Billed as his debut proper, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star cemented Nate Amos as an artist who could cohesively translate both his melodic and production skills to a singer-songwriter framework. For those not acquainted with his scarily prolific This Is Lorelei catalog (a very small portion of which he revisited on last year’s Holo Boy compilation) nor his experiments in Water From Your Eyes, it served as the perfect introduction to a generational talent who recently celebrated the release of his new album, The Singer in My Band, surrounded by the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Cameron Winter. The record leans in a twangier direction, but marks not a shift in style so much as towards the purity of his songwriting, becoming a little meta but never more than it strives for universality. It’s strikingly vibrant from start to finish, even on a track sung from the perspective of someone who turns out to be – spoiler alert – dead. There’s humour, in the vastest sense of the word, in the anguish, romance, and mortal fears of its characters. “You can laugh at love here,” Amos sings on the closing track, not making a promise so much as affirming what you’ve already experienced.
1. I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light
What often distinguishes Amos’ writing is that his narrators rarely yearn for transcendence, or yearn at all, yet he locates the fiery pang in their down-to-earth troubles. The one in ‘I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light’ isn’t sentimental about having to say goodbye – he’s done it too many times to count – but he won’t go without laying his heart on the table, so long as there are only crumbs of it left to inspect. “I got no fiction to send to the future/ Got no present to gift to the past,” he sings, returning to familiar targets in his wordplay. And winter’s approaching, but it’s summer every time he sleeps – or perhaps every time you put The Singer on.
2. Oh No Now My
Though a single, ‘Oh No Now My’ is a clear outlier on the record: hardly twangy, a little grungy, and sneakily unconventional. Assuming Joey is a drummer – “If the kit comes out I’m kicking your crutch” – it makes sense that Amos seems to be singing directly to the song’s roiling rhythm section, all too aware of the sacrifices of going back on the road. If the kit comes out, he knows he’ll have to say goodbye, too, and eat his heart in the morning light.
3. Billy Came Back
In the context of the album, you can imagine the karaoke legend Amos profiles on the record’s strongest single – one of the songs of the summer, in my book – being not some kind of friend but a stranger the narrator has encountered on the road. Still, he’s “my Billy” – such is the affinity the community holds for him when he’s back in town, singing his tunes as if “from the bottom of a deep blue sea,” which only makes him sound preternaturally lonely. Of course, he knows the songs by heart, but Amos won’t spoil which ones, except that it’s “old music.” ‘Billy Came Back’ is the kind of new song you can’t wait to be old and age into timelessness.
4. Watching Heaven Fall
The album comes closer to mimicking its bluegrass influences on ‘Watching Heaven Fall’, as if slowly turning the dial backwards on a time machine. The narrator certainly does – dredging up memories of youthful carelessness that, in the community he grew up in, amounted to sin. “When the seer on the subway said we’d burn in hell/ We all laughed it off and said we might as well,” he sings, though lock into the second to last verse and you can tell the question of legacy does nag at him now.
5. Sailing (Your Baby’s Down)
Country-leaning yacht rock that’s rough around the edges – that might be one of the least charitable if still accurate ways to praise this track, whose breeziness belies its deep-seated longing. Unlike the one on the opener, the narrator isn’t shy about crying on the floor and wanting to “shimmer on your storm,” but he’s gentle enough to wait for the right time.
6. The Singer in My Band
The title track is a gorgeous family affair, with backing from the father-daughter duo of Bob and Sarah Amos; it reminds me of Squirrel Flower’s ‘Cleveland’, a song Ella Williams originally wrote with her family band that also addresses a partner who doesn’t like Texas: “She’s stuck in fate since April dreaming of Chicago-land/ Trying to swing that shooting moon around and put me to the ground,” Amos sings. Chicago-land sounds a lot like heaven, and his lot, as we’ve learned, is happy to watch it fall before their eyes.
7. Nitro
A lush yet rootsy instrumental, ‘Nitro’ builds a bridge to the album’s emotional peak.
8. Hey Sarah Could You Tell Me Why
A nimble yet scruffy guitar line gains steam, abetted by a wave of strings that imbue the track with a real sense of desperation as much they soften it. Amos repeats the titular question, making it sound more existential than interpersonal as he wonders, “Will the future hurt, will the memories cry?” In the aching present, they can only numb the pain, or at least hope that time might diminish its hold.
9. The Kid With the Crown
While ‘Hey Sarah Could You Tell Me Why’ gets gradually more electric, ‘The Kid With the Crown’ is revved up from the get-go, too eager to wait for any chorus to rip out a guitar solo. In its fervent pace and sly verbosity, it comes closest to replicating the style and brilliance of Box for Buddy, Box for Star. “Do you dream of un-dreaming your dreams?” he asks in one of the album’s most quotable lines, narrowing the gap between Buddy and Self.
10. And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While
Pay close attention to the story here and the album’s most straightforwardly heartfelt bluegrass tune turns out to be one of the more devastating. “Pain it knows no time/ But I couldn’t find the line without it either way,” he sings, finding a bittersweet addendum to the idea that time heals all wounds. The sudden appearance of a guest vocal – that’s fantasy of a broken heart’s Al Nardo singing “Yeah, even though you died/ You’re still singing all your songs about me anyway” – delivers a plot twist in true recognition of the genre’s tropes. If the songs live on inside a single person’s mind, it suggests, that alone is quite a legacy.
11. Don’t You Cry in Lonesomeness
The singer doesn’t just promise to take his lover’s lonesomeness; he embodies it, singing close to the mic and accompanying himself with nothing more than gentle electric guitar. It’s as earnest and intimate as This Is Lorelei has ever sounded, and though in the past Amos might have ended the song prematurely, here he lets the emotion spill over; you could cry to it, despite his repeated pleas not to. And you might, having spent this time in Amos’ strangely populated world, find at least some lonesomeness gone.
