![]() He has been on the road a lot since the album was released, which means a lot of late nights, travelling and partying. “I hope it’s more than a trend or a fad because I’ve never understood why soul and r’n’b is not everywhere.” “I’m fine with it, but it wasn’t intentional I’ve had the songs for two years now,” he says. It was time to put out another record, so it was good timing.”Īlong with acts such as Leon Bridges and Gary Clark jnr, he is often described as being part of a "new soul" movement. let’s try this.’ It was something I wanted to do for a long time, and when I started to write the songs, it sounded that way and I was more excited about it than anything else I’d done. “As far as doing a different style, it definitely wasn’t motivated by anything more than, ‘I don’t know if this is really working out. “The content of the songs is the same,” he shrugs, explaining the “reinvention”. The incorporation of soul and classic rhythm’n’blues into his established storytelling style paid dividends, and he was signed to soul label Stax for the band’s first album. It wasn’t until he formed a new band, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats, that things started to happen on a grander scale. ![]() The Denver scene was good to him, he says, because “mostly it was our friends and our community, so it was pretty easy to play a show and have people show up and be excited about it.” Signed to Stax Rateliff had been playing small-scale gigs in the US with his folk-pop band Nathaniel Rateliff and The Wheel, then as a solo artist. I used to carry a recorder with me, then they invented cellphones and eventually I had one of those. It helps because my body’s moving so much I’m not being so neurotic or anxious about something. ![]() “Physical movement is a really good way to get creative energy flowing. ' "īut still, he wrote “all the time” during his working day. 'All right, I got something to tell you, too. I'd wanna go over there and put my thumb in their eye. The things that those mean motherf***ers say to people. "There were people at work who'd say 'Man, you oughta try out for one of them shows!' and I'd be like 'No f***ing way'," he laughs, referring to TV talent shows such as American Idol. His colleagues in the trucking company encouraged him to pursue music full time. I knew I needed to quit, and it was scary because it was my comfort zone and I’d been there from the age of 19 till 29.” “At some point, I quit the trucking company and started gardening because I knew if I didn’t, there was no end to that life. Having turned away from religion, he found himself a job in a trucking company in Denver. I just kind of choose to be label-less, as far as religion goes, these days." ![]() Once I started doing what I thought was best for my life and what I felt good about, I really woke up. "You just see the bad side of Christianity – or religion in general. "My first two years of trying to be a missionary kind of ruined for me," he says, laughing. As you might have guessed, it didn't quite work out. Rateliff (37) was raised in a religious household in rural Missouri and left for Denver at 18 to embark on missionary work. The bearded, tattooed, hat-wearing musician, now based in Denver, Colorado, might have made one of the most invigorating albums of 2015 in the eponymous Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, but it took trial and error to reach this point. Let's forget the fact that it is 2pm this, after all, is the man who in his best-known song, S O B, yodels: "Son of a bitch, give me a drink." You would be hard-pressed to find a better place to meet Nathaniel Rateliff. A darkened corner of a Dublin whiskey bar, full glass in hand, loud rhythm'n'blues playing over the speakers. ![]()
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