Nate Amos on This Is Lorelei, Water From Your Eyes, Ween, Tool, and Being Funny

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Over the past year or so I've gotten increasingly into Water From Your Eyes—not just last year's sensational Everyone's Crushed, but their 2019 masterpiece Somebody Else's Song. Something that makes them very fun to follow as a band is that they're putting out a lot of music aside from their main deal, and that certainly includes Nate Amos' This Is Lorelei project, whose latest record under the moniker Box For Buddy, Box For Star has become a sleeper candidate for one of the year's best indie rock albums. I hopped on a call with Nate last week to hash it all out:

Something that continues to catch me off guard with your music is your range and versatility—you seem very confident trying your hand at almost anything at this point. How do you think you've changed and developed as a songwriter?
The stylistic range has been consistent and is the result of a lack of an attention span—or a willingness to do a particular thing. Getting pigeonholed into one sound is something that I've instinctually avoided at all costs, for whatever reason. That creates an interesting arena to grow within as a writer, because the tools that you end up honing don't relate to a particular sound and it relates to writing as a whole.

Working in a lot of different styles has allowed me to strengthen the conceptual, components in terms of having a very elaborate justification for anything I feel like doing at a given time. I feel like I've grown a lot as a writer, and that growth hasn't really been in one particular sound, which has exaggerated my unwillingness to commit to one particular thing.

You're someone who just seems to create a lot in general, too. How do you respond to your creative impulse? Is it about embracing routine, or seizing the moment?
It's definitely process-based, especially for This Is Lorelei. Any given release is written in a very particular environment. The method is to just take the dive and work on it until it's done without looking back at other periods of time. This project was borne out of trying to create things and commit to completing them in a brief moment of time so that they remain very much of that moment.

Tell me more about the aspect of looking back on past work. Is that something you've grown softer towards as you continue creating?
If anything, the more you make, the bigger the pile of stuff you've made is. As you make more and more, everything you make is a smaller fraction of what you've done, so it just matters less and less. It's like your perception of time when you're 10 years old—a year feels like an eternity, but when you're 30, a year feels like nothing because it's just a very small part of what your overall perception of time as you experienced it is. I used to have kind of a working ethos of not looking back, and now it's not even really a choice.

Do you write and record every day? How often are you putting stuff to tape?
It depends on the period of time. I don't write every day—at least, not anymore. I used to, but because of the amount of time that Water From Your Eyes spends on tour I try to be a little more deliberate with when I write. It takes me at least a week to get into it. By the time I'm writing things that I'm keeping, I've usually been writing every day for two or three weeks. Once I get to that point, it happens pretty quickly—but to get there just requires patience. I generally don't even really try unless I have, like, a full month to work. Otherwise, you get to the point where, all of a sudden, you have to stop—and that time would've been better spent doing something that has more lasting power, like laundry or taxes. [Laughs]

Have you been able to write on the road in the past? Many musicians I've talked to have had different feelings on doing that. 
It's not something I even attempt to do at this point. It's something that I can do, and I have done—but every time, I've gotten home and just trashed it all. When you write on the road, it's such a different environment to write music. It'd be great to get to a point where I'm writing things on the road that I think are good enough to keep, but the recurring pattern has been: I write something on the road, it feels good while I'm on the road, and then I come home and realize that something I spent a week thinking about on the road would've been way better if I'd just given it one afternoon of concentration at home. If I have an idea that I really like, I'll specifically wait until I'm home to work on it—because if you try and force it on the road but it doesn't come out right, there's no going back.

What's your junk-to-keep ratio in terms of stuff you're writing and recording?
I would say about a third of it makes it through.

That's considerable, given how much you've released over the years!
I've learned the hard way that if you're only kind of sure that something's good enough, then it's not worth the time to work on it. If a song is meant to be written, it kind of writes itself. Time and time again, I'll put way too much effort into trying to make a song that just doesn't want to work. Learning the early warning signs of that is something that I'm working on, because some part of you always knows. If I'm sitting down and trying to make something and it doesn't make me laugh or grimace by the time I've been working on it for, like, an hour, then I just stop working on it.

