Getting into the Lore with Nate Amos from This is Lorelei
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Nate Amos is the multi-talented multi-instrumentalist known for his involvement in Water From Your Eyes and This is Lorelei (projects he refers to as “Water” and “Lorelei”). I have followed his projects for years, with the most recent Water From Your Eyes record, Everyone’s Crushed, topping my personal album of the year list. This is Lorelei is Amos’ solo project, and his transcendent new record, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is out June 14th and deals with themes of loneliness, recovery, and aching longing, adorned with innovative and beautiful music.
During my first listen of the album, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, innovation, and vulnerability of the music, and felt I had to speak with the person who made it. In anticipation of the record, I spoke with Amos over Zoom about the process of writing and performing this music. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
SWIM INTO THE SOUND: You’ve had a whirlwind year.
Nate Amos: Yeah.
SWIM: Last year, you released one of the year’s most acclaimed records with Everyone’s Crushed. You’ve been touring back to back, dropping new songs from both projects along the way, and you’re set to release yet another best record of the year. How are you feeling?
AMOS: I’m feeling good! It’s funny how with [This Is] Lorelei as a project, everything used to come out immediately as soon as it was done, so this is a pretty weird experience, waiting while it slowly rolls out. I’m used to that with Water From Your Eyes at this point, but not with Lorelei. The first year I finished the album without it coming out, it was something I thought about every day, and now it’s something I keep forgetting is happening.
SWIM: You’ve referred to the This is Lorelei project as a sort of diary, did that play into the creation of this album?
AMOS: Yeah, I mean it’s always kind of been equally diary and song study stuff. I write the lyrics by myself, so it inevitably tends to be a little more personal, but also, as a project, it’s just a lower-pressure arena to try different things out, at least for now. So there’s a little bit of the diary thing, but in the past, Lorelei has been very informal in terms of how I’ve worked on it. And this was all still in my bedroom, with no real plan. I feel like this album has set a higher bar for stuff that would end up on it. Normally an album would be all of the sixteen songs that I was able to make in ten days or something, whereas this album was ten of sixty or seventy songs that I wrote.
SWIM: Really?!
AMOS: Yeah, and some of it should never come out. Some of it has already come out because this was made in May to late July or August of 2022, so anything that came out on the Lorelei Spotify or whatever starting in summer 2022 is actually stuff that was written for and cut from this album.
SWIM: Okay, so “Bring Back My Dog” was originally gonna be on it? That’s one of my favorites. It’s so crazy that you decided to cut that!
AMOS: I mean, it’s more like once all the songs were done, part of it was figuring out what songs I thought were good enough for it, and the other one was figuring out what kind of character the album was trying to be. And the “Bring Back My Dog” song, I just kind of couldn’t–it had kind of a different vibe to it.
There were two songs on that EP… well, let me think, there were like two days when four songs got made. Two of them ended up on that EP, and two of them ended up on the album. I was also like, “Why shouldn’t this be on the album?” It just didn’t feel right. At one point, the album was like… I had to let go of a lot because it was 32 tracks at one point, and it was so, so long. And I was trying to figure out how to make it work, and at one point, had a voice memo phone recording explaining why the album’s so long and apologizing for it, and I was like, “This is ridiculous, I should just chill out and choose a group of songs that works,” and make an album.
SWIM: So it was a very intentional winnowing down.
AMOS: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
SWIM: You’re a multi-instrumentalist, and on this album and for previous EPs you’ve released, you use a lot of instruments that aren’t typically in the rock suite. On this one, I caught string samples, piano, chiptune synths, and I thought I heard a child’s xylophone in there, too. Is that right?
AMOS: Let me think. Okay, so the thing that sounds kind of like a xylophone? That’s a toy piano that goes on throughout the song “Where’s Your Love Now.” So that’s just a phone recording of me playing around on one that I looped. I’m trying to think of chiptune stuff.
SWIM: Maybe it was just sped up.
AMOS: I’m trying to remember. There’s a lot of sampling stuff. Even though the album is way more straightforward than Water From Your Eyes, there’s still kind of a way I put things together. There are a lot of samples, loops, and instruments that I can’t play by myself, like orchestral string instruments and wind instruments.
SWIM: Makes sense. Do you have a favorite instrumental moment on this album that might be hard to catch on the first listen?
AMOS: I got a lot. It’s funny because I’ve listened to this album again recently, and now it feels different. I like the second-to-last song, “Two Legs,” a lot. There’s a song called “My Boy Limbo” that has an almost messed-up-sounding instrumental thing that I like.
