This Is Lorelei (Nate Amos) is getting used to people caring about his songs.

Over the past decade, Amos let his pen and guitar fly free, releasing dozens and dozens of projects on Bandcamp: drone music, noise tracks, bleeps-and-bloops galore. Eventually, Amos, who is also one half of Water From Your Eyes, “landed in this songwriter thing [as This Is Lorelei] in a totally ass-backwards way,” he tells The FADER. “I reached the end of my rabbit hole and thought that the [most] experimental thing I could do was to take whatever instinct I'd built doing these other things and apply it to the most basic form of songwriting that I could.”

“Basic” may be a brute way of saying sturdily crafted; Amos’s well-oiled writing shined through on his 2024 breakout Box for Buddy, Box for Star — which explored themes of addiction and isolation with candor and humor. His songwriting bonafides were further cemented by co-signs from modern indie greats — Hayley Williams, MJ Lenderman, and Waxahatchee, among others — who covered songs from the album on its deluxe edition. “That's kind of the dream if you're writing songs: you want them to go do their own thing without you,” says Amos, before adding a caveat. “If that album hadn't gotten whatever little bump it got, those songs would just be 10 more in the pile of songs that I've written and don't really think about.”

As his solo music picked up steam, so did Water From Your Eyes and Amos suddenly found himself in the rare position of having two hot pots burning on indie rock’s stove. All of this also means that what used to be a private practice with little space for overthinking, is now extremely public and necessarily measured.

His new album The Singer In My Band (out tomorrow, September 11 via Matador) represent his first project as This Is Lorelei in his “new era” — one where he’s on the road months on end and forced to write music far away from the small world of his own studio.

With those constraints came new lyrical terrains. While Box For Buddy, Box for Star was diaristic, Amos’s latest is more expansive and imaginative — he refers to the newer songs as “short stories.” They are populated with characters — Joey, Bobby, Billy, Genevieve, Sarah, and Buddy — who scream, sob, and sing through Amos’s Altman-esque road film. Written with a dry sensibility and a heartfelt disposition, the record is a bird’s eye look at one man’s zigzagging through an Americana odyssey.

Amos stopped by The FADER HQ to discuss his instinctual writing practice, adapting to tour life, and getting sober.

Video Credits:
Executive Producer: Jon Cohen, Anthony Holland
Creative Director: Nadine Ng
Director of Photography: Ethan Holland
Editor: Quinton Dominguez
Sound Mixer: Alexander Zooi
Score: Luisa Bryan
Talent: Ravyn Lenae
Interviewer: Tobias Hess
Special Thanks: Grandstand Media

The FADER: I mentioned this early, very prolific period. That's where I first found your music. The intensity and pace in which you were releasing is something that a lot of people have noted. Can you talk to me a little bit about what that time was and what was motivating your output?
Nate Amos: That was pre-touring for me. I really just had a lot of time to make music. I think I would probably still be doing the same thing if I hadn't signed to a label and started touring. It's a very different thing now, for sure. I used to be able to just make music and really not have to deal with what anybody thought of it because no one was really listening to it, or it was friends and friends of friends, mostly.

When you when you keep a more aggressive release pace there's less pressure — the scale of everything aside. Now when I put out an album, after I finish it, I have to talk about it for a year, then it comes out, and then I have to tour on it for a year, so whatever I put out now, I have to be willing to put up with for a long period of time. Whereas in the past, I could put out something that I didn't feel was something that really defined me. I knew that if I put it out and was unhappy with it, I could just put out something else like a month later. So there's a lot more pressure personally on the quality of the music now because I have to live with it. In the past, I could just make it and forget about it. It's fundamentally just a different thing than it used to be.

You've said in interviews that the uniting factor in the This Is Lorelei project is the fact that you write really quickly. That was in reference to your earlier work. Is that still the case?
I try to work in chunks still, the nature of it becoming a job means I unfortunately just don't have time to work that way anymore as much as I would like to. And now it's become this inverse thing where I'm trying to work really hard so eventually I can just make music again instead of doing interviews. [laughs]. No offense. It's funny, because at the time, [writing and releasing quickly] felt like something that I was working really hard to escape, and now I'm working really hard to try to get back to that.

So the goal is to be as successful as you can so you can go fully Bob Dylan-style mysterious?
I have no goals in terms of being elusive. I would just love to be able to spend the majority of my time making music again.

The Singer in My Band is about life on the road in many ways and was written while you were touring. How does that inform or disrupt your creative process?
Disrupting your creative process is a good thing. It forces you to grow. If I thought that releasing albums at a slower pace and doing things this way wasn’t creatively fulfilling, I wouldn't be doing it. At the end of the day, as amazing as it is to be able to tour and make a career out of it, I would just be doing it regardless, so it's nice to have it placed in a different context.

