If you’ve been to a Colorado Avalanches home game in the last half decade or so, you’ve likely belted along with the Y2K pop-punk anthem “All the Small Things” by Blink-182. Even if you had somehow never heard the song in your life, it’s pretty easy to pick up by the time the wordless chorus hits: “Na-na na na, na-na na na / Na-na na na, na-na na na.”
The straight-ahead simplicity making the three-chord earworm perfect for a stadium singalong is what obsessed singer-songwriter Nate Amos while working on Box for Buddy, Box for Star, his first proper full-length album under the banner This Is Lorelei.
“It was a darker period of my life when I got really fixated on that song. I listened to nothing but different versions for probably like two and a half weeks or something,” Amos, 34, says. “That was the point where Lorelei turned into more of a pop project. Before that, it was way more experimental. That was my focus for a long time. ‘All the Small Things’ snapped me out of that groove and made me interested in writing pop music again.”
With a turn toward more traditional structures, the doors swung wide open for Amos and his longtime solo project. From roughly 60 songs “in various levels of completion or decay,” he chiseled a tidy 10-track slate of shimmering bedroom electro-pop (“Dancing in the Club”), guitar-driven aughts rock (“I’m All Fucked Up”), tender acoustic ballads (“Two Legs”) and an octave of influences in between. Shot through with equal parts heart and humor, the result is an off-kilter millennial mélange that feels lived-in while never quite sitting still.
“I get bored really easily. It's really hard for me to stick to a particular style for more than a couple days of writing. I kind of lose focus and move on,” Amos explains. “This was actually my attempt to make a more cohesive album. It felt like a happy medium between the best songs and the songs that work best together.”
‘Something about the altitude’
Now living in Ridgewood, Queens, the journey of this shapeshifting New York-based songwriter began right here on the Front Range. Amos was born in Denver in 1991, but his family moved to Vermont not long after his second birthday. The handful of times he’s returned as an adult have always left the emerging musician with an uncanny sensation he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“I get an eerie feeling whenever I’m in Colorado,” Amos tells Boulder Weekly ahead of the upcoming return to his birthplace for a national tour stop at Globe Hall on March 26. “I think there’s something about the altitude that ties back to some weird pre-memory.”
Since settling into his new life in the Big Apple in the summer of 2017, Amos has busied himself with a number of creative projects while This Is Lorelei hummed in the background as a catch-all for his stray ideas and experiments. Lead among them is the cult-favorite outfit Water from Your Eyes, an off-the-wall art pop duo formed in Chicago with longtime collaborator and former partner Rachel Brown nearly a decade ago.
“They’re kind of opposite projects from each other,” Amos says. “Lorelei is about embracing existing traditions of music, and Water from Your Eyes has turned into a thing where it's mostly about either ignoring or making fun of existing traditions of music. It’s hard to do both of those things at the same time.”
Highwire act
This push and pull of tradition asserted itself early in Amos’ creative life. The son of bluegrass musician Bob Amos, he grew up with the sounds of American roots music filling the halls of his childhood home. It may seem a far cry from the avant-garde pop stylings of his work today, but he sees a throughline between the old ways and the new.
“It had a big impact on the way I think about music. I'm not really a theory person beyond what you need to know to play bluegrass. It’s the cutoff for my understanding of a lot of things,” Amos says. “Technical requirements aside, it's actually very simple music. When you work in a simple songwriting format, you have to be so much more careful with the balance of everything — because if something's out of whack, it's that much more obvious.”
With no room for a false note in Amos’ more straightforward approach to songcraft, owing as much to bluegrass as Blink-182, Box for Buddy, Box for Star is something of a highwire act. Like any skilled tightrope walker, it’s a thrill bearing witness to the artist’s gravity-defying feat — but Amos says there’s something both comforting and challenging about knowing you’re not the first to step out across the line.
“It’s about participating in existing traditions and trying to do your own thing within a very small box,” he says. “For me, it's way easier to come up with something cool that doesn't sound like anything else than to come up with something good that sounds like a lot of other things that already exist.”
ON THE BILL: This Is Lorelei with Starcleaner Reunion and Dollpile. 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, Globe Hall, 4483 Logan St., Denver. $23