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The thing about this record is there’s a whole lot of southern boy gone bad and got down and dirty. I’ve got Hammond B3, banjo, R&B delta, there’s a little bit of everything on this record. It’s so pure. Give me the vibe in that studio. Photo: Gary Brown Reported by RTFX Neue Regel Radio [email protected] NATE: You know, we just kind of designed the vibe while we were there, and created one. There were so many things flying. Like I said before, we pretty much wrote that record while in the studio. There were so many ideas just flying off the walls. We were just trying stuff, and experimenting, and try- ing to be scientists and stuff. It couldn’t help but to have been some genre mixing and it is very south- ern. There’s some Motown in there. There’s a little bit of metal in there. I think that’s what you get when you truly have more than one person con- trolling the flow of creativity. This was everyone throwing out their raw, basic ideas and trying to meld that into some sort of song. I was really go- ing through a phase recently of some of that dark- er Motown stuff. But, especially on this record, most of that R&B vibe has to be established. For instance, even in “Come Up”, where it just keeps moving along and all I can do is just scream along. Speaking of which, how’s the voice holding up? NATE: It’s good man. Once you get this deep in a tour, it’s all about survival. You are trying to perform. You perform every night, obviously, and you perform at the best of your ability. But you also know that you have to do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. I wanted to ask this question when we were on the bus, being someone who trained and sang for a while. But I really wanted to take that moment and ask you because it’s so personal. It is something that I am dealing with now. What was that moment like when you got that news of what you had to go through? NATE: I was on my way to the studio for the last record. I was just trying to figure out why I was having trouble singing on stuff that I normally wasn’t having any prob- lems with. I needed an answer for it. There was a small part of me that was actually relieved that there was a reason. It wasn’t just the fact that I can’t sing anymore. There was a cause for it. It was, obviously, devastating. The first thing you hear when you have cancer is I’m go- ing to die. This is it. But then you get through that initial shock and you start figuring out how to work around it or through it. And lucky enough, I was making that re- cord so I wasn’t completely focused on the fact that I had cancer. I was focusing on wanting to change this part out here, and the logistics of making a record. I think that was important because I think sometimes we can manifest the severity of our sickness based on where our mind’s at. Page 11