In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.
It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star—a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired masterpiece status, affirmed by an all-star reimagining—came after he addressed his alcohol and substance use. Where some people claim to undergo a total personality overhaul alongside such a shift, Amos considered that idea and found it dishonest. You can hear it in Box’s many irrepressible styles, and in how he let his timeless pop songs loosen into more diffuse arrangements to reject the idea of too-tidy resolution: a sign that he wasn’t just an economical writer with an eye for tightly nested imagery (“And I know it’s only cards/But love I feel your heart in spades”) but an equally intentional composer.
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The Singer in My Band pushes further into almost prelapsarian simplicity: skippy, scuffed country-leaning songs perky with twang and walking basslines. Amos whittles endlessly charming melodies like one of those roadside carpenters equally capable of carving a duck as a motorbike. Hat-tipping to his bluegrass whiz dad (who adds an electrifying banjo to the title track), the tighter sound means Singer doesn’t have the magpie dazzle of Box. But even within those limitations, Amos continues to prove he’s one of those people who’s just good at everything: would-be standards, picaresque capers; cowpunk farce, burning frustration, purest heartbreak. “You were right to go, don’t you think so?/When I wouldn’t trade a good night for a better day,” he sings on “And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While,” a self-lacerating take on the record’s theme of whether you can outrun your true nature. The close focus of the sound underscores the feeling that Amos is puzzling all this out in earnest.
Amos has declared Singer a “road record,” saying he daydreamed these songs into existence from the back of the van and that its slippery protagonists are inspired by characters he met on tour. He has a close eye for character motivation; in his hands, songs that may once have been diaristic feel apocryphal. This sweet-natured chronicler of outlaws uses Joey, Billy, Buddy, Sarah, a pistol-slinging crystal dealer, and more as windows into what it means to skip out on life—or to finally show up. On opener “I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light,” Amos isn’t living in the past, or the future, or letting God take the wheel—he’s staying present and taking time as it comes. True to his word, the brushed arrangement strolls along breezily; the moments where his voice dovetails exactly with the bass tickle like those moments of natural synchronicity that come as the reward for living this way.