Tell me about creativity in regards to this new record, which sounds like it was a bit more deliberate in terms of assembly than past This Is Lorelei records.
Well, I tried harder—that was a big difference. I cut a lot more things than I normally do. I fully wrote and recorded about 30 songs, but I wrote, like, 70 songs. It was over a longer period of time than I usually work. Most of the past Lorelei stuff was, at its slowest, one song a day, whereas the 10 songs that made it to this album were written over two and a half months. I wanted to take it more seriously and maybe talk to a record label and be a little more formal about putting out an album, and at the same time the album that I was writing was naturally taking the form of a classic album—42 minutes long, 10 songs. The conception of the album matched the business plan, for lack of a better term.

Let's get into the business aspect a little more. Obviously you've been making music for a while, but your profile has increased quite a bit over the last year or two. How have you adjusted to that as far as your work as a musician?
It's made it so that I'm more concerned with being better at my instruments. I practice playing music now in a way that I didn't before. When it comes to the writing process, the goal is to not let any of that in—to keep the creative space as a sacred space. For context, when I say "business plan" for this album, that just means putting it out in a way other than me just releasing it on Spotify the day after I finish it. There's thought and intention behind the actual release of it.

A bad habit I was forming was to work really hard on something and then release it in such a way that it was as if I hadn't really worked on it at all. That was mostly because I was practicing songwriting, and I figured it might as well be out there. The point of the project was never to release things—it was to make things. The release is just a nice thing that can go along with that. I was trying to make a good album this time instead of just having fun—not that it wasn't fun.

I definitely get the sense, while listening to your music, that you'd be making it whether or not people are listening—which is a good thing. Given that, do you have any red lines, creatively?
Everything is fair game. I try to avoid making bad music, if possible—unless it's bad in a good way. I don't have any hard rules. If I have a hard rule forming, my instinct is to just break it.

Your music, as well as Water From Your Eyes, reminds me a lot of certain strains of 2000s indie—Deerhoof is a band that comes to mind. If you guys were making music then, I think you'd be considered one of their contemporaries.
With Deerhoof, there's a sense of fun in a way where they can do anything, and it'll work. That definitely had a significant impact on me. Also, you look at a band like Liars, who also had a huge impact on me. Their whole thing was "anything goes," but the albums also have their own laws of physics. Every album of theirs is very much a world that you exist inside for the duration of the album. In terms of stuff from that time period, they're probably the two bands that had the biggest impact on me. I feel creatively indebted to both of them.

With Liars especially, the way that they world-build is something that I really strive for. Ween is another band that excelled at that during their prime—granted, in a way that's very different than Liars, but every album is truly its own project. There's an overall sound that's slowly being created, but there's a little extra work for you to do because it's presented in a different form every time.

To be totally honest, there isn't that much stuff from the 2000s that I really listen to anymore. The only 2000s music that I have in regular rotation now is probably Tool's Lateralus.

Great record.
Oh, it's incredible. I've recently gotten really into Tool. I previously got really into King Crimson, and Tool were kind of like the heirs to King Crimson. When I approached Tool that way, all of a sudden I was just like, "Oh my God, maybe this is my favorite band." I tend to feel that way about certain certain bands sometimes. In terms of indie music, I really loved Broken Social Scene particularly—the wildness of the production, the idea of it being like a rock band but it's looser than that. It's almost like half sound art. If you listen to their self-titled album, it's pretty tripped out and very densely layered. I really liked the freedom that they expressed in their production.

People forget they were a post-rock band to begin with!
Yeah, it's funny, I feel like they ended up having such a particular reputation. Now it seems like they're thought of as the first band where it was cool to have 12 people running around on stage—a bunch of way more successful bands did that after them. But I really just like the way they approached the studio. There's really cool production on Kevin Drew's Spirit If... too.

You mentioned Ween—let's talk about them for a bit. They're a band for me where a lot of people whose taste I respect are into them, but I've never been driven to find a point of entry into their catalog. Help me out here.
My gateway was the one that everyone will tell you: The Mollusk. That's not wrong, but I think you have to look at the bookends. I'd recommend listening to The Pod and Quebec. If it really came down to it, those two might be my favorite—but then I think about it too hard and they're all my favorite. The funniest thing you could do, though, is glue those two together and then listen to their country album, 12 Golden Country Greats. Those three will do a pretty good job of displaying the breadth of it. Then I'd probably tell you to listen to The Mollusk and Chocolate and Cheese. The Mollusk is something I've recommended a lot, it's also incredible. I have a hard time ranking the Ween albums, because they're all so different.

