Nathaniel Street-West
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Nathaniel Street-West | ||
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 Nathaniel Street-West performing at Coyote Cafe during July 2006
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| Background information | ||
| Also known as | Street-West, Nathaniel Street West | |
| Born | December 26, 1979 Camptonville, California U.S. | |
| Origin | Sierra Nevada Mountains, California U.S. | |
| Genre(s) | Rock, Alternative, Folk, Blues, Country | |
| Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter | |
| Instrument(s) | Vocals, guitar, harmonica | |
| Label(s) | Puffin Records, Inc. | |
| Website | [1] | |
Nathaniel Street-West is an American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist who was born (December 26, 1979) in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Nevada City, California.
His work is characterized by a highly imaginative and lyrical storytelling style, deeply creative guitar work, and a nearly instantly recognizable tenor singing voice, which spans five and a half octaves. He accompanies himself primarily on guitar, generally flanked on stage by several racks of guitars, which include vintage and modern electric guitars and acoustic guitars, a Dobro, custom lap steel guitar, a 12-string guitar, and any other guitar variations he feels like using to get the sounds he wants for his wide-ranging catalog of songs. He also frequently plays the harmonica in addition to guitar. A typical solo performance may go on for over three hours and generally involves Street-West switching out guitars here and there throughout the performance, pouring out a dizzying range of guitar riffs, tones, and specialized fingering techniques to get at the feel he wants for each song. He is equally at home on his entire range of guitars and is a very percussive player, tapping his feet, playing every conceivable part of the guitar, and using his slender, long-fingered hands to pick out a dazzling variety of different playing styles that result in a surprising scope of guitar sounds. Street-West also often plays with his band which has included, during the year 2006, drummer Jimmy Paxson, and bass player Daryl Johnson.
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[edit] Background
In addition to a flurry of EP's Street-West released from 1994 to 1996, he has released three major albums over the last three years through Puffin Records, Inc. His first full-length album, "Light Out For the Territory", was released in 2003. His second full-length album, "American Way", was released in 2004. And his third release, "Witness", was released in 2006.
Street-West's latest release, "Witness", was released initially on June 20, 2006. "Witness" was produced by Mark Howard and the production included such notable musicians as legendary drummer Jim Keltner, Alanis Morissette's keyboardist] Zack Ray, bass player Daryl Johnson and pedal steel player Doug Pettibone. Jim Keltner, who worked with Street-West for the first time on the "Witness" project, remarked in reference to a particularly moving song of Street-West's that appears on the album — the song, "Coldness Follows" — "it really got to me. I immediately connected to a person in my life who is meaningful to me. When art touches you where you feel that strongly, it doesn't get any better. It's what it is all about."
[edit] Childhood
Street-West, a seventh-generation Californian, was born in a log cabin on Moonshine Road located on a ridge north of the middle fork of the Yuba River near Nevada City. Moonshine Road is built along Moonshine Creek — a creek named after the moonshiners who set up their stills along the creek during the California goldrush days. The area surrounding Street-West's birthplace was one of the main centers of gold mining activity during the late 19th century, located above rich veins of gold ore buried in ancient river beds beneath the steep foothills of the Western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. He spent his early childhood years in these mountains, territory which left a lasting impression on the developing artist. When the family moved across the country to Austin, Texas following a big career advancement for his father, the young preschooler apparently had a difficult time understanding what happened to the mountains, rivers and trees. His family says he waited impatiently as they settled into the new house, anxiously asking again and again when the moving van was to return to restore the family to his beloved mountains. Street-West learned to love Austin, Texas and considers himself part Texan, spending quite a bit of time at his house in Austin. He never, however, lost his love for the landscapes of the mountanous American West and whenever possible returns to wilderness areas of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains.
Street-West's early childhood exposure to the vast landscapes of the American West — an avid participant as his family embarked on many long journeys criss-crossing the territory — from the Western mountain ranges to the Texas prairies and Austin hill country, and throughout the Rocky Mountains — left a lasting mark and provide deep inspiration for his music.
