NATHANIEL RATELIFF & THE NIGHT SWEATS are the soul-stirring redemption revue taking America, and the world, by storm. But it’s been a hard road, beset by booze, bereavement, doubt and despair, for their forthright frontman. “I guess I’ve just realised you can be who you are,” he tells GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN.
MOJO PRESENTS
WHEN NATHANIEL RATELIFF FIRST VISITED THE OREGON STUDIO OF Richard Swift in 2014, he instantly knew he was working with a kindred spirit. They’d met in sordid clubs on tours with other bands, and Rateliff was familiar with Swift’s CV: a string of warped soul records, stints in The Shins and The Black Keys, production credits for Damien Jurado and Foxygen.
But working with Swift on his own songs, accompanied by his new Denver-based band, The Night Sweats, Rateliff fell hard. “It felt like finding a lost sibling,” says Rateliff. “He would be like, ‘You’re my twin.’ And we were both drinking the same. I could hang without judgement.”
On a bluebird Sunday afternoon, with light cascading through the windows of his home in the Rocky Mountain foothills, Rateliff recalls nights when he and Swift raged so hard they slept until 5pm. Still, they finished the Night Sweats’ self-titled 2015 debut for Stax. Rateliff was in his mid-thirties; after a series of folk LPs failed to create a sustainable career, he wondered if this was his last chance. By year’s end, the horn-gilded Night Sweats were an American sensation after S.O.B. – a frenzied anthem about enduring delirium tremens – went viral, sold records, and packed clubs.
But as the band prepared to finish its follow-up, Tearing At The Seams, the recently divorced Rateliff headed to an Arizona treatment centre to dry out. Swift cut back, too. Their sans-booze sessions in October 2017, again in Swift’s studio, revealed another strata of chemistry, so deep the band wondered if they should leave Denver.
“The guys loved it: ‘We should buy a house here. We could be closer to Richard, make more music more frequently,’” remembers Rateliff, frowning as he fingers his thin brown beard. “But by the spring, he had turned. His liver and kidneys started failing.”
Swift died in July 2018, four months after the record’s release. At his funeral, his wife, Shealynn, delivered a stark warning to her husband’s drinking buddy, nearing 40: “We can’t do this for you.”
Alysse Gafkjen
THE LAST SIX YEARS FOR RATELIFF HAVE BEEN A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN THE PROPENSITY to indulge and the drive to endure. On one hand, The Night Sweats offer one of contemporary music’s most ecstatic on-stage experiences, their soul clatter led by a burly, tattooed man moving like a cross between Van Morrison and James Brown. Off-stage, they’ve operated on the edge, even tangling with Canadian border patrol over substances in suitcases.
