A mad pop scientist reveals his inner singer-songwriter

T
the first piece on his upcoming debut album This Is Lorelei is a sweet, sad song called “Angel's Eye.” “So long, my lonely friend/Goodbye, my lonely love,” sings a high-pitched voice over gently rolling strums. It's a pure, honest country cry, full of emotion in every note.

If you don't already know, you might be surprised to learn that This Is Lorelei is a pseudonym for Nate Amos, one of the mad scientist minds behind Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes. In this band, he twists weird, noisy riffs into postmodern pop beats for singer Rachel Brown to sing. Water From Your Eyes are one of the weirdest, funniest and most exciting bands in New York right now, and they're on the verge of even bigger things after releasing a great album on Matador Records last year.

But the music Amos makes with Water From Your Eyes is only half the story. For more than a decade, he's been making sounds out under the moniker This Is Lorelei, spanning dozens of releases on Bandcamp. What is he ready to show the world with? Box for Buddy, Box for Star (out June 14 on DIY stronghold Double Double Whammy) is arguably the most unexpected entry in his catalog to date: a 10-track LP full of authentically soulful singer-songwriter material drenched in pain and Americana.

“I don't think I would have ever sat down with a blank slate and said, 'I'm going to make this kind of album,'” says Amos, 33, over a plate of kale and a side of fried chili at a Thai street food joint. food near his location in Bed-Stuy. “I don't think it's something I would have stumbled upon if I hadn't done all the other bullshit.”

In some ways, this music is a belated return to the sounds that Amos ascended to. Growing up in Virginia and Vermont, he was introduced to the ABCs of songwriting by his dad, Bob Amos, a bluegrass musician known for his original compositions in a genre often focused on traditional standards. “He's a Beatles fanatic and he passed it on to me,” says Amos. “This is the closest thing to a religion I've ever had.” (Rubber soul it was his dad's favorite. he shot the White album himself.)

Living with his family on a rural hillside in St. Johnsbury, Vermont — “They call it the Northeast Kingdom, from the hats I've seen,” he quips — Amos embraced a timeless teenage lifestyle in high school. “I took a lot of lessons and drove and smoked a lot of weed on the dirt roads,” he says. His stereo on these rides could be blasting anything from Death Cab to Avenged Sevenfold to some 'dark, lo-fi electronic stuff made by this guy I learned about from my high school Wikipedia page because I was trying to vandalize the Wikipedia page.”

After graduating in 2009 and moving upstate to Burlington, Amos dove deeper into patterns he's only recently begun to unravel. “Honestly, I was very into drugs,” he says, recalling those years of freedom and exploration. “But it was also when I started to find the voice I've been chasing for the last 15 years now.”

He started using the name This Is Lorelei around 2013 after he moved back to Chicago and left some of his worst habits behind. He played in various bands, including a stint in his dad's band, and was involved in producing local artists in Chicago. This Is Lorelei is what he called the music he was working on when he returned home to St. Johnsbury for the holidays. “It was always a side project, but there was more to it than any other band I've had,” he says. “It's this eternal thing that's always there.”

For a long time, This Is Lorelei remained an “artistic, fringe environment” project whose production was not always recognizable as songs. One release got him blacklisted by online distribution service DistroKid, he says, “because it was only 50 minutes of noise and all the song titles were just letters and numbers…. I had this system where I could basically put in 10 seconds of improvised anything and it would create, like, 40 minutes of non-linear music. I got really deep into that territory for a while.”

In the summer of 2019, Amos made a breakthrough. “I really, really got into Blink-182's 'All the Small Things,' and I was listening to all these covers of that song,” he says. “For a few weeks, I pretty much only listened to this song. My roommate thought I was going crazy. … Things being fast, catchy and just suddenly interested me a lot. I was drifting into experimentation and Blink-182 saved me.”

He was living in New York, where he had moved to be closer to Brown, his Water From Your Eyes co-star and romantic partner at the time (they broke up that year, but remained friends). Around this time, Amos' two primary pursuits began to take on their own distinct flavors. To summarize, Water From Your Eyes is about provocative pop experiments. This Is Lorelei is for straighter emotional lyric/chorus songs. One makes you laugh and think, the other makes you feel. “It's like playing two different sports,” he says. “They're still related — like, you're doing something physical — but it's a different game.”