From his very early teens Street-West had been a serious student of the American blues, and was dazzled by the work of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Long before he had seriously picked up that fateful guitar at fifteen he had been surrounded by music within his life and had shown talents as early as a young toddler in the areas of music, acting, and the performance arts. He had grown up in a family that listened to music constantly and his mother, a musician, had gone about her day singing aloud as she worked, singing the children to sleep at night. It was obvious to his family that he was destined to become a musician (and perhaps an actor) long before there was actual talk of a career. His parents have videotapes of three-year-old Nathaniel mimicking performances from MTV videos, costumes and all, every move down perfectly, using the fireplace hearth as his stage. There was also a red plastic Fender guitar from Toys-R-Us which he played with convincing accuracy from an even earlier age. Primarily, though, it was the perceptive insight he seemed to have into music from an early age and his sophisticated musical tastes which appeared precocious and highly unusual.
Street-West's family moved around the United States frequently, primarily because his father was a young executive on the rise in banking and construction finance, a field that demanded that he relocate where ever the company he worked for needed him to run a project. Perhaps luckily for young Street-West one of these places was Austin, Texas. From 1983 to 1988 Street-West grew up in Austin, exposed to the intense music scene there and close (geographically, at least) to one of his heroes, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Street-West still considers himself part Texan and spends as much time as he can at his home in Austin.
On the day that he got word of the death of Stevie Ray Vaughan Nathaniel was almost eleven years old August 27, 1990 and had just arrived back in Aspen, Colorado — another place that he loved and where his family lived part of each year. He was devastated at the magnitude of the loss of his favorite living guitar player. It became a strong association with his perception of what it would be like to live the hurried, topsy-turvy existence of a celebrity rock star. Whenever somebody brought up the idea that he most likely had a bright future ahead of him as a musician, he would discount the idea and quickly change the subject. "I just want to be a plain musician," he would say. He was also deeply influenced in these earliest years by the work of Bob Dylan, The Band,Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Steve Earle.
By the time Nirvana came along Street-West was all of about eleven years old and the family was living by going back and forth between two homes in Los Angeles and Aspen. Street-West found Los Angeles difficult from the beginning, he always felt it was hard to find any kind of center there but he seemed to be happy just about anywhere as long as he was able to turn to his music. By this time he was playing around on the guitar, experimenting with writing songs, and playing live for anyone who cared to listen. His friends and family knew that he was likely destined to become a musician and he was getting used to the idea, even though such a thing as a career seemed as far away as the moon. As young as he was, he tuned into Kurt Cobain's genius immediately and was an avid listener; to this day he considers Cobain one of the most influential innovaters ever in songwriting and music performance. Cobain's death on April 5, 1994 was another bitter reminder to add to Street-West's argument as to why any sane person would not want to become a rock star.
[edit] Early years
It may be said that Street-West's career began when he was about fifteen years old, soon after he first seriously picked up a guitar and began writing songs. There was an immediate recognition among the people who knew him at the time that something extraordinary was happening here. The sounds that Street-West coaxed from his guitars immediately made listeners think of guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Leadbelly. Since no one else knew what to call a beginning guitarist who just up and began playing like the greatest known ax men in the business they began using the "G" word (for "genius"), a word Street-West hated because it made him feel self-conscious about his playing. Other people may have thought he played like his heroes but he knew he had a long way to go yet before he would even get close so he went out of his way to avoid reference to his guitar heroes in his guitar work and tried in every way possible not to sound like he was copying their styles. This was the main reason that forced Street-West to devise his own unique set of guitar techniques: a self-conscious fifteen year old who barely knew what a genius was, but knew enough that it made him feel set apart from his peers, and that was untenable. Now, like it or not, he was self-conscious about his guitar work, and it was this self-consciousness that led him to a highly understated guitar style, deliberate and precise, playing only when and where he needed to in a song, and avoiding any flashy riffs. From the beginning, this artist (as all true artists tend to be), was a perfectionist about his work. He was going to play like himself and not by trying to mimic one of those far away guitar gods whom he worshiped. He would learn from them but he would not copy. He would not be labeled. As long as he remained in charge of his own destiny, he would be no genius.
Of course he couldn't exactly hide it away from the world either. He lived for his music and learned quickly that music couldn't really come alive until there was an audience to hear it. When he tired of staying up night after night making albums on his bedroom 8-track recording rig he began looking for ways to get on stage in Los Angeles. It wasn't long before he was playing in the clubs down in Santa Monica, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or another of the various bands he put together in those early days. He tried putting together bands with his high school buddies but he could never get them to play well enough to back him up. He was forced to look to players much older than himself — professional guys who had years of road and in-studio experience backing the known stars of the eighties and early nineties — and it always seemed to turn out that the other guys were at least ten years older than he was, and in some cases thirty years older. Although Street-West was always a natural leader when it came to music and never failed to take charge of his own bands there was a natural built-in generation gap between himself as the front man, singer, songwriter, and lead guitarist and the other musicians. With Street-West being so young in those early days between the ages of fifteen to twenty, and with such a huge gap between the music that moved him and the musical influences of the guys in his band he could just never seem to pull the sound together the way he heard it in his head. Street-West was primarily influenced by the great innovaters of the 60's and early 70's and groups like Nirvana while most of the guys he was playing with were steeped in 80's and 90's pop rock. The few he was closest to had deep backgrounds in the blues but the generation gap was simply too large a gap to bridge.
