MILES PARKS, HOST:
Nate Amos has written a lot of songs. Like, even he isn't sure how many he's actually released.
NATE AMOS: Somewhere in between 150 and 250, maybe.
PARKS: Amos plays in the experimental pop band, Water From Your Eyes. But for more than a decade, he's also quietly been releasing music on Bandcamp and Spotify as a solo artist, under the moniker This Is Lorelei. Last year, he finally released his first official solo album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ANGEL'S EYE")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) Cannot hide my heart from your angel's eye as you watch me from above.
PARKS: That album, called "Box For Buddy, Box For Star," had some overt country influences. Amos is the son of a bluegrass musician, after all. So for his new solo record out this week, called "Holo Boy," he says he took a different approach.
AMOS: Something that was very much on my mind with "Holo Boy" was that it would have to, to a certain extent, subvert a lot of the expectations of what a next Lorelei album would be. So I did kind of choose the songs for "Holo Boy" slightly from an angle of being, like, you know, I bet they wouldn't see this one coming.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOUTH MAN")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) Check. Bless this. I am in the morning. I'm the mouth man. You could never shut me up.
PARKS: There's something else unique about this second album, as well. All 10 tracks are old songs from his extensive back catalog, songs he rerecorded and reimagined for this record.
AMOS: There were a couple big switches. The opening song, "I Can't Fall" - on the original version of that song, I had actually slowed down the play rate and also lowered the pitch of the song to sing it and then sped it back up. So it was kind of a sped-up voice singing an octave higher.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T FALL")
AMOS: (Singing) We don't need nothing more than that. You're gonna get right on that plane.
That's something that I tended to do a lot in the past just kind of for the sake of not disguising my voice but having a variety in vocal quality over the course of a long album. Whereas, for this recording, I just decided to sing it in my normal voice, an octave lower than it was on the original version.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T FALL")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) Now I'm out, and you hold me in your arms. And oh, I can't - I can't think of anything at all. You already caught me. I can't fall.
PARKS: How has your thinking about vocal production changed since you've been making music?
AMOS: You know, I've slowly become more, I guess, naturalistic about it. I used to, again, maybe not quite disguise, but I can't really think of a better word for it than that. But especially with this album, because I've been performing as This Is Lorelei more and more, which was never really a thing until the last couple years, I've gotten a little more comfortable presenting my own voice in an unaltered way.
PARKS: It's so interesting. I don't want to do a full Freudian analysis here. But hearing you use the word disguise a couple of times as you talk about the vocal production - I've also heard you talk about this songwriting project as a way to kind of air some of the most personal songwriting that you do. And I guess, I wonder if you think those two things are connected in terms of feeling like, as you were airing some of this very intimate stuff, that doing it with a little bit of production made it a little easier. And now that you're - now you're feeling a little bit more comfortable with that.
AMOS: Yeah, totally. No, that's absolutely correct. I mean, I think, for me, a big part of my own growth as a songwriter has had to do with my growing capacity to be vulnerable in a public way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMS AWAY")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) I'm too tired to be trying to survive. I've been sleeping all my life.
AMOS: It is - it's a lot easier to express really personal things when you're either in a character or behind, you know, some kind of mask. And a lot of the development of Lorelei, as a project, has just been slowly removing these elements of separation and just letting the whole thing get closer and closer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMS AWAY")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) You're too kind. Are you slipping out of mind? Because I'm falling out of mine.
PARKS: Was there any ever thought to doing an album that was songs that people hadn't heard before? Or, I guess, what was the thinking behind going back in time and kind of reinventing these songs versus putting out a whole new record to move it forward?
AMOS: So the thought was before getting the next, like, new group of songs out there to everyone, would be to kind of expose the back catalog. I was - became increasingly aware that there were a lot of people that really loved "Box For Buddy" and just literally had no idea that there was all this other stuff.
PARKS: I didn't - I thought that was literally the only album. I'm not going to lie. I feel like I listened to it, like, so many times, and I had no idea that there were, like, 200 other songs just sitting there.
AMOS: Well, and that makes total sense because I never did anything with the other songs other than put them on Bandcamp and Spotify and forget they existed. You know, there was never any push to get that stuff out there. So part of my thought was, you know, to kind of create this cheat sheet where, you know, there are 10 songs on "Holo Boy," and they're drawn from nine different releases. So I was thinking that that way, if someone likes a particular song off "Holo Boy," then they could go find the original version. And then that original version would then have the context of a whole additional release that it was from. And maybe if you really like that one song, then all of a sudden, there's this whole album that you'd really like.
PARKS: I always like to ask before we end an interview on if there's a song or a moment on the album that I guess you'd like to go out on.
AMOS: Well, to me, the most important song on the album is the title track.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOLO BOY")
THIS IS LORELEI: (Singing) Stick thin, you can flip me over.
AMOS: This song was actually, if not the first, among the first real Lorelei songs that I ever wrote. The first handful of Lorelei things were releases that I made when I was visiting my family in Vermont over the winter, and I wasn't with my bandmates at the time. So I was forced to make music alone if I wanted to make music. And "Holo Boy" is the moment that the project ceased to be just that and started to be something that I did in my normal habitat. So, to me, that's the most important song on the album, and probably if it's good enough for the end of the album, it's probably good enough for the end of this interview.
PARKS: (Laughter) All right, that's Nate Amos, the songwriter behind the project, This Is Lorelei. The album, "Holo Boy," is out now. Nate Amos, thank you so much for talking with me today.
AMOS: Thanks so much for having me, Miles.
(SOUNDBITE OF THIS IS LORELEI SONG, "HOLO BOY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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