‘I know what it’s like to be vulnerable’: musician This Is Lorelei AKA Nate Amos on addiction and finding peace

The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances. Now sober, he reflects on his new album and the songs that helped him turn his life round For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp.

Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era. Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles.

The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand, he jokes.

His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile. diction and finding peace Jazz Monroe The singer-songwriter and Water from Your Eyes guitarist was unstoppably prolific, despite a growing dependence on substances.

Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand, he jokes. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table.

Amos recorded his new album, The Singer in My Band, at the Brooklyn apartment he moved into in 2017. It had a “punk house vibe” then, but as housemates moved on, he gradually took over the place. The home studio setup allows him to work fast, the only way he knows. He may speak in a slow drawl, but his torrential work ethic belies any affinity with slackerdom.

He finished the new record before signing to Matador, but kept its existence a secret from the label (also home to his other band, art-rock misfits Water from Your Eyes). “I sent them the completed album within half an hour of signing the contract, he says, stirring his bright green drink with a straw. “I was like: ‘Actually, it’s done!’” The Singer in My Band is alarmingly jaunty – an outlier in a bric-a-brac catalogue that has noodled from sad chamber pop to murky post-punk to midsize indie anthems.

He knocks out twangy riffs, hearty harmonies and bunnyhopping basslines that hark back to his childhood under the spell of his bluegrass-maestro father, Bob Amos. Had he made something so ripe and bucolic a decade ago, you might have assumed it was a joke. In truth, Amos has always had a country soul.”””