Everybody Wants to Sing Nate Amos’s Songs

The first time Nate Amos listened to a playback of “Where’s Your Love Now,” a remarkably cleareyed song of heartache and resilience that he wrote and self-recorded as a part of his indie-rock solo project This Is Lorelei, he thought to himself, “I am never going to play that song in front of other people.”

“I was like, I know this song is good, but also get it away from me,” he said. “I can’t live in that song right now.”

Early one evening in late February, Amos, 35, was sitting low in a repurposed movie theater chair, at a kitschily decorated Thai restaurant that he frequents in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. A few days later, he would to fly to Australia for a brief tour with Lorelei and the art-rock group Water From Your Eyes, in which he plays guitar, blisteringly. Amos’s dark hoodie was zipped all the way up to his chin, and his shaggy, Ben Gibbard haircut framed his face.

In the years since writing “Where’s Your Love Now,” Amos’s relationship to the song has changed. He has accepted that, thanks in part to several notable but stylistically divergent covers by the popular indie musicians Cameron Winter and Waxahatchee, audiences want to hear it at just about every show.

“Now,” Amos added with a laugh, “I’m just nervous about remembering the words.”

“Where’s Your Love Now,” with its plinking toy piano, insistent organ and unvarnished lyrics about finding the strength to leave an unhealthy relationship, is the centerpiece of “Box for Buddy, Box for Star,” 10 quickly recorded but immaculately crafted bedroom-pop gems that Amos put out in June 2024. It was, technically, the 67th release as This Is Lorelei, but it was also a landmark: The first album he released on a proper label, and the first one he made entirely sober. When he was writing and recording “Box,” as he calls the album, Amos, who had previously struggled with drugs and alcohol, was still worried about relapsing.

“I was just doing what I could to feel anything,” he said. “Smoking like 40 cigarettes and doing 500 push-ups a day.” And writing some uncommonly excellent songs that found a devoted audience, slowly but surely.

“Nate feels like a classic American songwriter,” Hayley Williams said in a voice memo. She first heard “Box for Buddy” about a year ago, when Daniel James, her collaborator in the duo Power Snatch, recommended it. Williams added, “I listen to his writing and think, ‘Man, I wish I could do that.’”

Rachel Brown, Amos’s Water From Your Eyes bandmate, said in an interview, “I’ve known Nate’s been a genius for 10 years now. I feel like I’ve been waiting the 10 years for the rest of the world to catch on.”

That has happened largely through word of mouth — and as increasingly high-profile artists covered Amos’s compositions. A new “Super Deluxe” edition of “Box for Buddy, Box for Star” arrives on April 17, and it features some names that Amos still can’t believe are singing his songs: Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Hayley Williams and, most impressively to the songwriter, the alt-comic and musician Tim Heidecker. (“I’d be hard pressed to name a working artist of any kind who has had a bigger impact on the way I think about making art,” Amos said. When he saw that Heidecker had posted a Lorelei song on his Instagram about a year ago, “I got this crazy feeling in my stomach.”)

The cover phenomenon started last March, when the Southern rock poet MJ Lenderman released a version of Lorelei’s “Dancing in the Club.” The original was an up-tempo, hyper-pop-punk number built around an antic, twinkling, guitar riff and Amos’s impishly Auto-Tuned vocals. Shortly after “Box” came out, though, Amos worried that he had limited the song’s appeal by using Auto-Tune. He asked his friend Lenderman if he would be interested in rerecording the vocals, but, as Lenderman recalled in a phone interview, he told Amos, “I don’t think I can sing that fast.”

So they quickly whipped up an alternate arrangement that slowed the tempo and leaned into the song’s inherent sadness. Amos played drums, and Lenderman played everything else. The cover was a revelation: A spunky, subtly heartbroken blast of avant-pop had been transformed into an aching dirge that sounded like a country standard from the early 1970s. Lenderman added it to his live sets, and noticed audiences singing along.

“I listen mostly to older music,” Lenderman said. But Amos’s songs have helped him realize “that there are peers out there doing really good things.”

Heidecker also described a timeless quality to Amos’s songwriting. “I love when I hear songs and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get that song,’” he said in a phone interview. “It’s amazing that those songs are still out there to be picked off the apple tree.”

As the year went on, more peers added Lorelei songs to their set lists: Waxahatchee, the folk group led by the sharply observant singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, was next, followed by the Geese frontman and singer-songwriter wunderkind Cameron Winter, who sang a sparse and bracing grand-piano version of “Where’s Your Love Now” on his solo tour.

“If a song is really good, it should be able to work in different genres,” Amos said. “And if it’s really airtight, you should be able to take it really far away from home, and the emotional form of it should remain intact. So that was the cool thing about the Cameron one — the presentation is wildly different, but the song worked in the same way.”

Amos said there is a simple reason he is so prolific: “I just like making music. It’s fun.” He knows a collection of Lorelei songs is done when he starts to get sick of them. “So a logical thing is to make something else.”

