Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (10th Anniversary Edition) Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

• 1 I Need Never Get Old 04:14
• 2 Howling At Nothing 03:10
• 3 Trying So Hard Not To Know 02:51
• 4 I’ve Been Failing 03:00
• 5 S.O.B. 04:08
• 6 Wasting Time 03:44
• 7 Thank You 03:18
• 8 Look It Here 03:03
• 9 Shake 03:39
• 10 I’d Be Waiting 03:41
• 11 Mellow Out 03:32
• 12 Wasting Time (Demo) 03:36
• 13 Howling at Nothing (Demo) 03:14
• 14 Trying So Hard Not To Know (Demo) 02:53
• 15 A Little More Too (Demo) 02:49
• 16 Late Night Party (Demo) 03:43
• 17 I Need Never Get Old (Demo) 03:49
• 18 Thank You (Demo) 03:51
• 19 Look It Here (Demo) 02:55
• 20 Feelin It (Demo) 03:50
• 21 I’d Be Waiting (Demo) 04:03
• 22 Mellow Out (Demo) 03:31
• Total Runtime 01:16:34

Info zu Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (10th Anniversary Edition)

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats feiern dieses Jahr das zehnjährige Jubiläum ihres beliebten, bahnbrechenden Debütalbums Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats aus dem Jahr 2015. Aus diesem Anlass bestätigt Rateliff heute die Wiederveröffentlichung des Albums mit zusätzlichen Demoaufnahmen, die einen Einblick in die fieberhaften Wochen der Inspiration geben, in denen eine neue Form des kreativen Ausdrucks entdeckt wurde. Die Neuauflage erscheint am 10. Oktober.

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats ist ein monumentales Album in Rateliffs Karriere, das eine Reise begann, die sich in den folgenden zehn Jahren mit karriereprägenden Momenten nur noch beschleunigt hat: Von den ersten Auftritten der Band in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon und Saturday Night Live über Tourneen und Kollaborationen mit Größen wie Paul Simon, Bob Dylan und Willie Nelson bis hin zu immer größeren Veranstaltungsorten, von Clubs über Theater bis hin zu Rateliffs geliebtem Red Rocks und Arenen, darunter ein ausverkauftes Konzert im Madison Square Garden.

Die Band startete genau zum richtigen Zeitpunkt für Rateliff: Nach Jahren als eher folkiger Singer-Songwriter mit mäßigem Erfolg erwog Rateliff, zu seinem früheren, stabileren Beruf als Gärtner zurückzukehren. Das Schicksal griff in Form eines Songs ein, der mit dem Konzept „Was wäre, wenn Sam & Dave in der Band wären?“ spielte. Rateliff wurde inspiriert, „Trying So Hard Not to Know“ zu schreiben, ein erschütterndes, aber faszinierend gefühlvolles Bekenntnis romantischer Desillusionierung.

Der Hahn war aufgedreht und die Songs sprudelten in genau der Mischung heraus, die er sich vorgestellt hatte: eine Mischung aus belebendem R&B im Stax-Stil und reichhaltigem Roots-Rock. Die Aufnahmen, die er in seinem Dachgeschoss mit GarageBand machte, mündeten schließlich in das gleichnamige, mit Gold ausgezeichnete Debütalbum der Band aus dem Jahr 2015, das vier Top-20-Triple-A-Hits hervorbrachte: „I Need Never Get Old“, „Look it Here“, „Wasting Time“ und das mit Doppelplatin ausgezeichnete „S.O.B.“.

Zu den elf neuen Demos, die dem Projekt hinzugefügt wurden, sagt Rateliff: „Die Reise eines Songs muss irgendwo beginnen. Songs können Ideen sein, die jahrelang reifen. Manchmal verstecken sie sich in unserem Inneren, und es liegt an uns, uns ihnen zu öffnen und ihre melodische Geburt zu begrüßen. Hier sind elf unveröffentlichte Ideen, die vor etwas mehr als zehn Jahren in meinem Dachboden entstanden sind. Ich hatte ein Mikrofon, ein Zweikanal-Interface, einen Zweikanal-Vorverstärker und meinen Laptop. Diese Werkzeuge reichten mir damals gerade aus, um Ideen in dem Moment festzuhalten, in dem sie kamen. Der Prozess der Aufnahme dieser Demos war eine große Überraschung und führte zu einer meiner wertvollsten Freundschaften. Ich dachte, ich würde das letzte Album meiner Karriere aufnehmen. Stattdessen war es der Beginn eines neuen Lebens.“

