Bio

"I am not a passenger.
And I sure as hell ain't no true believer. …
The only thing I am is a messenger,
playing my message for you."

Nathaniel Street West, "Messenger"

 
Buckle up. Roll down the windows. Crank the volume. Pop American Way into the CD slot. And get ready to ride.
 
Your guide on this journey is Nathaniel Street West, a traveler as well as a messenger, who has seen much of this country and picked up his share of wisdom along the way. His name, at first glance, seems like your destination — an address, perhaps, in one of the many towns he's called home through his twenty-five years. But let it settle in your mind as the music plays …
 
The hair-raising fury of "Revulsion," the blues-drenched guitar crunch and anguished, confessional vocals of "Mourning Mornings," the surprisingly visual imagery that splashes the colors of love and pain together on "Pas de Deux," the urgent pulse of his acoustic guitar driving the bitter insights of "Messenger," the trudge of primitive blues and Dust Bowl harp on "Weighted Words," and the conceptual sweep of the last track, "Battered Angels," one of the most ambitious fusions of spoken word and musical abstractions since Jim Morrison murmured his benediction to "The End" …
 
All of this flashes past as American Way rushes down the nighttime highway charted by Street West. Some of the scenery seems familiar: the grease that drips from his guitar summons black-and-white images of the distant Deep South. His voice — wry and ironic, then ripped by a spasm of old agonies brought back to life, and then, just as suddenly, weary and weathered — will suggest Dylan, or Hank Williams, or Kurt Cobain, depending on where the needle drops.
 
But in the end American Way paints a picture that's personal — almost uncomfortably so — and compelling. The more you listen, the more you're drawn in, until the truth becomes clear:
 
People like Nathaniel Street West come along too rarely. And when they do, what they have to say can change the landscape of our lives.
 
You can sense this without even hearing a note of his music. His features are delicate yet sharp, his language sprinkled with literary references that feel as natural as comments about the weather. He speaks quietly, listens attentively, and laughs softly at his own self-deprecating ironies. Though he enjoys conversation, he seems more comfortable watching and taking mental note as life plays out around him.
 
The main thing is, you get the feeling that he keeps something hidden — a flame, perhaps, which both warms and burns in some secret corner. Eventually, if you stay with him for a while, you sense that this light ties in with memories of a nearly forgotten Eden, where his story begins, as well with more recent trials that he has borne and overcome.
 
First, that childhood scene: a cabin, made from pine logs, lit through stained glass, high in the Sierra Madres. Nathaniel was born there, at three in the morning the day after Christmas, in a silent and snowy world under brilliant stars. He passed his first four years there too; impressions still linger …
 
"We had our own generator," he half-remembers. "Every week my dad would turn it on to pump the water out of the well into the gravity feed tank up the hill to generate power to run the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, the few basic appliances that we had.  Car batteries ran our stereo system.  It was the one appliance that ran constantly because we had music playing all day and night.  But when that went off at night, we had candlelight.  I have a strong connection to that place. When we left there for Texas, I was like, 'Okay … where are the trees? Where's the stream? Where's the silence?"
 
A combination of factors — his father's work as a homebuilder and later, a series of health setbacks for Nathaniel — kept the family moving. Nathaniel grew to like the idea of pulling up and relocating someplace new and strange every year or two: He made friends but didn't mind spending time alone, watching the scenery change from Texas to Colorado and Florida and eventually to Malibu.
 
That's where the guitar comes into the picture. Nathaniel had always been into music, absorbing everything he heard, from Frank Sinatra to Nine Inch Nails and all points beyond, and filing it away. In Malibu, though, the last pieces fell into place, and at age 13 his own music began to assert itself.
 
The keys to the story are two: his premature insights into the fragility of life … and the fathomless appeal of the blues.
 
"We'd been living in Aspen, where I'd taken ill and almost died," he explains. "We'd come down to sea level because the doctors insisted.   I was unable to breathe well enough living year round at 8000 feet. I spent my first year there recovering. It was during that time that I got serious about playing the guitar.  This guy called Guitar George gave me lessons until I didn't need him anymore because I'd figured out how to learn songs on my own.”
 
