This is Lorelei's Personal Best
As he releases his debut album for Matador, Nate Amos takes Kayla Sandiford through the stories and keystone songs of This Is Lorelei.
Over the past two years, New York singer/songwriter Nate Amos has developed a reputation as your favourite artist’s favourite artist.
Bearing the solo moniker This Is Lorelei for more than a decade, he has been prolifically releasing music on Bandcamp for years, before his 2024 album Box for Buddy, Box for Star caught the attention of the masses.
Already embedded in the Brooklyn music scene between his solo work and as a member of the experimental rock band Water From Your Eyes, the songs on Box for Buddy, Box for Star would fall into the hands of fellow musicians and collaborators, sprawling into a deluxe version featuring the likes of MJ Lenderman and Snail Mail, and even a super deluxe edition with reworks from Power Snatch, Waxahatchee, Jeff Tweedy and more.
It seems as though Amos has more music than he knows what to do with. When we last spoke, he was preparing to release his album Holo Boy in December 2025. In his own words, Holo Boy serves as “a shortcut to a whole bunch of different eras of this project”, offering different entry points into his expansive back catalogue, with fresh re-recordings of older songs. With Box for Buddy, Box for Star drawing a larger audience in, it was a natural segue for people to continue engaging with This Is Lorelei.
Now, Amos is gearing up to present completely new material with his upcoming album, The Singer in My Band. It’s Amos’s debut album for Matador Records as This Is Lorelei, and it sees him merge the pop-driven flourishes of Box for Buddy, Box for Star and Holo Boy with bluegrass influences to foster a homespun, offbeat folk-inspired sound.
The album is described as his “road record”, bringing together a collection of songs born from ideas that came to Amos while touring across the world. While his traditional process would involve developing those ideas from the comfort of his apartment with instruments at his disposal, they existed as daydreams until he could bring them to tangible form.
The songs were finalised at his parents’ home in Vermont, with contributions from his father, Bob Amos, who played banjo on title track “The Singer in My Band”, as well as his sister Sarah Amos and partner Al Nardo, both of whom chipped in on backing vocals on a few of the tracks.
Although the songs emerged from a constant period of movement for Amos, and they flicker through American scenes with a floating cast that circles back a group of old misfit friends, “home” is what springs to mind with The Singer in My Band. It has an innate groundedness, be that through the musical presence of his loved ones, which he says had “a fundamental impact on what this album was to begin with”, or the rootsy nature of the sound that he honours.
Inspired deeply by the simplicity of bluegrass, Amos tells me the work is defined by a clear, traditional structure with tenets that go back to the Great American Songbook. “Is there a Great American Songbook, or is it like a metaphor?” Amos asks quizzically when I address the parallel, and justifiably so.
While it would be easy to visualise a massive, aged text of popular and influential songs from the mid-20th century heyday of American songwriting, it’s something more abstractly defined, yet, seemingly evident in Amos’ approach to The Singer in My Band.
The abstraction suits This Is Lorelei, but the canon standard also insists upon rules of melody, lyrics, and chord progression that put in the grunt work to guide the album’s ensemble of characters, including Joey, Billy, Genevieve, Sarah, and Buddy, who has been the most consistent figure across the many different musical eras of the project, as Amos shares during our conversation. They are not intended to be the most reliable narrators, but they do their best to chronicle a snapshot of Amos’ life over the past several years.
Joey, for example, is the subject of a plea on "Oh No Now My" with a mix of tenderness and warning. “Oh no now my Joey / I wish you wouldn't mess around so much / If the kit comes out I’m kicking your crutch,” Amos sings, a heart split between a longing for the comfort of someone of reach, and a love that renders itself tougher than an old habit.”
Or the drifter at the centre of "The Singer in My Band", a card-sharp fleeing toward Chicago with a suitcase of stolen jewels and a pistol, who Amos begs to stay and sing in his band, only for her to tell him he doesn't belong to her world and he'll have to sing for himself. Then there's Billy, the character who lends lead single "Billy Came Back" its name - gone for years, only to return with a love and a song that you can’t walk away from. “My Billy’s back, he’s singing to the track,” Amos sings, almost with a tone of relief, “Billy came back”.
Elsewhere, the record softens. On "Don't You Cry in Lonesomeness", Amos offers to carry someone else's loneliness, so that they don't have to hold it alone, his voice settling into something gentler than the album's wilder character studies. "And I Haven't Seen My Love in Quite a While" goes further, trading half-lines of grief to address a love that follows him, singing, “Even though I died, you’re still singing all your songs about me anyway”. Warmth, ache, and fledgling chaos all seem to coexist in This Is Lorelei’s world, tracking a beating heartland.