Das Album, produziert vom verstorbenen, großartigen Richard Swift, bietet einen der ergreifendsten Einblicke in die lange Zusammenarbeit von Swift und Rateliff. Rateliff reflektiert: „Wir bekommen in unserem Leben nur wenige Gelegenheiten, in denen sich unser Weg mit einer Kraft kreuzt, die größer ist als wir selbst, und er hat mich zweifellos nachhaltig geprägt. Ich konnte ihm eine Idee bringen, und er schuf einfach diese ganze Klanglandschaft. Sein Einfluss prägt alles, was ich seitdem gemacht habe.“

Der erste Late-Night-Auftritt der Band in der The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon im Jahr 2015 war ein wichtiger Wendepunkt in der Karriere der Band. „Noch bevor wir gespielt hatten, kam mein Manager zu mir und sagte: ‚Ihr habt gerade mehr Vorverkäufe verkauft als für jedes Album, das ihr jemals gemacht habt‘“, erzählt Rateliff. „Wir gingen auf die Bühne, spielten, lieferten eine gute Performance ab und hatten Spaß. Und von da an war alles anders. Es war lustig, weil alle sagten: ‚Ihr seid über Nacht berühmt geworden!‘ Aber wir hatten bereits 20 Jahre harter Arbeit und Frustration hinter uns.“

In einem Moment, in dem sich der Kreis schloss, tauchte Fallon dieses Jahr überraschend bei der ausverkauften Jubiläumsshow der Band im Madison Square Garden auf, begleitete sie bei ihrer Zugabe und lieferte eine mitreißende Interpretation von „S.O.B.“ – zu sehen hier. Den letzten Auftritt der Band in der Tonight Show gibt es hier zu sehen.

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats
practically explodes with deep, primal and ecstatic soulfulness. This stunning work isn’t just soul stirring, it’s also soul baring, and the combination is absolutely devastating to behold. You don’t just listen to this record—you experience it. So it’s entirely fitting that the self-titled album will bear the iconic logo of Stax Records, because at certain moments Rateliff seems to be channeling soul greats like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave. But as this gifted multi-instrumentalist honors the legacy of the legendary Memphis label, he’s also setting out into audacious new territory.

Those who were beguiled by In Memory of Loss, Rateliff’s folky, bittersweet 2010 Rounder album, will be in for an initial shock when they spin Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats. But when you delve beneath the rawboned surface of the new album’s wall-rattling presentation, with its deep-gut grooves, snaky guitars, churning Hammond and irresistible horns, you’ll find that same sensitive, introspective dude, who bravely tells it like it is, breaking through his reticence to expose often harsh truths about the life he’s lived, the people he’s hurt and the despair he’s struggled with. The difference between the two albums is that the Nights Sweats’ funkiness insulates the starkly confessional nature of Rateliff’s songs while at the same time underscoring their emotional extremes.

The place where Rateliff is coming from is intensely real and intimate. Doing what he does is an act of bravery. “These songs are about the struggles I’ve had in my life—drinking too much, that kind of crap,” he says with characteristic candor, punctuating the admission with a rueful laugh. “And then the relationships we all have. I’m not a great communicator in my personal life, so it’s funny to be writing songs that say the things that I’m never very good at saying. It’s taken me a long time to figure that out. I’m trying to be a better communicator, but it’s horribly awkward—it’s awful—to tell somebody something you know is gonna hurt their feelings. I’ve always been one to go, oh, I’ll just eat this one; it’ll be okay.”

As the band blazes away on the soul-rock rave-up “I Need Never Get Old,” the visceral “Howling at Nothing” and the supercharged “Trying So Hard Not to Know” (key line: “Who gives a damn and very few can”), which open the album with a sustained outpouring of torrid intensity, Rateliff is opening himself up emotionally as well as physically, the raw grit in his voice conveying anguish and hope in equal measure. The buoyant immediacy of the music makes the hard truths embedded in the songs easier to swallow than it would be in Rateliff’s other primary mode—a solitary guy with a guitar, the brim of his baseball cap pulled down, putting his heart and guts on the line without the protection of his simpatico cohorts. Make no mistake, these songs would stop you in their tracks presented in that naked way as well, but the additional layers of soulfulness provided by the Night Sweats—its core comprising guitarist Joseph Pope III, drummer Patrick Meese and keyboardist Mark Shusterman—bring a convergence of intensities, musical and psychological, to the performances.

