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.
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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.
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