In terms of making this album, this is the first [album] I've made in this new lifestyle-era, so it actually happened very slowly. The rapid-pace thing was not really a part of it. The reason [writing quickly] works so well is because you're keeping things in their purest form. You're not removing ideas from the moment that they came out of. Any piece of art is a collaboration between the audience and the artist, but if you just take away the audience part and look at the initial creation, it's a collaboration between the artist and a given point in space and time. When that moment becomes a blurrier thing, and it becomes a thing where it's no longer about a particular moment, it's about revisiting the same idea through a variety of different perspectives, meanings, physical locations, and points in time, that gives you a lot of flexibility to change things. But you have to be especially focused to not lose sight of that original idea.

For this album, the best way to do that was to have the idea for the lyric and the idea for the melody at the same time. So, if nothing else: this initial combination of words and notes came out of this specific moment. I can only fit so many songs on an album, and I only have so much time to actually work on them, so I have to be really picky about which of those moments I choose to hold on to. In the past, I could mess with all of them, and it didn't matter if they were good or bad, they could all just come out. And so I've had to be much more intentional because I don't really have the wiggle room for bad songs. I like making the bad songs as much as the good ones, so that's the main loss. The things that I know are these doomed song ideas, I have to bury instead of uh letting them happen all the way.

How do you define a bad song?
Gut feeling. Sometimes you have an idea and it's like, “I'll see this through to the end and best case scenario it's going to be fine." That was the main difference for this album. I had to be really cutthroat about ideas to foster and sink energy into.

What's the biggest misconception people have about being a touring rock star?
The normal thing is to be like, "Yeah, like, you know, like you don't actually see anywhere. It's just a bunch of gas stations." It's kind of like being a pirate. The show must go on. You just deal with it. I've played shows with norovirus before.

How do you get through that?
You throw up as much as possible right before you go out. And then with Lorelei, I have to sing constantly, so that was a half an hour in the bathroom immediately before and immediately after the set. I just did a month in Europe with a pinched nerve and a sprained knee, you know. It's kind of like when shit like that happens, it sucks, but you just got to do it.

Because the show must go on?
I guess so. I haven't canceled a show yet. A misconception about tour is that it actually really sucks half the time. It’s never gotten bad enough that I've been like, I literally can't do this. I played a show with food poisoning like years ago where I had a vom bucket on the side of the stage. But I think the only reason we did that is because it was the only show that tour we were getting paid more than like $150 to play. That was actually the first day I ever met my manager. I was lying on the couch, shaking. God bless his soul, he brought me a Limoncello LaCroix. I can't even look at those to this day.

I love how the new album comprises these little stories with all these characters. There's Joey, Bobby, Billy, Genevieve, Sarah, and Buddy, which is a nod to your last album. Can you tell me about who these people are to you?
They're just names. When you use a proper noun — the name of a person, the name of a place, — and you use it in such a way that it's more than tangentially related to what's going on in the chorus song, then it's a way to brute-force add narrative building for the listener. Whether that's because they have some association with that place, or it's just a moment where it's like, "Oh, it's a particular place mentioned," somehow the wheels are going to begin turning. So I have ideas of who these characters are, but the way the whole thing is built is that those my own ideas about them are not really stated in the songs themselves. Beyond the lyrics of the songs, I don't really have a ton to say about the characters. It would just kind of spoil the fun.

Do you feel like you are these characters? Is Nate in there?
I don't think so. Maybe somewhere in little bits, but not in any definitive way. It's just a bunch of shit in a blender. I'm sure I'm in there somewhere.

The new record sounds in many ways like it's rooted in bluegrass. Your dad is bluegrass musician and is on the record. Can you tell me a little bit about this genre and what it means to you?
Bluegrass was really just the first music that I was thoroughly exposed to as not just recorded music: seeing it be made and functioning as an individual form of expression and as community practice. For that reason alone, it's very fundamental to the way that I think about form, melody, and harmony. More than anything else, bluegrass has very particular rules and methods by which it functions. There's a very strong sense of different components having a role. It’s a finely tuned machine, and I think that idea of defined collaborative roles within the arrangement of music was something that really stuck with me. Not that that doesn't apply to other genres, too, that was just how I learned about that sort of thing, so it's very familiar to me.

When I'm trying to write in a very basic form, like I am with Lorelei these days, it's a very comfortable space for me to work out of. It’s like falling back into certain archetypes that exist within bluegrass music. I'm not a bluegrass musician. At best, there are a handful of songs on this album that are adjacent to bluegrass, because it is such a particular thing, and it's a craft that you devote your life to. I haven’t done that. Bluegrass music is really hard to do. I wish I was good enough at a given instrument to hold my own in a bluegrass band, but it's a whole other level of technical ability and commitment to practice. I'm too spaced out.

I've always kind of floated around between instruments. With bluegrass, you have to truly master whatever instrument you're playing. I tend to float around between things. For years I would have said I was a bass player primarily, and then I was only really playing drums in bands for five years. Water From Your Eyes was the first band that I was ever a lead guitar player in. I would love to commit a decade to getting badass at banjo. I just do not have the attention span.

What was it like to work with your dad on this?
It was easy. I was working on the song and I was like, "I think this might need banjo," and I sent it to my dad. And I was just like, "There's a solo section here." He's just the best banjo player I know and knew that he would just do exactly what I wanted him to do with no instruction, and he just did it. He's just really good at what he does.