His record company, his managers, everybody tried to help with the situation but the backing bands simply never seemed to be able to keep up with him — the mix was simply never right. He was always ahead of them in his musical interests, in his natural ability, in his serious intent, and in his ever changing, dynamic, day-to-day growth as a young genius. He may not have wanted to be a genius but it was apparent to everyone around him that he was. In the difficult town of Los Angeles even a young genius found it a hardscrabble, infertile ground for nurturing a career in music.
[edit] The desire to "Light Out For The Territory" takes hold
Since he was around fifteen years old, Nathaniel Street-West had come to know many music producers. Producers would phone up and ask if they could drop by to see what was happening and then would become interested in the kind of music the young musician was putting out on a daily basis. Among the best friends Street-West made among these producers was Duane Baron. Although Duane had made his name in large part by working with heavy metal and hard rock bands in Los Angeles he was interested in working with Street-West from the earliest years. When Nathaniel decided to make a real full-length studio album during late 2000 he made the decision to go with Duane Baron as producer. They began working at Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. Street-West happened to be staying off and on in Atlanta at the time due in part to the fact that his younger sister was dancing with the Atlanta Ballet Company during those years.
They began by cutting all of the original tracks in Atlanta at Tree Sound on 24" tape and then brought the material back to Street-West's home studio in Malibu, California to finish tracking and mixing in ProTools. The result, "Light Out For the Territory", was a 2-CD, 17 song album, mixing blues, rock, and jazz. Due to many unforeseen factors the album ended up taking over 18 months to go from the original tracking in Atlanta to release by Puffin Records in October, 2003.
The diverse nature of the release made it difficult for listeners and critics to know where to place this artist and his first major release. Was he rock, folk, blues, jazz? Was it something completely new? Although there were many beautifully done productions among the seventeen songs the album did not create much of a stir, however it did serve to put the young artist on the map. It became a kind of classic hit among smaller and internet-based radio stations who became fiercely loyal to Street-West and his music. By 2006, many of the songs from "Light Out" had become almost cult classics, with tracks like "Reconsider Baby", and Street-West's versions of Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna" ending up on millions of iPods and similar digital players around the world.
Another interesting factor in the story of "Light Out" was that is sounded like it was created by a much older, more seasoned artist. To no one did it sound like a first release. To no one did it sound like it was made by an artist who was not yet twenty-one when the recording process began in the late autumn of 2000. The songwriting, arrangements, and musicianship sounded way mature, certainly beyond the known age of Street-West at the time. Most of the original songs on "Light Out" had in fact been written when Nathaniel was between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. He simply was, as the famed drummer Jim Keltner was to say later on, "an old soul". (Nathaniel Street-West 2006)
It was to be his next release, American Way, that sounded younger and more experimental in nature.
[edit] The post 9/11 world sinks in
"American Way", Nathaniel Street-West's second full-length release was made in his studio in Malibu, which during that particular year was located in the garage of his home. He had just moved to a different house and the only logical place to put his recording equipment happened to be the garage. Although it had taken over a year to conceive the novelistic narrarive which drives the album, once he set to work the recording took only a few months to complete.
Street-West, like most artists, felt disillusioned by what was happening to his country in the post 9/11 world. To help make sense of what he felt was happening around him he dreamed up an album of songs which became "American Way". Street-West says that he approached the process exactly as if he were writing a novel, creating characters, situations, ideas in his head and then using a continual narrative of sorts to hold everything together.
[edit] The desert wars hit home
[edit] Health problems and other subtext
Street-West has suffered from a serious autoimmune disease since he was three years old. Diagnosed with Polyarteritis nodosa — a rare form of Vasculitis — he has remained under the continuous care of his team of physicians. After undergoing chemotherapy for a life-threatening relapse of his Vasculitis in 1998 he had managed to stay in fairly good health and made major leaps forward as a musician during this time.