"I also got into the Doors, especially the blues numbers they did on L.A. Woman. They struck a chord with me. For at least a year I did nothing but listen to the Doors every day, all day long. That was what really got me to want to play guitar. So my parents got me some of the music that had inspired the Doors — a blues set, with five or six CDs from the 1930s up to the modern blues. That was a real revelation: during my hardest times I understood that I could fall back on this music as a type of religion, to sing the blues to express how I was feeling about what was going on in my life."
 
Nathaniel improved quickly as a player — so quickly that by age fifteen he was the youngest student ever accepted at the famous Musician's Institute in Hollywood. The fit wasn't right, though: Their emphasis on building super chops seemed to collide with what he needed from music. Inspired more by B. B. King and slide guitar legend Son House than by players more interested in speed than soul, he left to play and write on his own. He had been cutting complete albums of material on an eight-track at age l4.
 

Over the next couple of years word leaked out to music industry players about this growing catalog, rich with poetry and preternatural wisdom.  One of them, Duane Baron, was at the controls as Nathaniel recorded his debut, Light Out for the Territory, in 2001,  A mix of originals and material by artists as diverse as Leadbelly and George Gershwin, the album won alternative radio airplay and whipped up Internet buzz about this young man's way with angular imagery and impassioned performance. Characteristically, though, Nathaniel harbored doubts about it, even before he had finished cutting tracks.
 
"I didn't have any confidence when I went in to record that album," he admits. "I had just started picking up the guitar again, after my arm had been in paralysis for more than a year. I hadn't been singing either, so I was very self-critical. My songs weren't coming out the way I wanted. People have made nice comments about Light Out, about how they could hear certain things developing in my music. And they were right about that; it's just that I'd gotten lost in the BS of recording. I'm a live musician, and I'd kind of forgotten that."
 
Getting back in action, Nathaniel began playing solo gigs in coffee houses around Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade and with bands at local Los Angeles clubs. He began to develop a following, and a few weeks after his l6th birthday and l0 days after nearly dying in a Santa Monica emergency ward from the ongoing health issues that inform his life,  Nathaniel played to a sold out crowd at the House of Blues.  In the back of his mind the idea festered that he could do better on disc than he had; it's just that the time never seemed right to commit to another round in the studio. 
 
Which is one of the many unique angles in the story of American Way. This remarkable album was in fact never intended to be an album at all. The magic here stems from the fact that Nathaniel and a friend were more or less jamming. The tape was rolling, but neither was thinking that the results would go beyond Light Out to become Street West's real debut — his real emergence as an artist of uncanny capabilities.
 
But that's what happened — precisely because Street West was lost in his music, as if it were far from his garage studio, on any of the many nights he'd been playing before ever-larger audiences around L.A.
 
"We played live: guitar/vocal and drums," he explains. "Then I overdubbed the bass. Halfway through it started to dawn on me: 'Wow, this is pretty cool. This could be an album.' And I went from just messing around to realizing that I had to finish this."
 
This time, the material was totally original — not a cover in sight. Some of the songs are compressed and explosive: "Revulsion," for instance, an elegy for the Earth told with brutal, frightening bluntness. "Pas de Deux" leans another way, toward the cerebral/sensual: "A Pollock splash on this wall would do/But Van Gogh already painted you." Others, like "Battered Angels," push toward performance art: Written at one in the morning, it combines Nathaniel's appreciation for Doors-like improvised recitation with the influence Jack Kerouac and other masters of the restless pen. The result is a fleeting epic, come and gone in a moment, though vast as imagination itself.
 
American Way, then, is as candid as an album can be. It illuminates all of Street West's multiple talents, from searing guitar to a writing style alive with elements of European literature, street polemic, and the earthy truths of the blues. Each piece of this puzzle impresses on its own; assembled, they yield a picture of multiple strengths in balance, each feeding the others, all contributing to the arrival of an artist whose destiny is to make a difference.
 
"I'm just doing what musicians or writers or painters have done for years in our culture. The role of the Trickster character, or of the shaman, in Western culture has been to create art that makes people think. It's like putting up a mirror."
 
So says Nathaniel Street West, and he's worth hearing out. He is, after all, a Messenger …