INFANTREE @ echo

Posted by samantha - filed in 18+, echo, events

nathanielrateliff

It had been rough on all of their bodies, there’s no doubt about it, but Nathaniel Rateliff, the main songwriter and leader of The Wheel, looked like he’d been in a prize fight or two the night before he came in for this session in the summer, with his eyes red and nearly swollen shut from the lack of sleep and consistent burning through nights as if his time was running out. It’s not just the way that Rateliff, a native of Missouri wine country (as odd as that is to say) and a resident of Denver, Colorado these days, acts on the road when the behavior isn’t just expected, but encouraged. It’s how he thinks about his miniscule allotment of time and he ruminates on the lack of tenure that all of us are faced with here, working these potentially wasted aspirations and the hollowed out but booming and thundering heart of a man who knows that there’s no way that his time will ever be enough, into his spectacularly defined and perceptive folk songs. He gives these drowsy-to-wailing songs a southern bent at times and at others he makes them feel as if they have been dropped off in the middle of a Minnesota corn field, bumped from the tailgate of a pickup truck that was driving wearily through the middle of a cold, white, winter’s night on a deserted county road that’s only been half-heartedly plowed clean. The songs that Rateliff finds himself writing, more times than not, are those that seek to find out if there is a payoff, if there can be a payoff and what exactly could this mystery payoff be if we do actually have a formidable resiliency and enough time to pull off the unthinkable – and in this case it’s happiness. Or it’s something as close to a happy ending as could be written up – maybe just an ending without all the balloons or jolly cheers and thumps on the back, maybe just little smiles, a lukewarm chest and not too many aches, to go with a family that loves you as much as you could ever expect them to. – Daytrotter

with:
Pearly Gate Music
Infantree