All of these roads extend far and wide throughout This Is Lorelei’s work. When we sit down to talk through his Personal Best, Amos isn’t necessarily looking for a fresh set of entry points. He instead picks five songs that trace the entire shape of his development as a songwriter, from an early highlight built out of factory-machine rhythms, to the song that unlocked the whole concept of The Singer in My Band for him.
Along the way, he references a scrapped Water From Your Eyes album repurposed on the fly, a curiosity towards Francis Bacon that he transmuted into raw audio data, a writing exercise that challenged him to drop any preconceived ideas of what a song should sound like, and the origins of the strange, flexible, and recurring idea of “Buddy”.
As Amos invites me into his creative world once more, the multitudes that exist within the project seem boundless.
This, truly is, This Is Lorelei.
“Sick Twist” (2020)
NATE AMOS: That's a song that I always forget about, and then every once in a while it'll come up for some reason. It's kind of in this weird in-between space. It’s right around the period of time that Lorelei really changed as a project. The couple of years before that had been a lot more experimental in a way, where that energy ended up crossing over into Water From Your Eyes.
A lot of the Lorelei stuff in the years before this song was experimenting with concepts for a direction for Water From Your Eyes, but this song is the only one from that particular moment that actually encapsulates both the spirit of the project preceding it and the project following it. It feels like it was a turning point, and it's more interesting to me now than it was at the time, for whatever reason, because I can see how it relates to the project now.
But it's also so long ago, it feels like a different person. There's some old material of mine that I enjoy listening to every once in a while, and then there's some that I just can't do. This is a song that I'll actually sit down and listen to when it comes up.
BEST FIT: It sounds like “Sick Twist” is your metamorphosis song. It's interesting that you mention it encapsulating the Water From Your Eyes influence, because that feels especially prominent in the lyrics and the delivery. Was the change from deadpan delivery to something more melodic deliberate?
NATE AMOS: Well, it's funny, because at that point in time, melodically, Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes were essentially the same thing. I used the same approach to writing vocal melodies, and it's changed a lot since then. It correlates with somewhere in between Somebody's Else’s Song (2019) and Structure (2021), from around that time. Water was also in this weird place where there were some very pop elements existing alongside these moments of extreme dissonance, and there was a big emphasis on mechanical sounds.
"Sick Twist" actually has a lot in common with some of the songs on Structure. I was watching videos of big factory press machines and stuff, trying to take rhythms that aren't meant to be music, just these functional things, and take inspiration from those to make songs that almost sound like they're being played with a crank wheel or something.
It's this very specific moment where Water From Your Eyes and Lorelei were actually at very similar points. There's a lot of crossover, but they were beginning to move in different directions, it was this little, lingering feedback loop that slowly died off. It's funny now, I feel like with the exception of the odd song thrown onto a Water From Your Eyes album to provide the balance and be the normal song or whatever, there's really very little overlap at this point.
“Red” (2020)
“Red” came as part of your EP Dance, which came out just a few months after “Sick Twist”. Do you feel like the This is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes crossover was still present by this point?
That's weirdly an extension of the same moment, because I think it's possible that parts of it predate "Sick Twist". But Dance was funny, because I was originally working on it with the intention of it being the next Water From Your Eyes album. I think that would have come after Structure, or maybe Somebody Else’s Song. But I got too far on it, and I remember feeling unsure about it. I showed it to Rachel, and they were like, “Well, you kind of already made a full album.”
Sometimes with Water I'll do little demo vocal things, but on this one I got carried away and wrote the whole thing, and then I didn't really know what to do with it. As soon as I finished this album - I guess I never even really finished it - I abandoned it to make the album OK N8, which was actually the first album of what I would call the modern Lorelei era, where it's trying to be somewhat palatable on purpose, and trying to remove the alienation that comes with more experimental, dissonant stuff.
And then I put Dance online without really saying anything, because I felt like it should come out. But by the time I put it out, it was very much looking in a different direction.
"Red" is funny. This wasn't intentional, but I realised some of these things really correlate with certain Water From Your Eyes eras. I ended up scrapping Dance to work on Everyone's Crushed, and the visual world I was in at that point really applied not necessarily to Dance as a whole album, but definitely to "Red".
