The first time Nate Amos refers to himself as a songwriter in conversation, he uses air quotes. “Now that I’m a songwriter, quote unquote….” Amos says offhand during a recent interview. Why does one of the most widely hailed songwriters of recent years — the guy whose originals have been covered by Waxahatchee, Cameron Winter, Hayley Williams, Jeff Tweedy, and MJ Lenderman in the last 18 months alone — feel that those quote marks are needed?
“I always thought of myself much more in terms of composition, production, and conceptual art,” says Amos, who records as This is Lorelei. “I kept bouncing off the bottom of the rabbit hole, and at a certain point it seemed like the most creatively aggressive thing I could do would just be to rubber-band all the way back to the most bare-bones type of songwriting I could muster. Leaning into the songwriter thing was almost like a conceptual exercise. So I guess the quotes are because I didn’t expect to make my in-character singer-songwriter album and have a bunch of people go, ‘singer-songwriter Nate Amos.’ That took a little while to get used to.”
Amos is referring to Box For Buddy, Box for Star, an album that, in the two years since its 2024 release, has become an unexpected success story. For years before that, Amos — who is also in the art-rock band Water From Your Eyes with vocalist Rachel Brown — treated This is Lorelei as a side hobby, his “safe, secret world,” as he puts it. It was where he dumped whatever off-kilter pop tunes he was working on, posting them online for a miniscule audience. Now, he’s trying to figure out what it means to turn that passion project into a fast-rising, for-real career.
The Singer In My Band, the straightforwardly upbeat roots record he released this month, is the first example of what that might look like. Amos describes the album, which is entirely devoid of the sampled backing tracks and digitally manipulated vocals that have heretofore defined many This is Lorelei projects, as “an exercise in self-exposure.”
“I feel like Lorelei is in a very volatile state right now, and I’m trying to find that balance between going with the flow and letting it be what it wants to be but also trying to think about it responsibly,” he says. “I don’t want to grow to resent something that was such a source of solace for me for so long.”
FOR ALL THE existential talk about This is Lorelei’s future, Amos doesn’t appear particularly worried during a recent interview with Rolling Stone. He discusses his brand-new album and the state of his two bands as he alternates between his vape and cigarettes. At his team’s suggestion, we’ve met at an ice cream place, where Amos downs a chocolate milkshake and waxes poetic about his recent discovery of fro-yo. (“Just loading up on the fucking gummy bears and shit, it’s so awesome,” he marvels.) Throughout the conversation, he sounds bemused if not slightly mystified by the seriousness with which his music is now taken by the outside world. Somehow, the chill guitarist who likes to take the stage in camo Crocs and whatever Slipknot T-shirt he happens to be wearing that day has become something like the Carole King of 2020s indie rock. When I float that exact comparison to Amos, he starts laughing.
“Something changed over the two years following Box coming out,” he says. “It’s just different now. I don’t know exactly when it happened.”
For years, Amos preferred being the guy in the band who wrote songs while someone else does the singing. That’s how it works in Water For Your Eyes, more or less, and he liked it just fine. His plan was to keep making music as a behind-the-scenes facilitator, to never end up being the frontperson. The title of his new album is, in part, an ironic commentary on the degree to which he’s failed at that goal.
The very first time Amos says he ever heard someone who wasn’t already in his band cover one of his songs was last year, when MJ Lenderman sang his Auto-Tuned Box for Buddy highlight “Dancing in the Club.” (Rolling Stone named Lenderman’s version the second-best song of 2025.)
Amos was actually there for the session when Lenderman recorded the song in North Carolina. “I think I had just hit a bong,” he recalls. “I was like on the couch trying not to laugh while he was recording it. It was trippy. I remember sitting there and being like, ‘This is weird.’”
Lenderman might have been the first high-profile artist to cover a This is Lorelei tune, but others soon followed. By the time Amos began recording The Singer in My Band, he’d become aware of this trend to the degree that it shaped how he wanted to present his new material. Whereas in the past, Amos was inclined to disguise his voice “to make it sound less like me” — pitching his vocals up on the original “Dancing in the Club,” for example — this time he challenged himself to present his songs with minimal adornment.
