Broken Dreams Club Interview: This is Lorelei
Photo Credit: Eve Alpert
For years, Nate Amos uploaded hundreds of scrappy, fuzzy tunes to the Bandcamp account of his recording moniker, This Is Lorelei. Essentially demo recordings, the songs provided a glimpse of a prolific musician with a profound range, unafraid to explore any genre or sound.
In 2024, Amos finally formalized those recordings, releasing his first “official” album as This is Lorelei. The record—“Box for Buddy, Box For Star,” is the culmination of those intriguing early recordings, showcasing a boundless talent.
Featuring dust bowl folk songs, heartfelt indie pop tracks, glitchy electronica numbers, club bangers and anthemic love ballads, “Box for Buddy, Box For Star” was one of the best releases of last year and brought welcome new attention to the talents of Amos, who also stars as one-half of the avant garde duo, Water From Your Eyes.
On Thursday, April 3, This is Lorelei—now a three-piece band—will perform songs from “Box For Buddy, Box For Star” at Café du Nord. The show will be presented by local production outfit Throwin’ Bo’s.
Broken Dreams Club spoke with Amos about the background of the record, feeling inspired by Shane MacGowan and Elliott Smith and what’s next for This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes.
Ok, you’ve got another round of gigs starting up this weekend. How are you prepping for this latest batch of live shows?
Well, with the kind of live form Lorelei is in right now, I basically tour and then kind of come back with a revision. It’s taken a while to figure out exactly what to do with it, because the project is so kind of scatterbrained in terms of instrumentation. It’s been an interesting process to figure that out. But I think it seems like the answer is always simplicity. I have someone playing lead guitar now, so I just play acoustic guitar and sing and don't worry about other stuff. And it's gotten way more fun and interesting for me.
I was looking up videos of our shows from earlier this year. It was just you and an acoustic guitar, right?
That’s what we did in January, yeah. There have been some other setups as well. I did one tour as a power trio last year, where I was playing electric guitar and trying to do double duty vocals and lead guitar. It’s just really fun to have someone else worry about one of those.
Was last year your first kind of “proper” This is Lorelei live shows?
I guess it depends on what you mean by proper. Lorelei has existed for a long time. Back in the day in Chicago, there was a really chaotic live Lorelei band. I think the biggest performance was 10 or 11 people one time. If you kind of knew the songs, I would basically enlist you to join in the band. As long as there was a bass player and a drummer, I would just book a show. And then I would tell everyone else, basically, show up if you want. That yielded a couple of really fun moments and a host of bad performances. And then, for years, I just did karaoke sets. I didn't even have any of the words memorized. It would just look at the computer and stand there and sing. So, It's really been the last year or two that the live band has really developed.
Got it. So, back to the beginning—you’ve been recording songs under the This is Lorelei moniker for years and uploading a ton of those tracks to Bandcamp. What prompted the decision last year to finally release an “official” This is Lorelei album?
It was a combination of things. For a long time, Lorelei was more of a demo idea sandbox. If I had a really good idea from Lorelei, I would just lift it for another project. That still applies to Water From Your Eyes. At least a handful of things from every Water From Your Eyes album are kind of just plucked up from This is Lorelei. It wasn’t really until the last couple of years that it felt like Lorelei developed an actual direction of its own, separate from me personally. It kind of just became more and more of a focus. Before, I would just put a song up on Spotify or Bandcamp whatever, without doing any press or anything. And my manager got really frustrated with me. He was like, ‘dude, let me shop one of these.’ This was honestly the first album where I worked on it hard enough that I didn't want to just put it out without any kind of notice.
And how are you able to differentiate these songs from Water From Your Eyes songs, or My Idea songs? There is something distinct about This is Lorelei, but the musical tastes on “Box for Buddy, Box For Star” run the absolute gamut—I mean so much is covered here. When you have such a wide range like that, how are you able to determine what makes sense for This is Lorelei?
I guess it’s basically a gut reaction. At this point, I kind of have my Lorelei brain and Water brain. This is obviously a question that comes up a lot. The answer that I tend to give is it's kind of like playing two different sports. There is the basic idea and scope of things you could possibly do that are similar, but there are different objectives and different muscle groups being used. And the way it's kind of naturally evolved is that Water From Your Eyes is a kind of exercise in rejecting tradition. Whereas Lorelei has kind of turned into a thing where it really is more about embracing existing songwriting archetypes. If I didn't have separate outlets for those two things, I don't know if anything would work. It would probably just be a mess.