Usually, he makes an album and quickly moves on, but “Box” has stuck around, so he’s had to keep thinking about it — which isn’t always pleasant. “‘Where’s Your Love Now,’” he said, “is actually very central to what made that period of time really difficult.”

AMOS GREW UP in Virginia, and his family regularly visited Central Vermont before relocating there around the time he started high school. His father, Bob Amos, is a bluegrass musician. (His take on his son’s twangy “Angel’s Eye,” featuring vocals from Amos’s sister, Sarah, is on the “Super Deluxe.”) “I was around live bluegrass quite often, which was really cool,” Amos said. “It was normal to go to a house party somewhere and for a professional-level jam session to be something you expect to happen.”

Songwriting has been part of Amos’s self-expression for as long as he can remember. “When I was really little, I would just record myself, like, pounding a wall and yelling about playing checkers, stuff like that,” he said. Gradually he got more serious, writing some “really horrible” songs in middle school and high school, and eventually figuring out “how to write slightly better songs.” It took practice.

“I could always write music, but lyrics were the trip-up for me,” Amos said. “I don’t think I wrote a good lyric until I had written, like, a thousand songs.”

After a difficult post-high-school period living in Burlington (“Honestly, I was just really into drugs,” Amos has said of that time), he moved to Chicago and became immersed in the city’s underground music scene. Brown, who first started seeing Amos at shows a little over a decade ago, recalling thinking Amos was “kind of scary-looking,” like a grizzled truck driver with long hair and a “really scraggly beard” that made him look “like, 40 years old.”

“Then one day he had cut off all of his hair and shaved and I was like, ‘Oh, this is a boy,’” Brown said. Amos asked Brown to catch a movie together. “Yeah, we should watch a movie together, cute boy who I didn’t realize existed,” Brown remembered thinking. “Then we just like never stopped hanging out. And then like a year after we started dating, we started making music together.”

Even while Water From Your Eyes was finding its voice — wry, dissonant and borderline absurdist, like a terminally online and slightly brain-rotted Sonic Youth — Amos was making and releasing music as This Is Lorelei, though hardly the cover-friendly songs for which he would later be known. Around that time he told Brown, “I just have no interest in making any form of pop music anymore.” He started uploading so many long, droning noise compositions to their online music distribution service that the account got banned because someone thought Amos was a bot.

“Thank God that ended,” Brown said and sighed, “because he’s so good at writing songs.”

The catalyst may have been the end of Brown and Amos’s romantic relationship. Around that time, with the obsessive intensity of someone white-knuckling it through a breakup, Amos became fixated on a song he had heard hundreds of times before: Blink-182’s 1999 power-chord anthem “All the Small Things.”

“At the time I was coming off a two- or three-year wave of overthinking everything I possibly could about the music I was making,” Amos said. “And I think that song is proof that it’s possible for something to be fast, catchy, loud, short and stupid — and also to be a masterful piece of song craft.” Listening only to that song, including different covers, he realized, “it works in any different genre. It doesn’t feel awkward in any context. Really good song.”

LAST JUNE, A FULL YEAR after “Box” came out, Amos was onstage playing the first of two sold-out shows at the Moth Club in London when he realized that every single person in the crowd seemed to be singing along. “My first reaction was kind of like, ‘Oh no, I blew up my spot,’” he said and laughed. “Because Lorelei had existed for a long time as this relatively secret thing. I had to really do some mental adjusting to recontextualize it.”

It’s also made his touring schedule more complicated. Amos tries to avoid overlap between the creative work involved in being in Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei: “They’re different enough projects that you kind of have to get in the groove of each one.”

When he returned from Australia, he said that he had agreed to play sets at a festival with his two bands, and it left him experiencing “some serious whiplash.” It does help, though, that both touring bands share a rhythm section, the drummer Bailey Wollowitz, and the bassist Al Nardo, who is now Amos’s fiancé. (Brown’s favorite This Is Lorelei album is “OK N8,” because it is the first one he made after he and Al started dating. “I was like, you’re making amazing music. Wow, you guys should be together forever.”)

Brown said that while there are “some songs that make me smile” on “Box,” “some songs just make me so sad,” knowing intimately what Amos was going through just before he wrote them. “It was a really crazy point of time that I’m really glad he’s out of,” Brown said.

Finishing up a spicy beef salad as Thai pop music blared overhead, Amos said that he had finally put enough distance between the songs on “Box” and the experiences that inspired them. The plain-spokenness about heartbreak, addiction and terrifyingly close calls with death, he knows, are part of why it has connected so deeply with other people.

“Humans are humans that all go through things,” he said, reflecting once more on “Where’s Your Love Now.” “So I would like to think that hopefully someone who is going through the same thing that I was going through, that that song would tap into it somehow. And if someone can tap into that, then that means I did my job.”