“S.O.B.” sits at the dead center of the album, between the brutally honest confessionals “I’ve Been Failing” and “Wasted Time.” Thematically, the song is the album’s linchpin—partly a rebuke, partly a cry of defiance, “S.O.B” is the “fuck it all” anthem of a blue-collar kid from the Heartland whose conditioned idea of therapy is a shot and a beer chaser, and then another round, on the way to sweet oblivion. In live performance, Rateliff and the Sweats have been known to mash together “S.O.B.” and The Band’s “The Shape I’m In” as the double-barreled climax of their sets (you can find it on YouTube), the frontman high-stepping and boogalooing across the stage with controlled abandon, bearing a striking resemblance in his physicality to the young Van Morrison. These moments of revelry are also revelatory, singling out two of Rateliff’s biggest influences. Indeed, he hears distinct evocations of The Band on his new album, and he was listening to “TB Sheets” and the rest of Morrison’s The Bang Masters as he was writing it.

From there Rateliff contemplates some of the sustaining aspects of existence, from redemption by way of the forgiving love of another in “Thank You,” “Look It Here” and “I’d Be Waiting” to sexual heat in the N’awlins-style strutter “Shake.” The album ends on a hopeful note with the relatively laidback “Mellow Out,” which could certainly be heard as Rateliff admonishing himself to do just that. “Originally, I had it ending with a song called ‘How to Make Friends,’” he says. “The chorus is ‘When everybody knows you, nobody’s gonna want you.’” Another laugh follows, this one self-mocking. “But I replaced it with ‘Mellow Out,’ which is more of a release rather than a total bummer.”

When it came time to pick a producer, Rateliff went with Richard Swift, a polymath who has made records under his own name, helmed projects for Damien Jurado, the Mynabirds and others, and has played with The Black Keys and the Shins. Swift’s specialty is summoning (and capturing) inspired performances in the moment, and the synergy in the studio, first with Rateliff and then with his band, was instant and palpable. Rateliff and the Sweats already had the arrangements of the new songs down cold, having shaped them on the road. Swift, knowing a good thing when he heard it, set the mics, honed the sound, giving it plenty of space so that the studio itself served as an integral sonic component. Then he pressed “record” and coaxed it into happening organically. “Richard has such great ears, and he really knows how to play to the room,” Rateliff notes. “We have similar theories of recording: basically, you just need to play it right.”

Rateliff, who’s 36, traveled a long road to get to this point. He left school after his dad passed away at the end of 7th grade, left his home in the small town of Herman, Missouri, where his future would’ve likely involved endless shifts in a nearby plastic factory; and worked as a janitor for a high school. Not long afterward, he followed some local missionaries to Denver, thereby escaping what he describes as “the Midwestern lifestyle of working and growing up too fast.” He soon outgrew his childhood understanding of religion, realizing that “there are so many books out there besides that one,” as his worldview expanded exponentially. Rateliff spent the next 10 years on the loading dock of a trucking company before becoming a gardener and getting married along the way. But as the years passed, he became increasingly focused on writing songs and performing them at any watering hole that would have him, in time becoming part of the city’s burgeoning folk scene. “I got kind of a late start making music,” he says, “but eventually I went out on the road,” first with Born in the Flood, which he’d formed with Pope, and then The Wheel, the forerunner of the Night Sweats. By then, he’d overcome his longstanding discomfort at playing his songs in public.

“Writing at home is one of my favorite things to do,” says this constitutionally solitary man. “But for years touring was really hard for me—being alone, being married and having my relationship run through the mire, because a lot of my songs are about that. Sometimes it sucks to sing those songs and have to relive those situations. It leaves you pretty exposed, and your partner too; it can be unfair. But now I love being on stage and cracking jokes, trying not to take myself too seriously, even if the material is about failed relationships and alcoholism, that kind of stuff”—there’s that rueful laugh again.

“I try to be lighthearted,” Rateliff continues, “because, although the songs are heavy, I want it to be a release for people. I’m trying to do something that’s emotionally charged and heartfelt, and I want the experience to be joyous, for people to feel excited and dance around instead of being super-bummed by reality—I mean, things are hard. But I can remember dancing around to some song that was breakin’ my heart, dancin’ with tears in my eyes. I love that feeling, and I wanna share it with people, and hopefully they’ll feel it too.” (Bud Scoppa)

Dieses Album enthält kein Booklet