I was really obsessed with Francis Bacon, and when you're going through a serious phase with an artist who works in a totally different medium than you do, it forces your subconscious to do a certain amount of translation. And I think that more interesting things tend to happen if your art consists of mostly things that aren't literally applicable to what you do yourself.
"Red" is another one I forgot about for a long time, and it's way crazier than I ever gave it credit for at the time. I thought of it very differently while I was making it than I do now, looking back. But I think there's a parallel universe where Lorelei stayed on that path, and that was the thesis statement for the new Lorelei era. I very quickly jumped ship and went in a different direction, which I think has been a healthier mental workspace to live inside of. But it's kind of a banger. It's a crazy song.
It feels like you went all in with “Red”, playing around with a lot of vocal distortion and discordant textures. What prompted you to dial things back after taking that path?
I think I had a moment where I didn't want everything to feel so heavy. For whatever reason, that dance-music thing is really tied in with noise and a certain tonality in my head. When you're working on music, it becomes very much the soundtrack to your life.
I'm someone where listening to whatever music has a huge impact on how I feel in general, and when it's your own music, it can become this feedback loop, where whatever I'm working on in a moment totally defines my mental space. I wanted that mental space to be a little less serious and more fun. If I'd kept going in the direction of that album, I think it would have been much more exhausting. I realised I needed to tweak the project into something that would rejuvenate me, rather than weigh me down.
You said Francis Bacon was a point of inspiration for "Red". His work is known to be rather existential and unsettling. What influence did you take away to bring into the song?
I tried not to think about it too directly, and more just dive into that world. I had particular paintings printed out on my walls, it was on my computer desktop background, I was reading a book about him, watching every documentary I could find, and really not thinking about music, but letting the music be informed by that space. There's no literal "this sound is this part of the painting", you can't think about it too closely.
At some point, I was on this whole tip where I would download the highest-quality images of different paintings I could find, then import them into Audacity as raw audio data, time-stretch them, and try to make music based around the digital noise. There are some crazy things that can happen if you import a JPEG as raw data into Audacity and put an echo on it and then turn it back into a picture. It separates different parts of the colour scheme.
I actually did that for a Lorelei album or single cover one time. There’s a bunch of music that disappeared at various points that I don't even remember, but at one point there was a Lorelei song on Bandcamp called "No Face", where the picture was a bear with echo put on it turned purple, with about ten of them stacked on top. It was pretty crazy.
It's really neat to be able to exist in a visual art space and reinterpret it in that way. You morphed it to practically work in service of the music.
You just try, there are always new ways to engage with art, and if there's something you're really drawn to, I think it's important to explore it in as many different ways as possible, ranging from the practical to the totally absurd. It's not like any of the paintings sounded better as noise because they were great paintings. But it's kind of indulgent, to the point of almost delusion. It's just creation mechanics.
“Thirty Minute Sketch” (2022)
Going into “Thirty Minute Sketch”, do you feel like the desire to experiment and investigate different creative mechanics stayed with you by this point?
Totally, but in different ways. There's a big gap between the first two songs and this one, and honestly, probably the most productive writing stretch I ever had in terms of output over the course of a year or so that was fully in that newer Lorelei world. But this particular song was the last thing I made before I began working on what would become Box for Buddy, Box for Star. I was about to go on tour with Water, and I had half an hour to make a song, so I tried to speed-run it.
The whole thing, the writing, recording and mixing, was done as an exercise in thirty minutes, as a kind of challenge. I want to get back into trying that, but it's really hard to just drop into it. That’s the great thing about being able to write and practice your art all the time, you can begin to exist in that state, where capturing these little passing moments with ease, ones that would normally be forgotten, becomes something attainable.
It's a very unique song in the catalogue to me, because it's the only thing made around that time. And it happened differently to a lot of other songs.
Compared to the other songs - obviously two years is a big jump - but this one feels a bit more lo-fi and mellowed out. Was that a product of having just thirty minutes to work on it, or more reflective of what your headspace was like?
Totally. I wasn't worried about it sounding any particular way. It was about getting it done, and that's honestly remained the tip I've been on with Lorelei ever since. It was like the releases before it too. This is part of that same switch between Dance and OK N8.
I decided that worrying too much about sound ends up causing the content to suffer, so I switched and decided to flip the priorities. I didn't even try to mix that song beyond setting basic levels. In general, my philosophy has become, ‘Get the sounds down and if it's a good song, it'll be fine. If you need to mess with the mix tomorrow, go for it, you're allowed to do that.’ I try to pay as little attention to it as possible.
