Nathaniel Rateliff thought he could slip his new solo album "under the rug." This would just be an album for himself, he tells me. But, when it dropped last month, And It's Still Alright debuted to positive, high-profile reviews. He appeared on the biggest late night shows—we’re speaking at his Midtown Manhattan hotel, just hours before he goes to tape a performance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show. His solo tour tickets went flying.

That’s all good news, but a buzzy debut is hardly the only thing that failed to go according to plan when it comes to the project. It began with a recording process that managed to surprise and devastate at every turn. Then, last week, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to spread, Rateliff put his solo tour on hold. “We regret to announce that we have decided to postpone the rest of our current tour starting tonight and through Atlanta,” the statement from him and his team read. “We are looking forward to bringing this new show back out as soon as possible. We love our fans. Please take care of yourself and all those around you.”

Rateliff first felt called to make a solo album in order to process some of the huge overhauls his personal life had endured in recent years. After a separation, in 2018, he and his wife filed for divorce. The couple split during the Night Sweats’ second LP, Tearing at the Seams, but the break was too new, too personal for that collection. “I remember writing the songs [for that set] in the desert and it was almost like you're writing with this prophetic sense, letting your subconscious go places,” he recalls. “But I was like, ‘Well, I can't actually say that. That gives away too much information.’”

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To move forward, however, he realized he had to come back to the fissure. “It took me a long time to be honest with myself and know that [writing about something] is part of my process of dealing with things.”

A fan of Harry Nilsson, he envisioned the album in that same singer-songwriter vein and plotted the approach with his and the Night Sweats’ longtime producer and dear friend Richard Swift. Prior to his work with the Sweats, Swift had also partnered with acts like the Shins as well as the Black Keys and, for a while, he and Rateliff had been discussing making something like And It’s Still Alight. “I was really approaching making a record the way he made the four Damien Jurado records,” Rateliff explains, “which is like, I would bring him songs and just let him go nuts on them. We’d figure out the instruments as we went.”

But Swift had struggled with health problems over the years and by early 2018 and he was dealing with hepatitis as well as liver and kidney failure. He died that July, before he and Rateliff had a chance to start recording. In his grief, Rateliff found he still wanted to return to Swift’s Oregon studio to record. “Once I knew I was going to do [the album], I was like, ‘I want to go back to Richard’s.’” He, Patrick Meese, who plays drums in the Night Sweats, and James Barone of Tennis headed north.

The album’s lyrical scope widened, very much becoming a tribute to his friend. Little goodbyes are littered across the LP, working towards the harrowing final track “Rush On.” Recorded on the final day in Swift’s studio, it serves as a fitting, moving eulogy. “I hoped like a prayer/that your brokenness would leave you,” Rateliff sings, voice thick with emotion, “But months turned to years/And the emptiness prevailed.”

“We were just worried about it,” Rateliff says of why it kept getting pushed off during their week in Oregon. But it had to be cut in that room. “I felt like the spirit of Richard is in the studio,” he explains. “And I wanted to share the song with him. We were trying to wait for the right moment of feeling. I wanted to have the right emotion going into it to even perform it, so that it would carry over in the song.”

The end result, cinematic in its emotional heft but understated in its arrangement, will split your heart in two. Even, it turns out, if you’re the one who wrote it. “As I’m singing the words, sometimes I’m just like, ‘Oh, shit,’” Rateliff says. “It hurts.” He continues: “You can be surprised if you’ve written something, like the words seem beyond my knowledge and cadence and rhyming—even just the choice of vocabulary. I don’t always speak as eloquently as I write. It feels like a different person, sometimes. Or it makes me feel like the writing is something that is outside of me.”


When Rateliff announced And It’s Still Alright earlier this year, fans were surprised. (His Night Sweats bandmates felt similarly, "creatively," he admits.) “I did get some random comments where people have been like, ‘Are the Night Sweats done?’” he recalls before answering their worries: “No. They’re not.”

