Folk singer-songwriter Nathaniel Bellows has released his driving, smoky new single “That Too” alongside the announcement of his forthcoming new EP The Moat, out October 17. PRESS HERE to listen to the new single “That Too,” a grounded, acoustic admission that redefines what “love” is while delving into its ever-changing, unpredictable nature, and PRESS HERE to watch the lyric video. Exploring how the things we put in place to protect us can also cut us off from the rest of the world, The Moat traverses a variety of musical landscapes with emotional intimacy while delving into paradoxical themes of armor and vulnerability, hiding and exposure, insularity and outreach.
“‘That Too’ is the lead track from my forthcoming EP, The Moat,” Bellows explains. “The song sets up many of the themes the album seeks to investigate—memory, desire, solitude, time, compromise, failure, intolerance, wit, artistry, ambition. The song explores the notion of the ‘moat’ by evoking a structure that is both of earth and of air, protection and isolation: If the meaning of love / is a series of rungs / to a roof // But, then we’ll / dig the hole / and seal up the walls / and it feels just like / a home / a hull / a tomb. ‘That Too’ was the second song I wrote in what would become The Moat, and, through its angular, surging rhythm, it gave the pursuit of self-exploration a rigorous, rootsy feel.”
Featuring the recently released single “Works for Me,” a self-described introvert’s anthem that recasts the notion of being “lonely” as an empowered state of hard-won self-knowledge, The Moat winds between rollicking, upbeat swings and jazz-inflected inner searching to icy, electronic balladry and soaring treatises—all with the goal of deepening our knowledge of who we are in the world. PRESS HERE to pre-save The Moat, which was produced by Bellows alongside Michael Hammond, and explores the inherent contradiction of its namesake as either a fortification of self-protection, safety, and security, or a defensive structure necessitated by a fear of the outside world. Full tracklist below.
Making a name for himself as a stark but emotive storyteller, with a voice and lyrics that are as deep as they are rich, Bellows has received acclaim from NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Paste, American Songwriter, Americana Highways, and more for his previous albums Three, Swan and Wolf (where each song was paired with one of his original illustrations), and The Old Illusions as well as for his work as the sole lyricist on Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered, which was inspired by 13 of his poems and illustrations. Bellows has also drawn comparisons to Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen for his raw, soulful, and emotionally textured songs that are equal parts grace and grit.
An accomplished musician, poet, novelist, and visual artist who originally wrote music as companion pieces to his other artistry but never recorded the songs to put them out in the world, Bellows’ poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Academy of American Poets “Poem a Day” Program, the Poems of New York anthology, The Golden Shovel Anthology, and many more, as well as in his own published poetry collection Why Speak? (W.W. Norton), which was called “gripping...the book’s power depends on the slow accumulation of an inner world” by The New York Times Book Review and was pronounced “a smart and powerful debut” by Library Journal. Bellows is also the author of two novels: On This Day (HarperCollins) (“A triumph,” The Los Angeles Times) and Nan: A Novel in Stories (Harmon Blunt Publishers). His short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Narrative, Guernica, Redivider, The Best American Short Stories (selected by novelist Michael Chabon), and more.
The Moat tracklist:
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That Too
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True
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Night in Day
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Works for Me
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Your Fault
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Proof
