Nat Myers

Nat Myers – Yellow Peril (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 31:58 minutes | 635 MB | Genre: Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Easy Eye Sound

“I’m always searching,” says the Korean-American blues poet Nat Myers. “Itinerancy is something that I’ve owned. I’ve done a lot of traveling, but lately it’s started to seep into my songwriting and my music. Life just feels simpler on the road. You’re just trying to get to the next place in one piece.” His debut album, Yellow Peril, is full of jumpy blues songs about hopping trains, burning up highways, running from some danger but also running toward something harder to define and even harder to catch. Full of intelligence and soul, contradiction and nuance, these songs reflect his restlessness and wanderlust in their fleet riffs, complex rhythms, and quick tempos, as he draws from a variety of stylistic strains and historical threads to weave a complex epic about life in post-pandemic America.

Myers’ story starts in Kansas, but quickly moves to West Tennessee and then Northern Kentucky. Even as a child, he was a restless spirit: “I had a rowdy little childhood. My parents signed me up against my will to play in the school band, but I hated it. I pulled a Who on my trumpet and just destroyed it.” Instead, he spent his days skateboarding and listening to pop-punk and hardcore. “My mom got me a left-handed starter guitar, just trying to keep me away from the riffraff I was hanging out with. I kept hanging out with them, but now I had a guitar.” Even as he developed a deft picking style, Myers didn’t harbor great ambitions to be a musician. His true passion was poetry, especially the classics all high schoolers read but most quickly forget: Shakespeare and Homer, but especially The Odyssey, that epic of endless wandering. “I love the exercise of putting pen to paper. It’s the same way I feel about putting a needle down on vinyl. Magical things can happen.”

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