Amos had tried to get sober more than once, but it didn't stick until around age 30, when he gave up alcohol and amphetamines. “My alcoholism got to a point where I really had to stop for health reasons,” he says.

His vision for Box for Buddy, Box for Star it came into focus just under a year later, in the spring of 2022, when he was on a UK tour with Water From Your Eyes. Naturally, they ended up at Stonehenge on a day off. “Rachel and I are both into monolithic structures,” she says. “Something along those lines. It's the most beautiful thing there is.”

Lying under the ancient stones, he decided to take some time from the weeds as well. “I've been thinking about it for a while,” he says. “No reason, really. Just to see if I can do it.”

When he returned to New York, completely sober for the first long time in many years, he put all his energy into songwriting. “In the same way, with drugs or alcohol, you try to gain more and more to make yourself happy – this album was a similar pursuit,” he says. “I was like, 'Maybe if I write a good enough song, things will get better.' That's not how things get better, but that's how an addict thinks.” (He also did a possibly excessive number of pushups each day.)

As that summer wore on, he found himself putting together “a comeback album” unlike anything he'd done before. “I was writing a lot of stuff, and the songs I liked the most were the ones that resulted in more brutal self-examination,” he says. “That's where I seemed to get the most clearance from the situation.”

These themes are clear in songs like “Where's Your Love Now,” a soaring ballad of gritty survival: “When you let me drink, I thought I'd die in my sleep/But I'm healthier now, and I'm happier now.” On “I'm crazy” out today as the second single from the album, it sings about dysfunction in honest terms. On “Two Legs,” he weaves bright, shimmering riffs around another vulnerable statement: “If it made your life easy, I'd say goodbye/And love, if you said you needed two legs, I'd give you mine. “

It does not mean that Box for Buddy, Box for Star it is completely devoid of the wry sense of humor that defines much of Amos's work. Take that opening song, “Angel's Eye.” Who sings these tender words about loneliness and devotion? “The idea is that there's this biblical angel, a big scary thing, that kidnaps a cowboy and takes him into space,” Amos explains. “It's like one Romeo and Juliet thing — a love duet sung between the cowboy and the alien who can't be together.”

For Amos, these instincts toward honesty and subversion are equally important. “There's a lot about the album that's very serious, but it plays with that medium in a way,” he says. “Almost like a character exercise. The whole idea of ​​writing serious lyrics is kind of a joke.”

He adds: “One of the things about music that I really love is that it can feel heavy or aggressive or scary, but at the end of the day, you're still singing a song that you wrote, which is probably the least scary thing you can do. to do. It's just recognizing the humor inherent in making music.”

We were walking around his neighborhood in Brooklyn, ending up outside the apartment where he wrote and recorded Box for Buddy, Box for Star. As always, he played all the instruments on the album. (Or he tried, in the case of the strings: “I'm not up there playing the cello.”) He also sang all the vocal parts, using pitch-shifting filters to play with different pitches. “I'm all me, which is par for the course with this project, but I felt particularly important to this album in a way,” he says.

The classical songwriting tradition he explores to such great effect on this album has already begun to seep into his other work. “I was about to release the next album 'Water From Your Eyes' and then I got really involved with Shane MacGowan,” he says. “So I went in a different direction.”

Water From Your Eyes have tour dates throughout the spring, including a high-profile concert for their label mate Matador Interpol in front of hundreds of thousands of fans at Mexico City's Zócalo on April 20. Amos thinks about putting together some This Is Lorelei shows too. At this year's SXSW festival, where he fronted a trio with WFYE touring members Al Nardo on bass and Bailey Wollowitz on drums, it was one of the most live songs.

That might be a lot of attention for someone who spent years working out of the limelight and has now signed not one but two projects to established indie labels. “It's scary, honestly, if only because I've always made music the way I do,” says Amos. “It's never really designed to be consumed by other people.” He shrugs. “I try not to think about it.”