The Prolific Storytelling of This Is Lorelei
In the summer of 2024, Nate Amos released a record called “Box for Buddy, Box for Star” under the sobriquet This Is Lorelei. (The name is a reference to an episode of “Star Trek: The Animated Series.”) The ten-song album felt like a kind of début, though Amos had already established himself as half of the art-pop duo Water from Your Eyes—his project with the musician Rachel Brown—and uploaded hundreds of scrappy, idiosyncratic folk songs to Bandcamp, starting in 2014, when he was a twenty-two-year-old college student living in Chicago. “Box for Buddy” is suffused with heartache—the narrators of these tracks are choking on the backwash of poisonous relationships—but it’s also a playful, visionary album that both embraces and lampoons dusty singer-songwriter tropes. It seesaws between woeful love songs that are set to acoustic guitar and toy piano (“Where’s Your Love Now”) and woeful love songs that are laced with Auto-Tune and keening synthesizer (“Dancing in the Club”).
With Brown, Amos makes twinkly, off-kilter experimental songs that sometimes sound as though they’re being piped out of a cursed music box. “Box for Buddy” earned him comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel and the Postal Service, artists beloved for their urgency and their tenderness. A “super deluxe” version of the album, released earlier this year, features covers by a murderers’ row of indie musicians, including Waxahatchee (“Where’s Your Love Now”), MJ Lenderman (“Dancing in the Club”), Snail Mail (“Two Legs”), and Power Snatch (“Perfect Hand”), Hayley Williams’s duo with the producer Daniel James. Last December, during a solo piano show in Los Angeles, Cameron Winter, the front man of the band Geese, performed a soaring and intensely plangent version of “Where’s Your Love Now,” a song about looking back with a mix of bitterness and clarity: “I said, where’s your love now? / Long after your song is over / You left me to drink, I thought I’d die in my sleep / But I’m healthier now.” Amos’s current popularity nods, seductively, to an earlier era, in which artists were discovered not via algorithmic meddling but by the endorsement of their peers and old-fashioned word of mouth.
“It’s been very trippy, getting to know all those covers,” Amos told me this summer, over lunch at a Himalayan restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens. “It almost feels like a proud-parent moment. The song survived adolescence, and now it’s its own functional thing.” This month, Amos will release “The Singer in My Band,” his second full-fledged album as This Is Lorelei, and his most elemental and concise work yet. “I love a forty-five-minute album,” he said. “But, honestly, that’s a lot of prolonged attention to ask of people, with things being the way they are. So I figured I would shave ten minutes off that and be, like, Come on, lock into my thirty-four minutes. You can do this!”
Amos wrote, engineered, performed, and produced the record himself, excepting some banjo playing by his father, Bob, and occasional backing vocals by both his sister, Sarah, and his fiancée, the bassist Al Nardo. It’s the first release where Amos’s Americana bona fides—he grew up in a family of bluegrass musicians, mostly in Winchester, Virginia, a center for Appalachian music—feel evident. “I didn’t really attempt to play guitar until fifth grade,” Amos said. “By then, I had seven years of just sitting at bluegrass jam sessions and observing. The thing with bluegrass is that everything is a rhythm instrument—with the exception of the fiddle, sometimes—so it’s as if everyone is operating a giant musical drum set, and if one person isn’t holding their own then the whole thing completely collapses.”
“The Singer in My Band” sounds tighter and more expensive than Amos’s previous LPs. His voice, which is grainy and earnest, is often doubled in the mix, though when he leaps into a higher register, as he does on the single “Oh No Now My,” it sounds airy, almost celestial. These are hooky, likable songs about rambling around, encountering oddball characters, receiving their wisdom and warnings, and then keeping it moving—part Robert Frank, part Robert Altman, with a minor but hallucinatory dose of Hunter S. Thompson. Many have the gentle, foggy quality of a Polaroid: dim, half remembered, fleeting. “I always think about this Mitch Hedberg joke, that photos of Bigfoot aren’t blurry, they’re actually in focus—he’s just a blurry monster,” Amos said. He has come to think of the album’s structure in literary terms, comparing it to Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”: “It’s a larger narrative, but it’s told in short-story form.” His writing is unusually rife with proper nouns—Buddy, Sarah, Evie, Genevieve, Billy, Joey, Miss B. When I asked him if the work feels explicitly autobiographical, he paused. “I mean, there isn’t anything on this album that I haven’t experienced in some capacity,” he said. “But my approach toward writing is not so much trying to tell a specific story or communicate a particular thing but to create a kind of playground for the listener’s subconscious to build their own story.” It struck me as a generous impulse—confessional songwriting is often framed as a kind of bloodletting for the writer. “The way I’m thinking about it is, I’m forcing the listener to do their end of the work,” he said.
As a kid, Amos listened to a lot of the Beatles and Stevie Ray Vaughan, though for the past two and a half months, he said, “I haven’t really listened to anything other than ZZ Top. I’m beginning to be slightly worried.” Amos has also been publicly ebullient about his devotion to Blink-182’s “All the Small Things,” a goofy pop-punk hit from 1999. “That’s a God-tier pop song,” he said. “I got really fixated on that song in a way that, honestly, in hindsight, was not normal. I wasn’t even listening to the original recording. I was just finding every cover of that song I could possibly find and putting it on a giant playlist.” He admired the track for its agility, its economy, and its ability to transcend genre (the lyrics, essentially a series of grunts, are incidental to its melodic pleasures). “A sign of a really tight pop song is that it translates to all these different formats really well,” Amos said. The same, of course, is true for Amos’s work—distilled to its essence, and free of affectation, it remains enormously poignant.
After lunch, we took an Uber to the Cage, a baseball complex in Middle Village, a quiet, mostly residential part of Queens. In 2005, the Cage was opened by Ross (the Boss) Friedman, a founding member of the pugnacious and seminal punk band the Dictators, stalwarts of the early CBGB scene. (In 1978, both the Dictators and Bruce Springsteen were recording at the Record Plant, a beloved studio on West Forty-fourth Street; per punk lore, Springsteen shouts the “One, two, three, four!” count at the top of the Dictators’ “Faster and Louder.”) Friedman, who also played lead guitar in the metal band Manowar, passed away in March, and the Cage is now operated by his son Jesse. There’s something sort of ineffably rock and roll about the place—maybe it’s the hundreds of fist-shaped craters punched into the ceiling, evidence of fly balls careening toward Heaven and meeting plaster. As we selected our equipment, I asked Jesse if he had any advice before we went in. He gave me the kind of withering look you can receive only in the outer boroughs of New York City. “Don’t die,” he said.
Amos and I set our machine to a moderate lob and started swinging. Amos is a good batter: steady, confident, strong. He got off some dingers. The Cage felt like a useful spot to work out any resentments lingering in your psyche, all the old grievances dissipating with the clang of aluminum on cowhide. Afterward, standing on the sidewalk, we agreed that it seemed as though we’d accomplished something important. “It’s like a step up from bowling or mini-golf. How do we make mini-golf more extreme, so it’s dangerous?” Amos joked. “I think we did really good,” he concluded, lighting a cigarette. “We didn’t die.” ♦