{"id":20087,"date":"2018-03-11T12:41:41","date_gmt":"2018-03-11T16:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=20087"},"modified":"2018-03-11T12:41:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-11T16:41:41","slug":"weekend-music-break-nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats-hey-mama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/weekend-music-break-nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats-hey-mama\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Music Break: Nathaniel Rateliff &#038; The Night Sweats, &#8220;Hey Mama&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"intrinsic-container intrinsic-container-16x9\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T4SGV5WLVFE?rel=0&amp;showinfo=0\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">?<\/span><\/iframe><\/div>\n<span class=\"su-dropcap su-dropcap-style-light\" style=\"font-size:2em\">I<\/span> thought I&#8217;d never even heard of this band before this week. But that notion, apparently, makes sense only because I&#8217;d never paid attention to various email notifications I&#8217;d received about them in recent years. Suddenly they&#8217;re again <a title=\"Metacritic: critical responses to 'Tearing at the Seams,' by Nate Rateliff &amp; The Night Sweats\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/www.metacritic.com\/music\/tearing-at-the-seams\/nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats\" target=\"_blank\">on everyone&#8217;s radar<\/a> &#8212; including mine, this time around &#8212; for the release of their second album, <em>Tearing at the Seams<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>How to characterize their music&#8230;? The sound is country-ish, Americana-ish, sorta-kinda Southern rock, but the label which seems most often and most strikingly mentioned alongside the band&#8217;s name is <em>soul<\/em>. Rateliff&#8217;s powerful voice won&#8217;t make you think Sam Cooke has been reincarnated. And the lead instrumental voices are those of rock, principally guitar, bass, and drums. But yeah: in the spirit of the music and the sense of the lyrics you&#8217;ll find plenty of soul. (It doesn&#8217;t hurt that the label behind them is the legendary Stax Records, described by Wikipedia as &#8220;a major factor in the creation of Southern soul and Memphis soul music.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hey Mama,&#8221; the single whose video I&#8217;ve featured here, can be interpreted literally &#8212; as a dialogue between a young man and his mother. The guy feels sorry for himself, how hard he works, how little reward he&#8217;s gotten for it all, and so on. But his mother&#8217;s simply not having it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Better start acting like this here&#8217;s a race&#8230;<br \/>\nYou ain&#8217;t gone far enough to say<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\"><em>At least I tried<\/em><\/span><br \/>\nYou ain&#8217;t worked hard enough to say<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\"><em>Well, I&#8217;ve done mine<\/em><\/span><br \/>\nYou ain&#8217;t run far enough to say<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\"><em>My legs have failed<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As I say, the literal interpretation works just fine. But pretty much anyone who&#8217;s tried (and tried hard) to succeed at one art form or another may see in it an <em>interior<\/em> dialogue, too: between the self-pitying voice that says, <em>I may as well give up<\/em>, and the loving but sterner one that says, <em>Who are you trying to kid? You haven&#8217;t <\/em>started<em> working yet!<\/em><\/p>\n<span class=\"su-dropcap su-dropcap-style-light\" style=\"font-size:2em\">T<\/span>he visuals which accompany the song seem to encourage a non-literal understanding of what it&#8217;s about. It&#8217;s &#8220;just&#8221; a black-and-white film, not quite all in one take (although it feels like it), of a driver&#8217;s-eye view through the windshield of a car in almost non-stop traffic. The moments when the forward movement is interrupted &#8212; for pedestrians, for traffic signals which hold things up for a moment &#8212; provide some relief. But the overall sense is of an experience which simply does not stop, is impatient with pauses, is <em>relentless<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The frustrated souls who recognize the two voices of the lyrics arguing in their heads will probably recognize this feeling, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>? thought I&#8217;d never even heard of this band before this week. But that notion, apparently, makes sense only because I&#8217;d never paid attention to various email notifications I&#8217;d received about them in recent years. Suddenly they&#8217;re again on everyone&#8217;s radar &#8212; including mine, this time around &#8212; for the release of their second album, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A song to make your frustrated inner artist squirm: Weekend Music Break: Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, \"Hey Mama\"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2252,74,5],"tags":[212,899,3178,3364,4694,4695,4696,4697,4698,4699],"class_list":{"0":"post-20087","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-midweek-music-break","8":"category-music","9":"category-06_writing","10":"tag-creativity","11":"tag-art-photography","12":"tag-videos","13":"tag-americana","14":"tag-nathaniel-rateliff","15":"tag-nathaniel-rateliff-the-night-sweats","16":"tag-soul","17":"tag-rock","18":"tag-frustration","19":"tag-self-pity","20":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/heymama_youtubescreen.jpg?fit=643%2C358&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5dZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20087"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20093,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20087\/revisions\/20093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}