I know you’ve discussed this topic ad nauseam, so apologies for bringing it back up again, but you’ve talked about making this music while sober, which must have been incredibly daunting at first. Did that process get easier as you kept going? Were you able to really convince yourself that you could do this thing?
It was an odd period of time for me and getting sober was a big part of it. There are a lot of things you have to do in the aftermath of long term substance abuse, in terms of just mental health. Once you kick your thing, you have to learn how to be a person without it. And at that point, I still hadn't really done that. The only thing that I could do was obsessively get into my music. Ultimately, the reason this album got so much time poured into it, is because I was desperately looking for anything to do that wasn't working on my actual self. I wouldn't say it was easy, but I was very focused, at least.
So, in its own way, was this process therapeutic?
I try not to rely on that too much, because I spent too many years being like, ‘I don't need to do therapy, because I can express myself through my art’. I mean, that's kind of the ultimate cliche. There/s weight to that, but it can also be such a cop out. I know I've used it as a cop out.
I think everyone was just amazed at the wild diversity of songs on “Box for Buddy, Box For Star,” and I love that you start the album off with a real curveball track—this lonesome cowboy, tears-in-my-beer country tune, “Angel’s Eye.” That’s such an amazing tune, but clearly not indicative of the entire album. What made you want to kick off the record with that song?
I'm a sucker for a good red herring. That’s something I tend to do, but not to be deceiving. There’s a balance to it—I wouldn’t want to use really stylistically different songs at the start of an album in a way where it's just like, ‘check out how different I can sound!’ That wasn't the intention with this album at all. One of the things I was thinking about at the time was how a lot of albums tend to start in this very focused place, and then kind of drift off towards the end in different directions. I wanted to harness that same dynamic curve, but invert it. In a lot of ways, stylistically, this album is way more cohesive in the second half. It kind of begins as this ball bouncing back and forth—an up and down thing. And then the ball stops bouncing as high and kind of settles into this very comfortable place where that album lands. For me, the final resting place of the album was always [album closer] “An Extra Beat For You And Me”—that was kind of the point of the whole process. That’s the song that I feel like I wrote this whole album to get to. And “Angel’s Eye” and “Perfect Hand” were the two songs that were most different stylistically, so I think they worked best in the beginning of the album. I didn’t want to cut those songs because there wasn’t a good place for them, so I put them one-two in the sequencing.
And I’m going to spare you from going over this whole album, track-by-track, because I really could, but I wanted to touch base on a few of them. “Dancing in the Club” was one of my favorite songs of last year and it has this immortal line in there—“But a loser never wins/ And I'm a loser, always been.” I love it because it claims ownership over that. Indie music is supposed to be for losers and this song really feels like it belongs to indie fans. Did you have it in mind for this song to be a kind of defiant mantra?
Yeah—that’s the joke. It’s a club song by a person who would never get into the club. That song is funny because it ended up being produced in such a hyper specific style, even though it came from a place of simplicity. I was trying to write melodies that would function on their own without the assistance of any chord progression or things. I wrote about 90% of the melody and lyrics to that song walking around outside with nothing else going on. I like the idea of melody that sounds just natural when you’re humming it, walking through the woods. When you go that route, the lyrics that tend to fall into place have a certain melancholy. I was listening to a ton of Shane MacGowan at the time. Someone had sent me “Fairytale of New York,” which I had somehow never heard before—because a song on a Lorelei album reminded them of it. And then I went down this Shane MacGowan rabbit hole and thought to myself, ‘fuck, I have not written a real song in my life.” I've written joke songs, essentially, and he was someone who's tapping into the essence of the human condition that's relevant in rock music but also feels ancient. Basically, I listened to Shane MacGowan, had a panic attack, and realized I needed to write a good song.
I saw MJ Lenderman perform a cover of that song a few weeks ago. I know you two are friends. He has an interesting downtempo take, which I thought was great. What were your initial reactions to his version?
I heard him do it before he was playing it live and thought it was really cool. He’s got that voice—that very specific vocal delivery that can just communicate emotion. There are lots of really good singers who don't have that. There are lots of really bad singers who are great at singing, because they do have that. And he’s a great singer. I’d never really written a song with the idea of someone else covering so fundamentally in mind, before writing “Dancing in the Club.”