Ween were a band that were obviously very well-regarded for their distinct sense of humor, and I think you could also say that about your music in Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei. Talk to me about being "funny" while making music. It's a hard balance to strike!
Art is like a portrait of the human condition, and so is humor. For me, it's not so much, "There's got to be like a funny line in here," it's more about never ruling that out and staying just as open to that as anything else you might write about. There's this idea that music and musicians are so cool—too cool to be funny. My reaction to that is that spending your time making music is an inherently funny thing to do. At the end of the day, you're standing up with your little guitar and being like, "I wrote a song." It's an inherently funny thing. It's also an inherently terrifying thing, and an inherently serious thing—but it is all of those things, so the goal is just to never count out any part of the human experience. Humor just naturally becomes a part of it.

What are some things you find funny in terms of comedy?
Years and years ago, watching Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! for the first time was a revelatory experience—the way that whole show was put together in terms of these revolving ideas that are thematically linked, but never explicitly connected, and if they are, it's in a really chaotic way. It had a pretty big impact on the way that I think about putting together art in general. Sometimes I still watch Tim and Eric now, but I get so exhausted by it.

I feel exactly the same way at this point.
It's still incredible. But my tolerance for it is a little bit lower.

Well, it's influenced so much. It's in the air everywhere. You can't get away from it now.
That's very true. I also love It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That show just gets me on a level that other funny TV shows have not. I love Norm McDonald. I could listen to him just telling stories indefinitely and be fully entertained.

What's your favorite Always Sunny episode?
Oh God. I don't know if this is the right answer or not, but the first thing that comes into my head is the high school reunion two-parter.

Great episode.
I'm a big fan of season eight. I like that season a lot. Really good season. I haven't kept up with the last couple of seasons, but when I first got into it, I think 10 seasons had been made. There's something that happens where, because that's when I got into it, those are the 10 seasons that I consider to be the real show.

I'm an embarrassingly huge fan of Sunny, and I can tell you that for the last three or four seasons, every season has four really bad episodes, four episodes that are okay, and then two episodes where you're like, "Oh, they still got it."
That makes sense. I can't remember what the last one I really watched was, but that was pretty much what I took away from it—whatever the season was when, Dee gets revenge on the stripper.

"PTSDee." That's a great episode.
Oh my God, yeah. I remember that whole season, I was like, "Ah, I don't know." Then that episode happened and I was just like, Jesus Christ.

I'll be honest, that's probably the best late-series Sunny episode at this point.
That's good to know. 

You mentioned world-building before. In "An Extra Beat For You and Me," you say the lyric "Water in my eyes" at one point. Is that an Easter egg for the heads?
[Laughs] Obviously, it would be impossible for me to have written that line without it crossing my mind, but it was primarily a lyric. That's the second time I've done that in a song. Every two or three years, I'll make some little allusion like that. It happens naturally. It's just a thing that got written down, and I rolled with it.

Water From Your Eyes recently opened for Interpol at their Mexico City show to 160,000 people. That must've been insane!
It was pretty freaky. We got offered to do it and we were like, "Oh shit, that's really crazy." The chances that something like that will ever happen again are so indescribably small that we were like, "Okay, we should just do it. This is a once in a lifetime experience." I didn't really think about the ramifications of it, but every show we've played since, no matter how many people are there, just feels so low pressure now. It was kind of hard to process in the moment, and it's not even something that I've thought about that much since we've done it consciously—but subconsciously, it definitely left a mark. As a band, there's this sense now where it's like, "Okay, if we made it through that, we can do like whatever we need to do." It was a cool, really special experience. I'm very grateful to have gotten to do that.

I was recently talking with somebody at Matador who was like, "They're always on the road these days. Water From Your Eyes are constantly touring." How's that been?
It's a lot, for sure. I enjoy doing it. Obviously we've worked really hard, and if nothing was changing, I don't think we would have the drive to do it, but there's been a direct correlation between how hard we've worked. Touring is becoming more manageable and easier to do. I don't think any of us are people who want to be like on indefinite tours forever, but we seem to have an opportunity right now where we're working really hard and we're getting it to a point where touring and living on the road is a manageable, comfortable thing. It's a lot of fun, and it feels good to play music all the time, but it's also very much a time investment. As we get older and our lives change, touring will hopefully be something sustainable for us.