That was kind of one of the challenges with this project because I was trying not to go nuts with cool sounds and Easter eggs; the whole idea was to really hone it in to be more about the song than the production, which I felt [was] something that had gotten–not lost in things I’ve done in the past, but because I enjoy music production and am a nerd, I would end up just thinking about that more than the writing itself. This album was definitely an attempt to A) worry about the content more than the sound, and B) focus on the individual songs rather than the overall concept, and have it be a cohesive album but very much a set of ten individual songs that don’t really rely on each other, but make each other stronger.
SWIM: That makes a lot of sense. I was listening to “Two Legs” again this morning, it’s so, so beautiful, and the lyrics are so vulnerable. It’s a little bit reminiscent of Elliott Smith in terms of the melody and also just the abject sadness. Is it hard being frank about heartache?
AMOS: Yes. But again, with this album, it was funny because there is a lot of earnestness to the lyrical content of the album, but part of the idea–or almost part of the bit, dare I say, was to zone in on these classic singer-songwriter archetypes in a way where the subject can relate to something I feel. But it’s more of like an exercise in writing that particular kind of song because that particular kind of song is this almost a standardized thing that has been attempted by all sorts of people over the evolution of pop music. Maybe it’s a combination of different things too, because it’s got some weird, almost Disney-like lullaby stuff going on.
So it’s weird sometimes… it feels like a little exposed, but also I feel like maybe even if no one else knows, to me, there’s like a character that I’m playing on this album, so there are elements of me in it, but it also doesn’t feel entirely connected to me. Not that that song–every word in that song is true in one way or another, but something about participating in a tradition that belongs to so many people, you can reframe it in a way that feels a little less personal. I don’t know if that makes sense.
SWIM: Sure, absolutely. It has a core of truth, as Greta Gerwig would say. But the growth is maybe something embellished or imaginary. Speaking of operating in a tradition, the first song, “Angel’s Eye”… a country song. You write a magnificent country song, I was really surprised by that.
AMOS: Oh, thank you.
SWIM: Why did you choose to start the record off with that one?
AMOS: It just kind of made sense. So, that song was later on in the recording process. By the time it was written, there had already been a couple of versions of the album that I had thought were finished, but then I took it apart, and honestly, I really liked that one. It didn’t feel like it would work anywhere other than the beginning, and I didn’t have a first track that I was really attached to at that point. Then I tried it as the opener, and it was kind of like, “Yeah, okay, that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
SWIM: You sing it in two registers, almost as two voices, in two separate worlds.
AMOS: Yeah, it’s a duet.
SWIM: So why did you choose to sing it alone?
AMOS: Because I was alone.
[laughter]
AMOS: I like the idea… that’s something that shows up in at least two places on this album, where I am playing two different vocalists, essentially. And also I thought it would be funny. That is a very earnest song, and I do like it a lot, but it’s about an alien abducting a cowboy, and the alien and the cowboy falling in love, and then the alien has to drop the cowboy back off, and they’re both kind of like “what the fuck is this?”
SWIM: Wow, I thought it was about a ghost or an angel, actually, so the angel’s eye is a tractor beam?
AMOS: Kind of, essentially. I don’t know, I don’t have all the lore. [laughter] When the song’s actually being sung, the higher-pitched voice is the angel and the lower-pitched one is the cowboy, and the cowboy’s just kinda yelling at the sky.
SWIM: Yeah. Do you think aliens are real?
AMOS: I don’t know if I’m qualified to argue that anything is real. I think that the fact that we’re so sure about what’s going on to ourselves just means there’s a lot of stuff we don’t understand. I don’t know if I believe in aliens, necessarily, but I do believe we have no clue what’s going on.
SWIM: That’s a balanced take, I think.
AMOS: It’s more fun to think that way, I don’t know. I love conspiracy theories and alien content, and I don’t know how seriously I take it. And I don’t know how much it matters; it makes more sense to me than a lot of things people spend their time doing.
SWIM: I think my grandmother saw a UFO in Wisconsin in the ‘60s.
AMOS: Really?
SWIM: I think the government is hiding stuff from us.
AMOS: I’m about it. I’m here for it. I want to know.
SWIM: Same! Back to music…
AMOS: Okay, if we have to.
SWIM: Have you considered forming a country band or a country project?
AMOS: I grew up playing bluegrass music. My father is a bluegrass musician. So that music is very deeply ingrained in me, and I really do love country music, but no, I’ve never thought of starting a country band. There’s never been any long-term, consistent band for Lorelei just because, stylistically, it’s kind of all over the place. So it’s just been easier for me to figure it out show by show. But I’ve been playing with Al [Nardo] and Bailey [Wollowitz], who also play Water From Your Eyes live.
SWIM: The drummer?
AMOS: Yeah, Bailey plays drums, and Al plays bass in Lorelei and guitar in Water.
SWIM: A lot of your songs mention airports and foreign countries, are those taken from your experiences touring? You talked about this album as being from the perspective of a character.
