![]() ![]() Born in the Flood was on the verge of a contract with the metal-oriented Roadrunner label when Rateliff opted instead to make a solo, ballad-heavy record, In Memory of Loss (leading to the breakup of Born in the Flood). ![]() Neither band gained much national traction. Missouri-born, he moved to Denver in 1998 and was eventually paying his dues with not one but two bands: the alt-rock–ish Born in the Flood and the more acoustic-based the Wheel. It wasn’t even a decade ago when Rateliff was playing unplugged singer-songwriter gigs with far fewer people in the crowd than at the sold-out Beacon Theatre. “If it bombs, maybe I’ll go into ‘Merry Christmas to You.’” “It makes it sound like I’ve got multiple-personality disorder.”Īnd now, starting tonight, he’ll be stage-testing that other side of his musical psyche. When I was younger, I was like, ‘Am I pretending to be somebody else? Is the voice I’m using actually my voice? Or is this a character?’ But it turns out, it’s all still me.” He laughs. “Sometimes I don’t want to be the other one. So who’s the real Rateliff - the torn, sensitive balladeer or the white-soul stomper? “Sometimes I’m definitely the Night Sweats character and sometimes I’m this guy, you know,” he says, a laptop and guitar nearby. ![]() It’s nice to be able to just write songs because you’d like the idea of writing songs and being able to work through your own shit.” He always just did what he wanted to do in a world where everything needs to be some sort of commodity for the industry. “That’s what I really love about Harry Nilsson. “I was always drawn to do a record that maybe no one’s going to love, but you do it because it’s important to you,” says Rateliff, who these days looks like a slightly more groomed version of his bearded-woodsman self. What’s nowhere to be heard here is the boisterous energy of the Night Sweats. But the band’s 2015 debut appealed to an audience looking for alternatives to pop, hip-hop, and EDM, and sold more than half a million copies their 2018 follow-up, Tearing at the Seams, did nearly as well. The market for a Midwestern soul band fronted by a beefy, behatted guy who looked like Garth Hudson’s son barely seemed to exist at the beginning of the 2010s. One of the most unlikely success stories of the decade that just ended was that of Rateliff and his band, the Night Sweats. “He was like, ‘Can’t wait to see all you guys,’” Rateliff says in his hotel room a few hours before the show. But it was a member of Yola’s band who made Rateliff realize what he had gotten himself into. He’s not rattled by the Christmas-themed benefit or the starry bill, which includes Mavis Staples, Mumford and Sons, and Yola. He’d later go electric, gaining an appreciation for the freedom of effect pedals: “I was really into making feedback for hours at a time.” Both impulses are present on In Memory of Loss, with its shards of raw guitar rising beneath hushed, insistent melodies.It rarely happens, but a few hours before he’s set to walk onstage at New York’s Beacon Theatre in early December, Nathaniel Rateliff is getting a little nervous. His mother taught him three chords, a friend showed him a few more, and there was no need to bother with lessons he started penning his own songs on an acoustic. There’s something really nice about there not being much to do it really helped me be a creative person.” After his father passed away, when Rateliff was only 13, he picked up the guitar. He built skateboard ramps, explored caves, slept outdoors in the heat. As a teenager, he stumbled across a cassette of Led Zeppelin’s IV abandoned in a local barn he wore the tape out listening to it on headphones, drumming along with “When the Levee Breaks” and “Misty Mountain Top.” Rateliff’s youth in rural Missouri was quiet and rambling. The family sang together throughout his childhood. Rateliff grew up of modest means, the son of devout Southern churchgoers. In Memory of Loss is a stunning, heartbreaking sonic document from a singer-songwriter who’s made his way from a childhood in Bay, Missouri (pop. The space comes courtesy of producer Brian Deck ( Califone, Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse), who helped transform 8-track bedroom demos into miniature epics of contrast, beauty, and yearning. That voice belongs to Nathaniel Rateliff, a man who’s earned the twang and hard-knock weariness that shines through on his Rounder debut. The first things you notice are the voice and the space. ![]()
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