Best of What's Next: Nathan Moore - Paste Magazine

Album: Folk Singer; for fans of: Tom Waits, Todd Snider, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. The sharp, introspective lyrics of Nathan Moore draw an instant connection to the great folk singers of the past, and it’s no surprise the singer-songwriter says also feels a deep kinship with the more traditional poets he admired growing up. “I am a word man, no doubt about it,” he says. “When I am writing a song it starts with me picking up and strumming my guitar, but that is just the background, the canvas which I then can paint my words on.” On Moore’s new album, appropriately titled Folk Singer (out now), those words weld a mighty power. Recorded after the split up of his original band, ThaMuseMeant, and in between stints with his side-project Surprise Me Mr. Davis (with The Slip and Marco Benevento), the LP captures Moore at his most personal. The songs gather up the lessons he learned and the stories he discovered during his time alone on the road, when he played night after night and became what he calls “a slave to the moment.” Folk Singer is a stripped down affair, featuring just Moore, his guitar, and his words. “The whole identity of the solo folk-singer thing is a lot more immediate than it has ever been before,” he says, “so the idea of making a record that was representative of what you would see when you see me live was perfect.”
For Moore, participating in that history of hallowed wordsmiths that came before him is important. “When I read Rimbaud or Bukowski, or listen to Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams, I see them all in this long continuum of art and craft that has been going on since we first came up with language,” he says. “I have always felt an intense relationship and lineage to that history.”

Like the folk-singers and writers he admires, Moore sings about the human experience. And whether he’s offering up a screed against America’s current economic situation or a simple love song, Moore delivers his message through a storyteller’s eyes. It’s an inescapable tendency, he explains—one that defines who he is. “Being a songwriter is not something you do for a few minutes a day. It is the way you see the world constantly,” he says. “My eyes and ears are noticing the way people say something. It is the process through which I see the world and process the world. Even when I sleep, it is just the way I dream.”


By Tim Newby - Paste Published at 6:00 AM on November 25, 2009

Nathan's Music can be found HERE