Ah, the solitary life of the singer/songwriter. Crafting songs in isolation, writing about deep introspective topics like love, loss, and life's meaning. We imagine them toiling away at their craft, going it alone until they get the song just right.
Nathaniel Rateliff does all these things. And he certainly goes it alone; after all, he does a lot of his writing in the bathroom. To be precise, he does a lot of his best work "on the shitter." And while he might write songs that make people cry when performed live, he'll talk about fried chicken between those melancholy tunes. It's hard to capture the mood of my interview with Rateliff; we spent a good deal of the time laughing. But when the guy tells me that he needs "a clean house, lots of sex, and no dogs" for a productive writing session, or that sometimes he's too lazy to finish a song in the studio, it's easy to laugh.
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