“I forgot I had to do an interview,” Nathaniel Rateliff chuckles, “so I’m in a bar.”
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting environment to speak with the Missouri man of the moment. Over ten years he has earned the enjoyment of fans and respect of his peers the old-fashioned way; shoulder-to-the-grind touring and a restless artistic temperament, always looking ahead while keeping one foot in the blues/rock/soul tradition. But with his debut album with The Night Sweats, his career suddenly found itself riding a massive wave. ‘S.O.B.’ has become the raucous anthem of the year, and with its lyrics beseeching somebody to buy him a goddamn drink, a rowdy bar seems almost divinely ordained to chat about success, touring, and writing bridal songs on the toilet.
“In the past, with all the other records I’ve put out, you have people surrounding you in the industry saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be such a big deal, it’s going to be huge, people are going to love this fucking song,’” Rateliff says. “So you bust your ass getting the record out, pouring your heart into it, and nobody gives a shit about it, and neither does the label. And that’s horribly, utterly discouraging.
“You’re out touring, sacrificing your family and relationship times, you’re doing it all out of pocket. So you’re pushing really hard, but at the same time the people who are telling you the record’s going to be huge are the same ones who already have a house and a salary, while the musicians are living in a van somewhere, crying because they can’t remember when they last saw their wives. But now it’s started to work out. [‘S.O.B.’]’s definitely not my favourite song, but what the fuck are you going to do?”
He laughs, while in the background the muddied sounds of live music swell and a crowd starts cheering. If at first Rateliff seems to be mired in doom and gloom about the industry, he is at pains to insist he is not a pessimist. Indeed, even when conversation touches on the harsher side of life and touring, he still sounds jovial about the strange road a musician wanders. In the past he has been described as a pensive songwriter, and while there are certainly moments of sombre reflection in his work, the scale of his output is much more varied.
“I think of myself as a lot of different things. At times I’ve been pensive and introspective, and then I’m also a bit of a dickweed and crazy, with a wild hair up my ass. I make different records at different times to fulfil those different parts of me. I always feel the need to personally challenge myself, in a very lazy way. I’m not a very ambitious person, so when I say ‘challenge’, I mean in the laziest way possible. Lazy and self-loathing. And kind of horny. You combine those things – there’s the secret to writing songs. ‘You know, I’m pretty horny, but I haaate myself. Ah, fuck it, I’ll write a song.’”
These different sides to Rateliff are expressed rather brilliantly on he and The Night Sweats’ eponymous debut. It is like a brief, intense overview of the sounds and styles that have influenced him over the years, although any strict meaning or insight into their composition is something he would prefer to remain ephemeral.
“I’m always a little reluctant to give information on what songs are about. I think the thing about art that’s most interesting is people’s own interpretations, versus giving away some kind of secret. I might have written a song that somebody got married to, and I probably wrote it on the shitter; I might have been having a real bad day. The thing about music is that the listener’s interpretation is often more important than the artist’s. I think it’s kind of nice to keep it a bit of a mystery. I’d love to know what Leonard Cohen thinks about his songs, but I’d also rather never know.”
He makes a fair (if colourful) point, and one that many listeners struggle to fully appreciate; that the song you’ve connected with, that means so very much to you, has a vastly different history for the composer. Listening to the new record conjures many different impressions, thanks not only to Rateliff’s stentorian voice and a rollicking band, but the arrangement of songs themselves. You hear the album as a short story collection, each track a distinct vignette.
“I always think of the record as having a Side A and B, like a vinyl,” Rateliff says. “You have to listen to the first side, and those songs have to be good enough and keep your attention that you want to get up off the couch and flip it over for more. All of the records I grew up listening to are like that. I had a bunch of Night Sweat songs written, and just before we went to record I kind of hunkered down at my house and started writing, and ended up with another 15 or 16 songs. I liked ‘Wasting Time’ a lot, but I didn’t know if it was going to fit. We had other songs that were ruckusey, R&B, soul songs, but I thought it was important to showcase different emotions, to have the songs reflect what I feel personally. You have to feel it in order for it to be real.”
Bluesfest 2016 takes place atTyagarah Tea Tree Farm on Thursday March 24 – Monday March 28, andNathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats appear there, then at the Metro Theatre on Thursday March 31.Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats is out now through Stax/Caroline.
