Nate Amos is really, really busy. NME is catching 40 minutes with him in a Manchester hotel lobby towards the end of a months-long odyssey with Water From Your Eyes, the experimental noise-pop duo he’s one half of, supporting Hayley Williams. But we’re here to talk about a different project: This Is Lorelei, his power-pop solo project, with which he’s just kicking off a cycle for his second official album, ‘The Singer In My Band’.
He released its predecessor, ‘Box For Buddy, Box For Star’, two years ago, after around a decade of quietly dropping music on Bandcamp. It became a slow-burning indie favourite, particularly after his friend MJ Lenderman covered the track ‘Dancing In The Club’. Since then there’s been the new Water From Your Eyes album ‘It’s A Beautiful Place’, the deluxe and super-deluxe versions of ‘Box For Buddy…’, and the collection of re-recorded Lorelei deep cuts ‘Holo Boy’, all while balancing touring cycles for both projects.
“I’d like for it not to be quite so busy in the future,” Amos admits with a self-effacing smile. “But the amount of attention that Lorelei has gotten has been very unexpected for me, so I’m not surprised that it’s been hectic. It feels like an unplanned child or something. It just happened and all of a sudden I was like, ‘OK, this is gonna be crazy for a while.’”
Right now, Amos looks like a man who’s been on tour for a long time. His hair and beard have grown long; his demeanour is friendly but tired. It’s punishingly hot today, and he’s in a t-shirt, sweats, and Crocs, with a can of Monster and a pair of headphones set down on the table in front of him. He doesn’t strike us as the kind of guy who’d thrive on this busyness, we suggest. He laughs and agrees: “I spend most of my time in quiet spaces if I can help it. I like to hang out in the woods.”
This Is Lorelei’s unexpected success is the kind that tends to come with gushing, rapturous praise. He’s talked about like a well-kept secret waiting to break; the word ‘generational’ has been used. With Lorelei, Amos is a songwriter’s songwriter – his structures are simple, his melodies perfect, his voice sweet and his lyrics both profound and funny. On the covers album that came with the ‘Box For Buddy…’ super-deluxe release, artists that are already legends, like Williams (with her new electronic duo Power Snatch) and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, and heroes of indie’s current guard, like Lenderman, Waxahatchee and Snail Mail, take their turns covering Amos’s songs. It acts as a stamp of approval from the grand council of American indie music.
Amos, who’s 35, grew up in sleepy small-town Vermont. He later ended up in Chicago, where he started Water From Your Eyes with his then-partner, Rachel Brown, before relocating to Brooklyn with them. His dad, Bob, is a bluegrass musician who now performs in a duo with Nate’s sister Sarah. His first experiences of playing music were with his family. “My understanding of what music was, on a very basic level, came from that. And not just the music itself, but the community that tends to exist with folk music is a very different thing than pop music.” Bob and Sarah show up across different songs on ‘The Singer In My Band’, playing banjo and singing respectively.
‘The Singer In My Band’ gets closer to roots music than Amos has before. There’s none of the electronic experimentation that brushed ‘Box For Buddy…’, instead being entirely guitar-based, while a lot of the time his harmonies and roaming arrangements feel as indebted to old country standards as to more conventional indie-rock heroes like Alex Chilton and Stephin Merritt. Amos struggles to write on the road, but most of the ideas started formulating in his head on long tour drives. It’s never worked that way before – everything on ‘Box For Buddy…’ was recorded and mixed within about four hours of its first conception. The difference in pace lent itself to a different, more deliberate kind of song.
“One of the things that defines ‘Box For Buddy…’ is that it’s very train-of-thought, and there’s a lot of information being dumped in some of those songs. [I wanted] to follow it up with the limitation of way less words. Half as many words per song. And try to capture a similar emotional punch with less,” he says. “I was definitely chasing simplicity with this album. I wanted everything to be very exposed – no disguising my voice, no leaning on bells and whistles to make a less interesting song more interesting.”
“The amount of attention that Lorelei has gotten has been very unexpected for me… it feels like an unplanned child or something”
The lyrics on here, he says, are “really personal”. Many of them deal with complicated friendships. “They have to do with either keeping a safe distance, or giving yourself to this person totally as a support, and the sometimes complicated aftermath,” Amos says. Yet most of the time he writes with a storyteller’s eye for detail and economy of words; on the rootsy ‘Watching Heaven Fall’, a highlight, his lyrics are Dylanesque. ‘The Kid With The Crown’, which he describes as the “untied shoelace” of the album, feels the least filtered. He takes turns admonishing and encouraging a friend: “Buddy, are you mean? Do you dream of un-dreaming your dreams? […] It’s a curse, and it’ll only get worse”.
“[In other bands], I’ve always positioned myself as the man behind the curtain or whatever. That was honestly one of the big hurdles to get over with this album, was accepting Lorelei as something that I do publicly,” he says. “If I’d known that [‘Box For Buddy, Box For Star’] was gonna be listened to by as many people as it has, that would have tripped me up.
“As someone whose life and thought processes have been very influenced by music that I’ve consumed over my life, the idea of wielding that power freaks me out a little bit. [So] this album has been the process of accepting the job, and exposing myself as much as possible within the album to kind of like, get over the nervousness.” He sees the album’s opening track, ‘I Will Eat My Heart In The Morning Light’, as a kind of manifesto for presenting his art to so many listening ears while knowing he’s an imperfect hero. “I know there must be better men, but I’m not the kind to hide”, he sings.
For a man who could have the weight of the indie rock world on his shoulders, Amos seems to carry it all with a slightly bewildered humility. “I’m not totally sure how this happened or why I’ve been given this opportunity, ‘cause I have known a lot of people throughout my life that I think are really brilliant people with a lot more to say than me. But I will try my best; that’s a promise,” he says. “This album is [saying], ‘OK, I’ll do this with you guys, and thank you for giving me the chance. I won’t let you down’” – he chuckles nervously – “I hope.”
This Is Lorelei’s ‘The Singer In My Band’ is out on September 11 via Matador
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