This is the only song on this list that brings in ‘Buddy’. Was this the first song that you wrote where you lyrically introduced the concept, or character?
No, but again, it might be stuff that's disappeared from the internet. I don't even know how it started. Thinking about what the oldest might be, there's an EP called Pa$$ion Threshold, and the final song on that is a Buddy song. I know that wasn't the first one, but that might be the earliest surviving one. There are probably some I don't know about.
It's just a really funny word, because it could be a name, but it could also be something you call somebody, which is usually when you're either yelling at someone in traffic, or you're comforting a small child who skinned their knee. It exists in a minimum of three different spaces simultaneously. It’s a flexible word.
I don't really know what I was going for with this song. I probably wrote the lyrics in three minutes. At a certain point - I don't know if this is the case in "Thirty Minute Sketch" - Buddy became like a mean name I would call myself. It functioned that way, popping up in this scolding-yourself type way, and I remember flagging that and being like, ‘I've got to stop doing that.’ So then I did. It's meant a couple of different things.
It’s a very amorphous motif, despite being just one word.
It's one of my favourite colours, or whatever. I think it grew out of a period right before this. Money Right Now is at the centre of it, and there's an EP that goes with it called Stop Making Music, which is further disintegrated.
I was on this tip where I was using cool-guy rock and roll grammar in a very "making fun of Tom Petty" way, and there were little things that made me realise it allows for there to be multiple meanings for different things, like double negatives. And that turned into this rabbit hole, where I entirely abandoned grammar and had all these random words that I was using as if they were names, but they weren't.
By the time I got to a couple of the songs on the Stop Making Music EP, it's literally just random words. I totally lost the path of talking about anything, and it turned into this absolute gobbledygook. I think the Buddy thing was a way to hold on to my love for making fun of rock and roll guys, but without giving it enough leeway that it falls out of control, and the word thing happens again.
I really felt like I was onto something, and I don't remember how I got there, but Buddy is like a holdover from a previous experiment that got out of control. A little souvenir from the out-of-control days. It's a way to scratch the same itch but keep it under control.
“Guess Who’s Dead” (2022)
So, this song is lifted from EP #32, which was released back-to-back with EP #31, and EP #33 came out around a year later. That’s all pretty close together. Where do you feel that you were with your artistry, and what did this song mean for you at that stage?
EP #31 and EP #32 are both things I made for Box for Buddy, Box for Star but cut from it - and also the later EP, for the most part. But they were all songs I liked enough to want to put out on streaming and didn't really fit that album.
At one point, Box for Buddy, Box for Star was seventy-five minutes long or something, I can't really remember, I think it might have been longer, because I was looking at two-CD territory, and it just got out of hand, so I cut a bunch of stuff and released it as EPs.
"Guess Who's Dead" is another weird flow-state song. It just happened. I was in the mode of writing and recording two or three songs a day, and that one just landed in a funny way. It's a little bit of a misfit Lorelei song, but I feel like some of my favourite Lorelei songs are the misfits.
That’s why you've got to make everything you want to make, so that it's there at very least, because you come back to appreciating the ones that might not fit the way you thought they did at the time.
“Billy Came Back” (2026)
With this song, there were a couple of things that I really wanted to do after Box for Buddy, Box for Star. I wanted to write songs that felt like they carried the same sort of weight to me personally, but by saying a lot less, with a much tighter form.
Because with Box for Buddy… if I'd have known I was going to be singing those songs all the time, I don't think I would have put so many words into some of them, because it's a lot. I'm not used to moving that fast. So I wanted to make everything as minimal as I possibly could, and focus on the sounds of words, but in a kind of clunky, obtuse way.
I think that applies to Box for Buddy, Box for Star too, as a title. It’s this weird, lumpy, album name, it doesn't really flow, it's very "ba ba ba ba ba", and I like that sort of rhythm in words. So this is shorter and more economical, and that was an experiment to try and figure that out. When that song came together, the rest of the album followed very quickly. It felt like the right song to choose.
This album has been described as following bluegrass principles, taking inspiration from The Great American Songbook. Did that tie into the simplicity of trying to give songs room to breathe?
Yes, I think trying for simplicity was the whole concept of this album, to use basic tools and keep anything even remotely fancy to a minimum, so that when something special does happen, it has a lot of breathing room and isn't lost.
There's more economy of motion in the whole thing, which ties into folk music for me, that's bluegrass in particular, just because I grew up with it.
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