{"id":709113,"date":"2026-07-24T16:35:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T16:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/709113\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T16:35:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T16:35:14","slug":"i-know-what-its-like-to-be-vulnerable-musician-this-is-lorelei-aka-nate-amos-on-addiction-and-finding-peace-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/709113\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I know what it\u2019s like to be vulnerable\u2019: musician This Is Lorelei AKA Nate Amos on addiction and finding peace | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to\u00a0get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded \u2013 since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 \u2013 to what was then a\u00a0plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.<\/p>\n

Amos is sitting in the basement of a\u00a0cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an\u00a0iced matcha; coffee makes him \u201cfeel like shit\u201d, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. \u201cExactly when you\u2019re not supposed to\u00a0be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,\u201d he\u00a0jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a\u00a0tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.<\/p>\n

Amos recorded his new album, The Singer in My Band, at the Brooklyn apartment he moved into in 2017. It had a \u201cpunk house vibe\u201d then, but as housemates moved on, he gradually took over the place. The home studio setup allows him to work fast, the only way he knows. He may speak in a slow drawl, but his torrential work ethic belies any affinity with slackerdom. He finished the new record before signing to Matador, but kept its existence a secret from the label (also home to his\u00a0other band, art-rock misfits Water from Your Eyes). \u201cI sent them the completed album within half an hour of signing the contract,\u201d he says, stirring his bright green drink with a straw. \u201cI was like: \u2018Actually, it\u2019s done!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Singer in My Band is alarmingly jaunty \u2013 an outlier in a bric-a-brac catalogue that has noodled from sad chamber pop to murky post-punk to midsize indie anthems. He knocks out twangy riffs, hearty harmonies and bunnyhopping basslines that hark back to his childhood under the spell of his bluegrass-maestro father, Bob Amos. Had he made something so ripe and bucolic a decade ago, you might have assumed it was a joke.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In truth, Amos has always had a\u00a0country soul. He was born in Denver but felt more at home in rural Vermont, where his family holidayed and eventually moved to a house on the side of a mountain. He was 14 then, and getting sick of school. \u201cI\u00a0lashed out, like teenagers do,\u201d he says wryly. By 16, he was skipping classes to hang out on dirt roads, smoke weed and absorb the influence of more seasoned truants. Daunted by the busyness of impending adulthood, he spent the best part of six months tripping on psychedelics. \u201cI did a pretty good number on myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

He graduated, somehow, and settled in Chicago in his early 20s. Music fascinations proliferated. He made psychedelic beats for rappers, throttled electric guitars in bands, occasionally shuttled around to play bluegrass with Dad. This Is Lorelei emerged from the chaos, with songs that burbled like Animal Collective one month and thrashed like H\u00fcsker D\u00fc the next.<\/p>\n

He was still well acquainted with vices he now lumps together as \u201csubstance issues\u201d. Looking back, he sees his all-consuming focus on music and drugs as a way to defer a brewing storm. \u201cYou find ways to be excited when you\u2019re younger, and for me that was through drugs. I settled into what, at the time, I was sure was going to be a pattern of just being a lifelong addict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite courting a hectic social life, he craved peace and quiet \u2013 the kind he left behind in Vermont. \u201cPeople say they\u2019re born in the wrong generation: they\u2019re talking about the 60s or whatever. I honestly feel like I would have been a happier person working on a farm 300 years ago.\u201d The closest he could get was \u201cdrowning out bad noise through substances, dumbing myself down to a point where it felt like things were simple\u201d.<\/p>\n

Branching out \u2026 Amos with Rachel Brown in Water from Your Eyes. Photograph: Adam Powell<\/p>\n

That bad noise re-emerged in his music. He was briefly banned from the\u00a0online distributor Distrokid for uploading so many epic drone dirges he was flagged as a bot. A deluge of similarly experimental work was themed around \u201ctechnology corrupting nature\u201d, he says, but he portrays it less as an art concept than\u00a0as a symptom of anxiety and depression. \u201cThe beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a\u00a0hard time with the known.\u201d<\/p>\n

His shaggy, lurking presence at shows became a source of intrigue to\u00a0Rachel Brown, a fellow music obsessive in Chicago\u2019s DIY scene. They became a band and, once he got a haircut, a couple. As Water from Your Eyes, the duo ran a long-distance operation making silly, stoned electropop while Brown studied film and television at New York University. In 2017, Amos left Chicago to join them. The band and friendship survived their breakup two years later.<\/p>\n

At the time, Amos responded to their split by mainlining Blink-182\u2019s All\u00a0the Small Things on repeat. Its quick hooks and stupid charm felt like a signal in a world of noise. Still his low mood lingered. Doctors prescribed heavy medication that sometimes helped, sometimes dragged him deeper into a funk. In 2020, he started dating Al Nardo, now his fiance and a\u00a0live member of both bands. He gave up\u00a0drink and hard drugs a year later. Weed filled the void, so another year later, he quit that too. \u201cIt felt like my brain was on fire for three months,\u201d he\u00a0remembers. \u201cI would do push-ups until I collapsed.\u201d He made music for 12 hours a day, terrified that if he stopped, he would relapse.<\/p>\n

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A documentary on lifelong drinker Shane MacGowan, of all people, finished the repair job that Blink-182 had improbably started. Watching an\u00a0a\u00a0cappella Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor cover MacGowan\u2019s distraught folk ballad The\u00a0Song With No Name, Amos rediscovered pure folk melody. \u201cI grew up surrounded by bluegrass and folk music,\u201d he recalls, \u201cso I felt like a sleeper agent being activated.\u201d<\/p>\n

His tunes got more hummable, his\u00a0lyrics more acute. In 2024, he released Box for Buddy, Box for Star, his first sober album. One song, Where\u2019s Your Love Now, features a line so suffering and simple that it seemed to go missing from the songbook of one of his ancestors, such as Elliott Smith or Wilco: \u201cThat hole in my chest\u00a0still wishes you all the best.\u201d The\u00a0track has\u00a0since been covered \u2013 separately \u2013 by two of the era\u2019s eminent indie songwriters, Cameron Winter and Waxahatchee.<\/p>\n

Amos still gets \u201cpretty constant visual hallucinations\u201d from his tripping teens. \u201cIt can take me by surprise,\u201d he says, \u201cbut for the most part I don\u2019t really notice them any more.\u201d He dabbles in weed but is long past the period when, as he puts it on the new record, he \u201cwouldn\u2019t trade a good night for a better day\u201d. He hopes This Is Lorelei will be a \u201csafe space\u201d for the similarly afflicted: \u201cUse this as the platform and then check it at the door.\u201d Is it a safe space for him to do the same? \u201cIt was \u2026 before people started listening.\u201d He laughs. \u201cWater from Your Eyes fans will come up to me like: \u2018Yo, sick guitar playing.\u2019 From\u00a0Lorelei fans, I\u2019ve had some crazy\u00a0trauma-dumping situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that he resents the attention \u2013 it\u00a0just makes him cautious. \u201cI know what\u00a0it\u2019s like to be vulnerable and then encounter art that can change the way you think about things \u2026 but the idea of being responsible for that art is really scary. I don\u2019t fully understand why, out of all the people I know, I\u2019m the one who is given this opportunity.\u201d His gaze burrows back under the table. Something down there makes him chuckle. \u201cI will try my best,\u201d he says finally. \u201cI promise I\u2019ll try my best.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Singer in My Band is released on 11\u00a0September on Matador.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to\u00a0get through the day. There was plenty of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":709114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-709113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=709113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/709113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/709114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=709113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=709113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=709113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}