PULLING TOGETHER “TEARING AT THE SEAMS”
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats’ new album almost didn’t happen
Nathaniel Rateliff’s time is no longer his own. Since the Denver-based singer-songwriter started performing with his spirited soul band, The Night Sweats, the band has played some 350 concerts with another 59 already on the books for 2018 — an aggressive clip for any outfit.
It wasn’t long ago that you could catch Rateliff for a curbside interview on any given day on South Broadway. Those days are over. Our conversation, 30 short minutes in a well-appointed office at 7S Management’s headquarters in Denver, came amid a stretch of promotional shows that’s had him doing up to 12 interviews a day for outlets around the world.
“I don’t really have any time for myself or a personal life,” Rateliff said, a trucker hat clamped down over his unkempt tuft of hair. “But it’s OK. I’m excited about what we’re doing.”
On Friday, Rateliff and company will release “Tearing at the Seams,” its sophomore effort. Spiking the band’s rugburning Sam & Dave routine with big folk ballads and Americana rock, it’s as much of a bawler as a brawler, toasting to the good times one moment and imagining setting “the whole thing on fire” the next.
There’s plenty for his legions of Night Sweats fans on the new album, but the melancholic swells Rateliff commanded in past projects like The Wheel and Born in the Flood are there, too. “It’s all over the place,” Rateliff concedes.
Sophomore albums are tricky, especially ones that follow an Recording Industry Association of America Gold Recordcertified debut. To make matters more complicated, “Tearing at the Seams” nearly didn’t happen at all.
“There was a time certainly when we were in the heavily touring part of The Night Sweats where he was vocally like, ‘I don’t know if there’s going to be another Night Sweats record. I just want to write folk songs,’ ” said Night Sweats guitarist Luke Mossman.
“I had some moments where I was going to quit,” Rateliff said. “It’s funny. You become a musician because you’re insecure, but standing in front of 10,000 people doesn’t really change that. It only made me question things even more.”
The stress of touring the band’s debut album exacted its toll, he said, as did The Night Sweats’ rowdy single “S.O.B.” Days before the band’s debut album was released, it played the song on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” a turning point for the band that catapulted it onto the Billboard charts. The band often saved the song as a nightcap for its shows; the chorus — “Son of a b----, give me a drink” — would dependably incite a mess of dancing and flung beers.
The reaction was a cruel twist of entertainmentindustry fate. The song was inspired by Rateliff’s bout with delirium tremens — a potentially fatal symptom of alcohol withdrawal that’s accompanied by shaking, hallucinations and, yes, sweating. Show by show, that traumatic experience became a hugely popular drinking anthem.
“It was hard because, sometimes, it felt like, man, people just don’t get what I’m talking about,” Rateliff said. “But that’s also not my responsibility as a performer.”
What made its success harder to swallow was that, in Rateliff’s own estimation, “S.O.B.” isn’t a great song. Much like “Anthem,” a song Rateliff came up with on stage at a Denver concert that won him a $150,000 offer from Roadrunner Records that he subsequently declined, “S.O.B.” was written on a lark. Rateliff didn’t want it to be on the first record at all — Night Sweats drummer Patrick Meese and Richard Swift, the enigmatic producer behind both Night Sweats records, had to convince him to include it.
“The difference between ‘Anthem’ and ‘S.O.B.’ now, though, is I appreciate what ‘S.O.B.’ has done,” Rateliff said. “Regardless of how I feel about it as a writer, I’m going to sing that song for a long time, hopefully.”
Just as he’s come to grips with the power of “S.O.B.,” Rateliff eventually found satisfaction in writing a new Night Sweats album — in part by avoiding the pressure to write anything that resembles that hallmark track. “You Worry Me,” the album’s lead single, eschews the party-pop of the band’s biggest songs, coursing with concern for someone whose fate is no longer the singer’s responsibility: “I’m all right today / you’re gonna find a way to cross and you’re gonna get there.”
Mid-tempo pillow-huggers aren’t typically good fodder for radio singles. But Rateliff pointed out that the song is the fastest to chart on non-commercial radio in Triple A radio history. “So, we do have a radio hit,” he grinned.
Here and elsewhere (“Babe I Know” offers the same bereaved embrace of resignation) the title “Tearing at the Seams” feels like a cause for alarm. Though he wrote much of the album with the band in the desert of Rodeo, N.M., Rateliff went to a health retreat in Tucson for 11 days to finish it. It was a chance after 12 weeks on the road to pull his head together, not drink and work through “a bunch of hardship” he was going through. (He and his wife recently decided to divorce.)
“Still Out There Running,” a revealing trickle of meditations, is “a conversation between two people,” Rateliff said obliquely. One of his conclusions here — that a songwriter’s relationships are kindling for their concerts — suggests that solitude is a foregone conclusion he’s still grappling with. “I used to be the king of standing alone,” he sings, the implied hubris long since beat out of him.
But through all the success he’s had with The Night Sweats, which make another appearance on “The Tonight Show” on Monday, he said he can still see himself going it alone again. In fact, his most recently announced concerts, a string of dates opening for songwriting druid John Prine, notably bill him sans Night Sweats. He admits that he’s not sure what those evenings will look like just yet, before breaking off a bang-on Prine impression.
“I’d love to (perform solo again),” Rateliff said. “I’ve actually been trying to kick out a solo record for a while.”
The problem is an increasingly familiar one: “I just don’t have time.”