You're often called a "great American songwriter" or a "classic American songwriter." Do you have a relationship to this idea of “American songwriting?”
It's not a thought that I really engage with. It's very flattering on a personal level. I've always been very focused on composition and production, and more like conceptual art within the medium of music. I landed in this songwriter thing in a totally ass-backwards way where I reached like the end of my rabbit hole. I thought that the experimental thing I could do was to just totally revert and try to take whatever instinct I'd built doing these other things and apply it to the most basic form of songwriting that I could.

Right because in early This Is Lorelei days, you did like drone music and bleeps and bloops music?
Yeah, it was all over — noise music and stuff. Lorelei was just an "anything goes" project where I could essentially test things out for other projects. Lorelei never really had a defined sound until somewhat recently. The songwriter-thing is funny because I am writing songs and I'm trying to practice and get better at it, further hone the craft. But it's funny to me that that is the thing that people are saying, because I never really thought of myself as a songwriter, I thought of myself as a producer until people started telling me I was a songwriter, and then I was like, "Okay, I guess I'm a songwriter now."

They're saying that because you are in the relatively rare position of having a popular cover album where the songs kind of transcends you. What was it like hearing artists like Hayley Williams, MJ Lenderman, and Waxahatchee sing your words?
I mean, really crazy. That's kind of the dream if you're writing songs: you want them to go do their own thing without you. It helped me take myself a little more seriously as a songwriter. The songs on that album [Box for Buddy, Box for Star] that got covered, when I was making those, I never could have imagined anything like that. I was just posted up for whatever reason, putting myself through like a boot camp where I had to write, record, mix, and print two songs a day. It's funny because if that album hadn't gotten whatever little bump it got to get to that point, those songs would just be 10 more songs in like the pile of songs that I've written and don't really think about. So it's pretty crazy that they're alive to the extent where they pop up and say “Hi,” five years after I wrote them.

Box for Buddy, Box for Star tackled the subject of sobriety head-on. How has sobriety shifted writing for you?
A lot of a lot of things changed just in terms of how I was spending my time. Before I was sober, that was really like the most productive recording and writing era of my life, but I don't think I would have been able to function on the road like that. Being on the road has also had a huge impact on writing just because there isn't really time to do it anymore. If I want to have a month to write music, I have to fight tooth and nail for it. That probably has more of an impact on the writing than sobriety did, but who knows? It's hard to piece together accurate memories of that whole period of time. I listen to [Box For Buddy], I'm just kind of like, "Damn, that [addiction] was like the one thing that I was writing about." I've broadened my horizons a little bit because it's become a battle that takes less and less of me to fight over time. So, I have more bandwidth for feeling other things.

The Singer in my Band is a less insular album. It's more about imagination.
It definitely goes more places.
Box for Buddy is sort of like a memoir in the form of diary entries. The Singer in My Band is more like a collection of short stories or something. It's like a different format of presentation.

Do you have a favorite road album, book or movie?
Probably like any Townes Van Zandt album. “Close Your Eyes, I'll Be Here in the Morning" … that's like the saddest road song ever. But yeah, I don't know … ZZ Top.

You started This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes in Chicago. Both projects have really grown in New York. There's a lot of talk about New York rock these days … I'm wondering if you think that there's something to that? Did the city contribute to you"making it" as a musician?
Probably. New York has a certain amount of infrastructure for things like that that Chicago doesn't have. It's not impossible, I have friends that have built successful careers based in Chicago. With Lorelei, this was never a project that I was trying to launch. It was mostly just a private practice thing. I never really had any bands in Chicago where the goal was to do more than just participate in the scene. So, it's hard for me to say.

Definitely when I came out here, and also with Water From Your Eyes, we weren't really trying to do anything more than play shows with other bands we liked at The Glove. That was the whole point. Then we stumbled into progressing further as a business. I don't know if that would have happened if we were in Chicago, or if that's a New York-specific thing. But it certainly happened here and it didn't happen in Chicago — but that might have been more me than the place.

Can you tell me a little bit about why The Singer In My Band is the title here?
I was trying on different album titles for size and that felt like the only option, really. It's kind of weird and clunky. It's such a plain thing that it almost doesn't really make sense. And then if you were to dig into the lyrics to try and figure out why it's the album title, if anything, it gets more confusing because it's just like a passing thing in one of the songs. It’s just what I wanted to name the album.

This is a road record. Do you have a sense of what the next record's going to be? A stay-at-home record?
I have no idea. I'm working on new music now, and the only thing I can say is that whatever I'm trying to do now, I'm sure I'll fuck it up, and it'll end up being something else. That's the rush of making music … you set out to make something and something way more interesting than you could have never thought of by yourself happens instead.

You said you're on a 10-day vacation in between the tour craziness. Are you writing music right now in these 10 days?
I'm trying to make myself actually just not do anything for a day first. Yesterday was my first zero-day I've had in a while. I made it my job to try and chill out. I did not do a very good job. I'm going to try and make up for it today when I go home and play Crash Team Racing.