Unfortunately in October of 2006 Street-West suffered yet another serious relapse and is presently under going treatment. Until the treatment gets him back on his feet he will remain at his home in Los Angeles working to recover his strength. Despite the unremitting chronic symptoms of this devastating disease, Street-West has built a remarkable career as a professional musician. He has simply never allowed the chronic illness to stop him from moving ahead. When he tells someone music is his life, he means it.
Street-West has always looked forward to any opportunity available to be of help to other patients with vasculitis-type illnesses. Currently he and his family are putting together a foundation that will involve raising public awareness about vasculitis, that will reach out to other vasculitis patients and their families and caregivers, and that will raise funds to support research into the disease. Street-West particularly wants other patients to know that it is possible to live with and overcome this disease and he plans to devote substantial time to helping others who are living with the illness.
He is currently tolerating the treatment well and is looking forward to getting back out on tour with his fans. (Street-West 2006) (Puffin Records, Inc. 2006)
[edit] Most recent activities and events
On June 20, 2006 "Witness" was released by Puffin Records, Inc. into general distribution.
In June, 2006 Street-West was picked up by Evolution Promotion in Boston, MA for promotion of "Witness" to radio, television, and internet sources.
In July, 2006, EQ magazine devoted an entire article to the making of "Witness" by Nathaniel Street-West. The article, written by "Witness" producer Mark Howard (Daniel Lanois, U2, Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Deadman , goes into some detail regarding the experience he intended to apply to the recording of "Witness", experience garnered through the long years he worked with Daniel Lanois on Grammy award winning recordings such as U2's "The Joshua Tree", "The Unforgettable Fire", and "Achtung Baby" — plus Bob Dylan's "Time Out Of Mind" — and work he had done on his own such as Lucinda Williams' "World Without Tears", and Deadman's "Our Eternal Ghosts". He knew there were high expectations riding on this recording as no one as yet had managed to record Street-West in a way that captured the intensity Street-West put across in performance. No producer had as yet captured the spectrum of genius Street-West embodied as a guitar player, vocalist, and performer. The EQ magazine article documents these strategies of producer Mark Howard, written in his own words, as he approached the challenges of recording a project as demanding as "Witness".
On September 12, 2006, "Witness" was released for hard copy distribution by Burnside Distribution Company.
In late November, 2006, Nathaniel Street-West is to be featured on the hour-long premiere episode of the new PBS music program, Frequency, produced by Fast Focus TV. Street-West will appear on this episode with fellow newcomer's Corinne Bailey Rae and KT Tunstall, with the legendary Johnny Cash, Steve Miller, and Prairie Home Companion, and with current hit maker, Ben Harper. Nathaniel Street-West is the only artist signed to an independent record company who has been invited to appear in this series. This is a testimony to the impact that Street-West's work is beginning to represent in American culture, work that has now spanned over a decade and yet Street–West is — at 26 years of age — only at the beginning of a long career. This premiere episode of Frequency will air on all 349 Public Broadcasting System] television channels throughout the United States and, through the International Broadcasting Bureau, to 740 major stations in over 65 countries internationally. It is scheduled to begin airing sometime during November of 2006. Exact schedule information was not available at the time of this writing.
Beginning in October, 2006 Street-West was scheduled to begin a series of carefully targeted tours throughout the United States and in the England, Scotland, and Ireland. Previous to this date, Street-West has been touring to promote the new release along the Pacific Coast, particularly in the Southern California area. Due to a relapse of his Vasculitis, Street-West has been forced to postpone the currently scheduled tour. (See Health Problems and other Subtext section, above)
[edit] Discography
[edit] External links
- Official Website - Official Nathaniel Street-West website. You can listen to forty-two songs from the three major releases free there in streaming audio format
- Nathaniel Street-West page at iTunes
- Nathaniel Street-West on MySpace
- Fast Focus TV Video On Street-West - Video about Nathaniel Street-West produced by Fast Focus TV for PBS Television.
- Artists at Fast Focus TV
- Nathaniel Street-West Fast Focus TV
- EQ Magazine Article - Written by Producer Mark Howard (U2, Bob Dylan) regarding his experience recording the album, "Witness" with Nathaniel Street-West
- Evolution Promotion
[edit] References
- Street-West, Nathaniel. Official Website. http://www.nathanielstreetwest.com. Retrieved November 2, 2006
- Puffin Records, Inc. Official Press Release. November 1, 2006
