Words matter. These are the best Nathaniel Rateliff Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Sometimes, if I allow time to be creative, it doesn’t show up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Growing up in the middle of nowhere, there was a lot of twangy music around, but it didn’t really connect with me then.
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.
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.
I’ve always loved soul, R&B, doo-wop and blues, and I’ve wanted to make a record like that for years.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
