Nathaniel Rateliff revelling in unexpected joys of the road

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This article was published 28/07/2022 (1534 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats arrive in Winnipeg fresh from an enviable musical experience.

The Denver singer-songwriter and his band performed at the Newport Folk Festival last Sunday and welcomed legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon to the stage in the middle of their set of covers of Simon and Garfunkel classics and solo material.

It was a notable event — it’s difficult to believe Sunday was Simon’s first appearance at the famous festival — even if it was rightly overshadowed by Joni Mitchell’s performance the same day, her first in public since suffering a brain aneurysm and undergoing surgery in 2015.

“It’s hard to put into words the joy we felt bringing the great American songwriter Paul Simon to the Newport folk stage,” Rateliff said after backing Simon, 80, on a rendition of Graceland, The Boxer and other classic tunes. “Thank you, Paul, for your songs, your voice and your presence.”

While Friday’s concert at the Burton Cummings Theatre might not match performing with a rock legend for Rateliff and company, it remains a much-anticipated show for Rateliff’s fans in and around Winnipeg, who last saw the group here in 2016.

Rateliff and the Night Sweats released their third album, The Future, last November, and recording it proved to be a catharsis from the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Rateliff, 43, said in an interview in Forbes magazine.

“Well, everything looked pretty bleak at the time. I try to write from a kind of observing the bleakness perspective while trying to have some hope in there,” Rateliff said in the interview with Jim Ryan. “The thread through the songs is certainly kind of looking at what our future is. So that’s definitely what I was writing about and thinking about — and, at times, thinking about the potential of our future being not a very good one.

“And sometimes it still feels that way. I don’t feel like we’ve really made it out of any of the issues we were dealing with in 2020.”

Songs titles such as Face Down in the Moment and Something Ain’t Right suggest difficulty coping with troubled times, the album’s emotional title track that begins the LP prepares for troubled times ahead.

“You’re standing in the water / You think that you’ve been saved / With your blind ignorance / In comes a crashing wave / Let’s see what drowned men do, in your watery grave,” Rateliff sings, accompanied by the seven-piece Night Sweats.

Rateliff released a solo record, And It’s Still Alright, in February 2020, one of countless albums that were victims of bad timing, owing to the pandemic.

There were an endless array of livestream performances during the summer of 2020, but Rateliff took the format to an extreme in September of that year, performing 10 livestreamed concerts at an almost vacant Red Rocks venue in Colorado, which has room for about 10,000 people.

So don’t expect Rateliff and the Night Sweats to take Friday’s show for granted.

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“But just to be back out on the road I think was amazing for us as a band. We’re a live band. And I think people come to see us and know us because of that. And we try to have fun,” Rateliff told Forbes.

“It also felt like, from the stage, seeing the audience reaction (on the livestreams), that people really need to have that interaction that we have when we play live shows.”

Friday’s opener is the Deep Dark Woods, a folk group from Saskatoon that has won two Canadian Folk Music Awards since forming in 2009.

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall

Alan Small
Reporter

Alan Small was a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the last being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.

   Read full biography