Nathaniel Rateliff Quotes
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Growing up in the middle of nowhere, there was a lot of twangy music around, but it didn't really connect with me then.
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Success will be when I can have a real swimming pool instead of the fifty-dollar one I buy at Kmart every year. But I don't want to get robbed of any authenticity to try and make money.
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When I was a kid, my dad kind of forced me to sing the third harmony for our little family group, and I just kind of hated it. I just felt so uncomfortable on stage, too shy.
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There's this element of surprise when you're writing songs, like it's something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it's just exciting. And that's why I keep writing - because I like that feeling.
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I first moved to Denver to work with a group called YWAM, 'Youth With a Mission.' I was a kid - I was 18 - and did some work with homeless people. Really, trying to convert people is sort of an awful position to find yourself in, so I quickly, on my own, grew out of religious ideas.
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One of my initial memories of being taken over by music was watching Paul McCartney on TV play a tribute to John Lennon. He was playing piano by himself and singing 'Imagine,' and I remember feeling an anxiety and shortness of breath.
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I've always loved soul, R&B, doo-wop and blues, and I've wanted to make a record like that for years.
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I toured a lot in the U.K. and Europe solo for a lack of funds, really. I left people I'd been playing with for years at home, just because I couldn't afford it.
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Roadrunner wanted to make Born in the Flood the next Nickelback, but I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to be a huge rock star playing songs I didn't like. I didn't want to be stuck playing 'Anthem,' the song everybody liked but I didn't want to put on the record, for the next five years.
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When I was a kid, we weren't really supposed to listen to secular music. But one day, I found a 'Led Zeppelin IV' cassette tape in the garage, and it was just amazing-sounding music, not like anything I'd heard before. I remember thinking: 'Well, if God created music, why is his music in church not as good as this?'
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I'd always wanted to do an R&B and soul record; a friend with a studio asked to come by and record a couple of songs, maybe just make a 45. Then the songs started to pour out, and pretty soon we had eight or 10 songs down.
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My mom played 12-string and sang, and my dad could play pretty much any wind instrument and had a great ear for harmony. Soon enough, my sister and I got into music because we were always around it, and people were always listening to it.
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I'm pretty easily overwhelmed and pretty tough as well. I think I'm tougher than I used to be. There's been a lot of hardship along the way. But that's what life is. And it's how you deal with those things, and how you let them shape you that makes you a better person and defines what sort of person you're going to be.
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The last album, 'Falling Faster Than You Can Run.' I was really proud of, but then I didn't actually know whether it was going to come out on any label at all. So I didn't know if anyone was going to hear it. Then of course we ended up doing another EP after that called 'Closer.'
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There isn't much of a music scene in Hermann, unless you like polka. But the landscape I grew up in is a part of me. I spent a lot of time in the woods doing a lot of nothing to break the boredom.
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My original project was called 'The Wheel'; there's a record out there called 'Desire & The Dissolving Man,' 'The Memory Of Loss' as well. There's also 'Falling Faster Than You Can Run,' also 'Closer'; all of that's on our website.
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Sometimes, I don't like making emotions your career; something about it is kind of gross. But, at the same time, I want to move people the same way the songs make me feel.
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I've always been trying to write songs that hit you in the stomach but ones that make people feel like things will be just fine.
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Sometimes, if I allow time to be creative, it doesn't show up.