So, you wrote that song with the idea that it could specifically be covered by MJ Lenderman?
Not specifically by him, but I did have the idea that it could be covered. You want to write a song that other people want to sing—artistically, that's the dream. To have one of your songs leak through into the canon of songs that people play when they think of songs to play. That’s one half of the dream. The other half of it is like—it’d be really nice to have a cash cow.
Next stop, Sabrina Carpenter is covering that one.
Exactly. Or some country dude. And that's why it was really cool hearing Jake [MJ Lenderman] play it, because he showed it could be transposed into that country sound. For me, the main mark of a certain kind of song that is really good, is how it translates into being done in different styles.
My favorite song of last year was “Where’s Your Love Now.” It reminds me of a modern day Beach Boys song and it feels to me equally about finding power in sobriety and emotional independence, outside of a relationship. Was that a ripped-from-the-headlines experience? Is that song autobiographical?
Yeah, I would say that song, at least more than anything else, was an autobiographical one. Most of the songs on the album are, it's just a question of how many layers removed they are. Sometimes it works better to push it a little further away, like “Angel’s Eye”, which kind of has its own narrative, or “Perfect Hand”, which just devolves into wordplay. But “Where’s Your Love Now” was definitely one that I wanted to remove as many of those layers as possible. I wasn't trying to write any particular kind of thing, but that’s just what happens sometimes. A lot of these songs went from not existing to being fully recorded and largely mixed in two or three hours. Nothing good ever comes from sitting down and trying to write a song. In my experience, it just has to happen organically, and then you have to latch on to that moment.
Again—you have such a wide range of sounds and approaches and genres on the album and there seem to be countless influences. One of the few songs that I view as having a direct forebear is “Two Legs,” which has this very Elliott Smith, “XO” feel to it. Were you listening to him at the time of making this album? Did he have an impact on the sound of that particular song at least?
He's someone who’s deeply ingrained in my songwriting. When I was about 15, someone gave me a copy of “Figure 8” on CD, and that blew my mind. His sense of arrangements on the “XO” and “Figure 8” period is something that has always stuck with me. I mean, with Elliott Smith, you can't be a guy who double tracks your softly sung vocals without that being the first thing that everyone thinks about. I knew what I was doing, but it actually started off as more of a Ram/Wings thing really, which sort of overlaps with Elliott Smith. In terms of production style, I was definitely thinking of Paul McCartney primarily, but I doubt I could have made it through that whole thing without at least thinking of Elliott Smith a few times.
I read that you view This is Lorelei as kind of a low-priority side project. Are you surprised at all that the album has resonated the way that it has?
It’s been a shocker. Because Lorelei predates Water From Your Eyes by five years or so. It’s the oldest running thing of mine, and so I'm very used to it not being something that elicits any sort of response, which I was always fine with, because it was kind of my secret thing. But I do feel like it turned into a more serious project at some point, slowly over the last five years. I'm really glad that it's happening on this album, as opposed to some of the others.
You’ve always been super prolific—have you been working on follow-up This is Lorelei songs to this album? What about Water From Your Eyes?
I'm kind of constantly flipping back and forth. I'm working on writing new Lorelei stuff now and the next Water From Your Eyes album is done—it’s in the bag. The idea is to alternate years with those projects, at least as long as I can keep up with it.
So, Water From Your Eyes will be touring and putting out an album out this year?
Yeah—it’s going to come out later this year—it'll be announced soon. There’s a bunch of stuff planned for this year for Water From Your Eyes and I would love for another Lorelei album to come out next year, in 2026.
Are you excited to be coming back to San Francisco? Water from Your Eyes has played here plenty. But I think this will be the first This is Lorelei appearance?
This is going to be the first time that Lorelei has played any further west than Chicago, unless I'm forgetting something. I'm really excited to be playing in San Francisco. It’s funny how different touring can feel with different bands. I never really realized that until this last Lorelei tour. I'm so used to going on tour as Water From Your Eyes, which has a very specific headspace to be in every night. And it's just different touring with Lorelei. But I think we are all excited to be coming out to California now.
Show Details:
This is Lorelei with Starcleaner Reunion
Where: Café Du Nord
When: 8 p.m., Thursday, April 3
Tickets: $27, available here.