AMOS: I mean yes and no; again, it’s like I was definitely in an airport not long before I wrote one of these songs, and I might not have written it if I hadn’t been in the airport, but I wasn’t like “I gotta write about this airport!” It was more like… going back to using archetypal song elements where you have name-dropping cities, methods of travel, talking about money, stuff like that. All these things have been beaten to death in songwriting to the point where they’re just tools you can use to do anything. And then there’s trying to develop your own little ideas that you treat as normal and use them in the same way, but they’re unique to the album. That’s something that can blur everything into a lyrical texture that I really like. Use stuff people are used to hearing, then aggressively use things they might not have heard, but smash it all together. So it’s like half and half. Sometimes if a place is name-dropped or a vehicle is mentioned, it’s a real thing. And half the time it’s just not.
SWIM: So what is it like being from Water From Your Eyes, which is a band where you don’t sing, and another project where your voice is on pretty much every song? Is that a strange asymmetry to navigate?
AMOS: I mean, it’s strange. I don’t know how difficult it is. They’re both projects that, at this point, I know very well, and I have a sort of particular mindset for each of them. And it’s kind of like playing two different sports. They’re just separate enough that they don’t really get in the way of each other. I definitely, as of now, have clocked more hours just playing guitar in front of people than singing. I don’t really like singing in front of people, but I guess if I’m trying to do this, then I have to. We did a back-to-back tour where it just flipped from one thing to the other halfway through, and it didn’t feel all that weird. It’s a different kind of fun.
SWIM: That’s great, I caught a lyric on “An Extra Beat For You And Me,” the little “water from my eyes” line. Is that a nod to your other project?
AMOS: Yeah.
SWIM: I was also wondering, do you know the “Buffalo Stance” song by Neneh Cherry?
AMOS: No, I don’t think so.
SWIM: She has a little interlude where she goes “water from my eyes,” and I was like crossover moment!
AMOS: Oh, whoa, I did not know that. That’s cool.
SWIM: Anyways, I was curious why you included the little nod.
AMOS: I don’t know what the initial idea was. I just kind of wrote it, and then I was like, “Is that too silly?” Because it is kind of funny to nod at it, but I realized there’s this recurring theme where once every couple of years, I’ll write a song and just kind of sneak that phrase into it. The last one is a song that Water ended up doing called “When You’re Around.”
SWIM: Yeah! Yeah.
AMOS: Someone originally asked me to write a song for a movie.
SWIM: A karaoke scene, right?
AMOS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That song is the same thing. It doesn’t really mean anything that it’s in there. It just kind of happened that way.
SWIM: Is it crying? Is it sad crying or happy crying?
AMOS: It could be either. In that song, it’s more of an overwhelmed cry throughout it, rather than a sad thing.
SWIM: Yeah. Beautiful. I have another question about country music for you. We’re almost out of time. Growing up in a bluegrass environment where people were playing country music and country-adjacent music constantly… do you have favorite country musicians?
AMOS: Oh, yeah. I mean, in terms of traditional bluegrass, it’s not something I listen to all the time, but there are certain standard things in that genre that blew my mind, like the early stuff like Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and The Stanley Brothers. A lot of what I grew to love later in life was stuff that’s kind of like rock-country hybrid because I viewed those as such separate things, and at a certain point, was kind of like the purist mindset, where there’s like the old-time bluegrass music, and I didn’t like it when that was taken and applied to other things. But I got really into [it].
Discovering Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers was an interesting thing at one point because I missed them until later in life. Favorite country musicians… Townes Van Zandt. As I got older, I became more into country as a songwriting style in a way that I didn’t really think about as a kid, where it was more about the music itself rather than as a medium for writing that I might use.
SWIM: Do you think there will be more country music in your future?
AMOS: Probably! I don’t know, I have no idea. I never really know until the album is off and running. And this album certainly didn’t–the intention was not to open with a country song. But it was how I was studying Shane McGowan a lot, and I feel like that bled through pretty obviously in some of the tracks. But I don’t know; it depends on when I have time to make a Lorelei album again and what I’m into at that point.
SWIM: Yeah, it seems like you’ll be pretty busy for the foreseeable future.
AMOS: Yeah, I mean, ideally, I’d like to get on a schedule where I’m alternating and have some sort of album coming out every year alternating between projects. But we’ll see if that happens. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. [laughter] Probably more country songs, yeah. Not exclusively country songs.
SWIM: Well, I’m excited to see more country songs and non-country songs. Thank you again for taking the time.
AMOS: No problem, thank you for having me.
SWIM: Good luck with the rest of your tour and album rollout. I think it’s going to be historic.
AMOS: Thank you. I’m glad you like it.
Elizabeth is a writer and researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice—and makes electronic music in her spare time. She is from Northern Nevada.
