Amos the Kid’s long and winding road

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This article was published 04/05/2023 (1206 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dressed from boot to cowboy hat in denim, on a sweaty stage in a sweaty tent packed with bopping beanies and stomping feet, Amos the Kid was midway through the biggest set of his life when he decided he was thirsty.

“God damn, I need water,” he said into the microphone before pulling out a two-litre bottle. He took a sip, smacked his lips together, and started wailing again like he had something to prove to himself.

He started and stopped a track he’d yet to play live. “The new ones are always scary,” he said before giving it another go.

It was the last Saturday night in February, and Amos Nadlersmith, a cow-punk slack-rocker from Boissevain, was a little bit overwhelmed by the crowd of at least 500 surrounding him at Festival du Voyageur.

There was once a time when Nadlersmith, now 27, was a bit of a musical mystery child, making plaintive folk tunes under the anonymizing pseudonym the Shoal Lake Kid, performing here and there.

He was not yet convinced that he was a musician. Even with his first full-length LP, Enough As It Was, out May 6 on vinyl and his first Canadian tour about to start, Nadlersmith still isn’t sure what to call himself.

He’s always had other jobs to sustain him. “Too many to count,” he says, listing off a few of them over a cup of black coffee. He worked on an organic farm picking mustard weeds. He’s been an arborist’s assistant, a canoe guide, a tree planter, a cabinet installer, a deck builder, the town recycling guy, a chicken catcher and a leech fisherman.

He’s got no scars, only memories from the latter. “They just suck on you and you pull them off,” he says, laughing.

Music was always a bit of a far-off dream: Nadlersmith wrote songs from the seat of his canoe as he paddled across the lakes of Northwestern Ontario or as he fished for muskie in Vermillion Bay.

“It’s an unpopular opinion, but my favourite fish to cook is pike,” he says. “A lot of people say it tastes too fishy, but that’s the point.”

But to really make a go at this music life took some time, and it also took swapping out the Turtle Mountains for Garbage Hill, leaving his rural upbringing behind and transplanting himself into the thick of the Winnipeg music world.

Shortly after moving to Winnipeg, Nadlersmith started working at the Good Will Social Club, where he got a front-row seat to a rapidly expanding indie music scene.

Meanwhile, Nadlersmith made his own noise, inspired by the minimal, complex lyricism of Townes Van Zandt, the slack-jawed drawl of Kurt Vile, the dreamscapes of the War on Drugs, and the punkish poetry of Gord Downie.

It wasn’t until 2019 when the jagged pieces of Amos the Kid began to fit together, and Nadlersmith began working with Adam Fuhr of House of Wonders on the tracks for Mountain View, a brisk, five-song EP released one month after the pandemic began in 2020.

Also released on cassette, Mountain View — with the rueful earworm What Did You Do, the new-wavey Jesus Cocaine Ketamine Christ, and the soft-core rave of the title track — was a college radio and streaming hit. So was Amos’ 2021 EP, No More New Ideas.

Those releases built significant buzz around Amos the Kid, who by this point had begun donning a cowboy hat onstage. One can’t deny Nadlersmith’s country rep, but he has trouble with being called a traditional “country artist.”

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he says. “It has evolved into this sort of outlaw-country kind of thing, but I worry about that. I know if I were to hang out with someone in my hometown and they would see it being called country music, they’d say, ‘That’s not country.’

“But the things I write about, and the images I use are quite like what you’d find in a country song.”

No matter which section the record store files it in, Enough As It Was is eternally spinnable, flickering with danceable percussion, charming twang and an impressive range of sonic influence. Backed by a solid band of heavy hitters, including Fuhr, drummer Brian Gluck, keyboardist-singer Jensen Fridfinsson, and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Cayer, Amos the Kid’s lyrics and understated vocals shine.

A record about growing up, regret and escape, Nadlersmith calls it “an angry album,” and from the first chords of opener World Burn, that comes through loud and clear. “You said the world would burn / I said I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nadlersmith sings with Fridfinsson.

On Well Water, Nadlersmith sings with rusty nostalgia about the metallic aftertaste of a cold cup of Boissevain water: the grass is never greener. “I was going to leave that town for good, man,” Amos sings in a refrain, knowing he never quite can.

The title track, placed smack-dab in the middle of the 11 tracks, is a frenetic, frantic centrepiece, built on a percussive bed of ripping paper and snapping fingers. Fuhr, who produced the record, says the song happened almost too naturally: Nadlersmith was strumming a few chords, Fuhr started improvising some rhythms, and then Amos the Kid started riffing melody and lyrics off the dome. He immediately summoned the band to the studio.

Midway through the song, Nadlersmith begins a spoken confession that turns into a screamed admission. “I don’t want to ask too much. I don’t want to talk anymore. I’M CONFUSED.”

“Within four hours of that (first) riff, we were done the exact recording that is on the record,” says Fuhr. “Nothing like it has ever happened to any of us before. I’m almost sure nothing like it will happen again.”

Three months after sweating his way through the set at Festival, Amos the Kid plays May 6 at the West End Cultural Centre, with Winnipeg’s Tired Cossack opening.

It will be the biggest show of Nadlersmith’s career.

But the kid in the cowboy hat is ready for his closeup.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com