This Is Lorelei - The Singer In My Band This Is Lorelei

The last few years have been transformative for Nate Amos. Between delivering breakout records both as a solo artist — under his This Is Lorelei moniker — and with his band Water From Your Eyes, sold-out shows across multiple continents, and seeing some of today’s most influential artists cover his songs, the ascending songwriter has found his stride.

As the first This Is Lorelei album for Matador Records, The Singer in My Band takes the building blocks of the Great American Songbook and twists those elemental pieces into new shapes, at once both strangely familiar and endearingly offbeat in Amos’ signature style.

Written while touring the globe in support of releases from both his projects, The Singer in My Band arrives as the first true ‘road record’ in Amos’ discography. “The ideas incubated while daydreaming in the car without access to any instruments,” he recalls, “so instead of being home and writing on the guitar or a computer, they developed slowly and subconsciously, existing as a sort of intangible thing while looking out the van window.”

“Billy Came Back”, the album’s propulsive lead single, arrives alongside a video by Alan “Rickman” Official. “‘Billy Came Back’ stewed for months before I picked up a guitar to work it out - I kept forgetting about it but it always came back. Finishing the song was the only way to get it to leave me alone,” says Amos.

There’s Billy, Joey, Genevieve, Sarah and the ever-present Buddy, an Altman-esque ensemble cast that populate the album’s stories, scattered through distinctly American scenes and landmarks. As narrators go, they aren’t terribly reliable. They traffic in wild stories and chaotic experiences that are at once oddly specific and just a bit blurry, mirroring Amos’ experience of the last several years.

2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star was Amos’ first attempt at an intentionally written full-length solo album, tackling newfound sobriety through a roving, tongue-in-cheek take on musical personas, all filtered through Amos’ genre-agnostic lens. It was a critical and word-of-mouth success, spawning a deluxe version with covers and collaborations including MJ Lenderman, Hayley Williams, Jeff Tweedy, Cameron Winter and many more.

The Singer in My Band came together in the same apartment where Amos has produced much of his music, with final touches made at his parents’ house in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Amos engineered, produced and performed everything on the album, save for a blistering banjo lead on the title track courtesy of his father, bluegrass musician Bob Amos, and occasional vocals from his sister Sarah Amos and partner Al Nardo.

There’s an economy of style to The Singer in My Band that’s distinct in the Lorelei catalogue, harking back to Amos’ earliest experiences with songwriting and a lifelong reverence for bluegrass music. “It’s the most fundamental form of music to me,” he says, but is quick to note that its influence is more a set of principles than a sound. “There’s a simplicity to bluegrass, where there are very particular rules and a very particular box - songs have to stand up by themselves in terms of melody, lyrics and chord progression.”