Inside Track: Louis Tomlinson 'How Did I Get Here?'

Photo: Susann Bosslau

Louis Tomlinson’s hit album How Did I Get Here? is a showcase for the many talents of Nicolas Rebscher.

How Did I Get Here? is the third solo album by Louis Tomlinson, and Nicolas Rebscher’s credits include keyboards, guitars, bass, backing vocals, percussion and drums, as well as songwriting, engineering, mixing and production. He co‑produced five and was sole producer of seven of the 12 songs of the standard edition of the album.

Rebscher and Tomlinson had previously collaborated on the One Direction star’s second solo album Faith In The Future. That album hit number one in the UK, so when it came to album number three, the idea was to build on this success. However, whereas the 14‑track standard edition of Faith In The Future features 10 producers in total, this time around, “They were looking for one producer who is at the heart of everything, to make it more of a continuous story, so they asked me.”

House Music

By this point, several of the writers who had worked on Faith In The Future — Tomlinson himself, Theo Hutchcraft of synthpop duo Hurts, David Sneddon, Rob Harvey, Dave Gibson and Joe Cross — were already involved, along with Matthias Wang. “The team actually had already done two weeks of sessions before I joined, finding sounds and a new direction. Three songs on the album, ‘On Fire’, ‘Lucid’ and a bonus track called ‘The Observer’, came from those early sessions.”

Work on the new album took place in multiple locations, with Rebscher holding it all together. “We started in April 2024 with writing sessions at Wendyhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush in West London, which has a beautiful small control room. It’s close to a railway, and you can hear the sounds in some places on the record, for example on the guitars on ‘Broken Bones’. I love that vibe. When I came into the project, I decided to continue the alternative independent rock sound of the second album, and in particular of ‘Out Of My System’, which was pretty intense and bass‑riff heavy. I was like, ‘OK, let’s stay in this slightly dark vibe, with the low guitar.’ During the sessions at Wendyhouse, ‘Broken Bones’ and ‘Last Night’ were written.

Nicolas Rebscher: "During writing, I do the engineering myself. It’s all very simple. It’s not about equipment. It’s about creating a vibe."

“Writing sessions usually involved three to four people. There’s the artist, the producer and one or two topliners. I came in with my Mac M1 laptop with Cubase and UA Apollo x4 interface. I’m on Cubase, because for me it’s the perfect combination of being precise and being creative. I like how they implemented MIDI, and how you can modulate every knob. You can just drag and drop into every bit of the DAW. During writing, I do the engineering myself. It’s all very simple. It’s not about equipment. It’s about creating a vibe.

Initial writing sessions took place at Wendyhouse Studio in London.

“Before doing writing sessions I tend to prepare some drum loops and synth sounds, mostly from Splice, and guitar sounds, so there’s an instant vibe. If needed, I can press a key and people go, ‘Oh, that’s a cool sound.’ With ‘Broken Bones’ I found the synth samples that open the track, and some loops for the beat. People in the room got excited and we built a song from these seeds, with Louis’ lyrics referring to him breaking his shoulder when celebrating his last number one record. I played my electric guitar parts through the DI of the Apollo. I always crank it up to 11, or whatever the maximum is, and then I take off some highs to get this really roaring guitar sound. A couple of times during the sessions I tuned the guitar an octave down to make it sound like a bass.”

Getting Away From It All

The next stop took the team to the residential Angelic Studios, an hour north‑west of London, to get away from the big city and write in a “safe space”. The same approach informed a week of writing at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, for which Rebscher was not present. “One of the most important things for the album happened in Real World, with Mathi Wang writing and producing, and Theo and Jamie present. They wrote ‘Sunflowers’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Sanity’, which are a little bit of a different to the other songs on the album. Mathi brought in this dreamy, trippy, more electronic sound. It was amazing to me and at first I was puzzled, but then I understood: ‘OK, this is a very fresh side of Louis.’ I was really happy about that, and these tracks ended up being co‑produced by Mathi and I. This merger of Mathi’s sonic vision and mine ended up influencing the whole album.

Nicolas Rebscher (left) with Louis Tomlinson and Matthias Wang (right), another of the central figures behind the How Did I Get Here? album.

“During these UK sessions, the idea was growing in Louis’ head of being far away to really write the album. He saw the UK sessions a bit like foreplay, though several of the songs ended up on the album. But he had this vision of going somewhere exotic and warm, to create a new sound. In the end, we booked three weeks of sessions in May 2025 in elstudio in Santa Teresa, on the west coast of Costa Rica. It’s an amazing place, with views of the ocean and the jungle, an ocean bathtub, swimming pool, and cool areas to hang out, and so on. It was rainy season, and we had thunderstorms every night, with the power sometimes going, but we had beautiful sunshine during the days.

“The studio has a very well‑equipped recording room and a cool control room, and people were writing there. We wanted to have the choice of the professional setup in elstudio and a more homely, chill environment, so I also set up in a huge, 80...