Gotta Make This Work

A singer/songwriter currently based in Los Angeles, Nathan Jacques hails from the quiet, wooded, mountain towns of New England. His music can be labeled Americana, but threads of country, folk, and vintage rock & roll are deeply woven into the sprawling cinematic soundscapes he creates, all gleaming with a western edge.

Nathan fell in love with the guitar in his younger days by way of classic rock. “It was all about the guitar. It was everything; if I could learn a cool riff, or I could stumble to try and learn it that was all I needed.” His solo songwriting came to the fore after his last stint as guitarist and co-writer with a pop-rock band came to an end. “I was left wanting in music…without a band. I had an acoustic guitar and I was like, ‘Well, gotta make this work. You do what you can with what you have.”

So, how did Nathan get from guitar-driven rock to the western songwriter tradition in the vein of Marty Robbins? “It was a combination of just being generally interested in it, and that’s kind of just where I found my voice could do well. Like I said, I was in a pop-rock band; I would try and sing that kind of stuff and I’d get really bummed out because my voice just wasn’t high enough.”
Nathan’s recently released debut, Loud Mind, defies the conventions of the genre. It is a 12-song concept album inhabited by dramatic, fictional characters experiencing preternatural happenings and expressing the human truths of love, loss and redemption.

“I’m just a fan of any kind of big adventure story…big sprawling epics, I was just so onboard…When I found that you could do that in music…I could really fall into that world like it’s a movie, like a good book. I always wanted to do that, I thought, ‘Why not give it a go?’ Once I started doing it, I couldn’t stop, I was obsessed. I would write pages and pages…flesh out the whole story.”

Visit with Nathan here, and listen to the interview here.

By Dan Walsh