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.
Nathaniel Rateliff
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.
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.
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 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, we weren't really supposed to listen to secular music. But one day, I found a 'Led Zeppelin IV' cassette tape in the garage, and it was just amazing-sounding music, not like anything I'd heard before. I remember thinking: 'Well, if God created music, why is his music in church not as good as this?'
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.
I'm pretty easily overwhelmed and pretty tough as well. I think I'm tougher than I used to be. There's been a lot of hardship along the way. But that's what life is. And it's how you deal with those things, and how you let them shape you that makes you a better person and defines what sort of person you're going to be.
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.
Sometimes, if I allow time to be creative, it doesn't show up.
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.
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'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.
I've always loved soul, R&B, doo-wop and blues, and I've wanted to make a record like that for years.
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.
One of my initial memories of being taken over by music was watching Paul McCartney on TV play a tribute to John Lennon. He was playing piano by himself and singing 'Imagine,' and I remember feeling an anxiety and shortness of breath.
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.'
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.
My original project was called 'The Wheel'; there's a record out there called 'Desire & The Dissolving Man,' 'The Memory Of Loss' as well. There's also 'Falling Faster Than You Can Run,' also 'Closer'; all of that's on our website.