As for “Dancing in the Club,” Amos is amused that that song, in particular, is the one that kicked off the phenomenon of other artists translating his music for a wider audience. “The bit for that song was that I was going to try to make a song that a pop star could cover,” he says. “I remember laughing as I was writing it, because I was like, ‘This is the cheesiest piece of bullshit ever,’ which it kind of is. But I also think it’s a better piece of work than I gave it credit for at the time.”
This time, Amos challenged himself to drop the bit. “No one likes their own voice, so if I’m making something that’s for me, then I’m going to try to make me not sound like myself,” he adds. “I tried to get over that for this album.”
Amos’ process for writing albums becomes much easier once he gets the first two songs down. “If I can get the chemical reaction between those two things, then the rest of the album will write itself,” he says. For his new record, those first two songs were “Oh No Now My,” a stormy guitar-rocker full of remorse and caution, and “Billy Came Back,” a fast-paced ode to a karaoke legend.
Elsewhere on this album, as on “Eat My Heart Out in the Morning Light” and the title track, he channels roots-rock with the tempo of the traditional American music that Amos grew up surrounded by — his father is bluegrass musician Bob Amos — while songs like “Don’t You Cry in Lonesomeness” features Amos strumming electric guitar by himself over lyrics that could’ve come from Hank Williams.
The newly pronounced country-folk arrangements on the album have already resulted in one headline calling Amos an “alt-country star,” a label that he mostly shrugs off. “‘Alt-Country Star Nate Amos’ makes it sound like I have a lot more money than I have,” he quips.
For all the slacker bedhead energy that Amos can exude, hearing him discuss the tightrope walk of balancing two serious musical projects at once makes it clear that his casual affect conceals an enormous amount of hard work and commitment to his craft. He recorded The Singer in My Band on a tight deadline last year, racing to get it done before kicking off the promotional cycle for Water From Your Eyes’ acclaimed album It’s a Beautiful Place. He ended up finishing the Lorelei album in a week.
Although he remains fully committed long-term to both projects, Amos is dedicating himself to This is Lorelei for the time being. “I feel like we got [Water From Your Eyes] to a point where we can afford the luxury of taking a break for a little while and coming back to it,” he says. “I feel like I really have to lock in and focus on securing Lorelei. Things are happening so fast with it right now that I want to give that my full attention so I don’t look away and it turns into something I don’t want it to turn into.”
What might that be? He’s not even sure. But he knows that he misses the luxury, as he puts it, of “making all the bad songs, too.” When a Lorelei song simply isn’t working now, he just abandons it. He no longer feels like he has the time to see where those bad songs lead him. Mostly, he misses the days of holing up in his apartment to record for days on end, then uploading the results to Bandcamp with zero expectations.
“I’ll be chasing that level of creative freedom for the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s funny, because when I was doing that, I was busting my ass to try and escape it, and it ended up working…. I do really miss it. Now I’m trying to find whole new ways to write, which is the whole point.”
But Amos isn’t hiding from the increased expectations that now follow This is Lorelei. And regardless of how far this wave takes him, he wants to ensure he’s able to retain the spirit of what made the project so precious to him in the first place. “It’s a little bit of a freaky thing to both witness and participate in the commodification of something that’s so intensely personal,” he says. “The nightmare scenario would be no longer caring about it. If I got to the point where people were asking me my preference between two different things that I should care about and I got to the point where I was just like, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I’m too tired…’ If It hit that point, the moment I clocked it, I would become incredibly depressed.”
How did it all happen? How did the behind-the-scenes tinkerer become the singer in his band? How did the weirdo pop-art side project become the go-to vessel for the Great Indie Songwriter?
“I was never trying to write songs for other people to sing, unless it was within the context of my own project,” Amos says at one point. Then he smiles to himself. “That goes back to the whole ‘songwriter’ in air quotes thing. Like, god, who would’ve fucking thought? Certainly not me.”
Lambrini Girls by Jessie MorganJessie Morgan
