quite the fateful question. “It is! It’s huge. Um, I’m gonna say Liam. Obviously for musical credibility, probably Noel. But just all around, Liam. He’s just hilarious.” In the words of Nathan: Peace, Love, Good Future.
Good Future’s new single, Socials, is out now on Spotify and Apple Music.
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