Which isn’t to say this album should be viewed as a temporary side-step in a career that still feels mid-takeoff. When the Night Sweats’ self-titled debut dropped back in 2015, it announced a new brawny brawler at the forefront of soul. The set, a pumped-up take on throwback Memphis sounds, cracked the Top 20 on the all-genre Billboard 200 and sold half a million copies. Their 2018 follow-up sold nearly as much. “From being a solo artist before the Night Sweats to creating the Night Sweats and making a band out of it, I’ve used all of that information to make this record,” Rateliff says. And, he adds, “I feel like it’s going to help us create something different for the Night Sweats sound when it comes time for us to do that.”

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His solo tour, originally slated to run through spring and early summer 2020 now stretches into the fall with rescheduled dates. But the time where he’ll gets back in the studio with the Night Sweats isn’t actually far off for fans. Rateliff says he's already at-work on new material for his other band, though with the passing of Swift, the search for a new producer is front-of-mind. “It’s important to me to know how somebody else works at this point,” he says. “I don’t really want to work with somebody who’s not going to hear me, but I definitely want to work with somebody who’s going to hear more than I hear and push me and the rest of the guys beyond what we think we’re capable of.”

There is also the question of what exactly he feels drawn write about for the group’s next album. “I don't know if the times we live in are requiring me to write a happy song that people can just dance to,” he explains. “I'm interested to see what I will write about, depending on the state of things by that time. I still just love to listen to music for the pure enjoyment of it, because I love it. I'm still curious.”

What these times require is something he also keeps in mind with the Marigold Project, his foundation which aids organizations that work on social justice and economic reform via special musical releases. “My goal for Marigold Project and the Night Sweats isn’t to cause more divide,” he says. “It’s to bring people together and build community—and try to bring people together who have different ideas. If we don’t understand each other, there’s always going to be divide.”


It’s not just a new musical arrangement that has Rateliff’s life looking different these days. He has a girlfriend, who lives in Brooklyn, and his own new place in Colorado. “I’m not a fan of the city,” he admits of the largest metropolis in the United States. He prefers his set-up outside of Denver, on the rare days that he can get home. “I live in the country,” he explains, “on around five acres. That’s more my speed.”

It’s a welcome shift, he adds: “Having a home feels really good to me. It took a while. I’m 41. Some people don’t ever own anything, and I was pretty content with the house I’d lived in for the last 15 years in Denver. It was only $800 a month. I was like, I’m not going to buy—why should I buy?”

A stable relationship and a remote place to unwind might’ve felt impossible just a few years ago. When the Night Sweats broke out, the partying was hard. Often, and for everyone in the group, it would get out of hand. “I definitely had some years where it was Jack Daniel's from the time I woke up, like the entire day. It’s a messy thing to figure your way out of, especially if you don’t want to quit forever.”

Rateliff had to reimagine the music industry, he found, in order to re-orient himself. “The Doors movie screwed me up as a kid,” he says by way of explanation. “That’s the sort of persona that everyone’s supposed to have, just kind of stumbling through, stumbling to the show, falling offstage. And people love the idea of that person, and I don't know why.”

So Jack Daniels is out these days, as are the harder substances. “I don’t do cocaine anymore,” he adds. “I can’t do it. And I just drink way less. It can definitely be a challenge. On occasion, I like to tie one on but, as I get older, I hate feeling like shit the next day, or two days. I mean, if you really go for it, if you’re doing drugs and shit, it’s like, ‘Okay, I just ruined my whole week.’”

Rateliff wasn’t alone in his group in looking for change. But figuring out how to support each other as they each cleaned up on their own, to whichever degree felt right, was not without its challenges. “It's hard to give somebody else the space to grow and change, when you feel like you've figured it out, or you're however many steps ahead, and you're thinking, Dude, just fucking quit smoking cigarettes," he admits. “That's the tough part.”

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Rateliff is adamant that the Night Sweats aren’t done, and not just for the music. "We’re a friend group," he says. "We are a family.”

He continues: “I'm sure the guys would say, ‘I wish Nathaniel would just do this, and stop being an asshole.’ I'm sure we all have that feeling about each other—but we try to be supportive. It's just a topic of conversation we have, just a lifestyle change, a permanent one. And it's just hard to get there. Especially when we're a bunch of goofballs, and it's fun to sit around and drink beers, and roll dice, and jump minibikes, and get hurt, all that stuff.”

The Night Sweats will find their way out, and back to each other. That is certain. As Rateliff muses, it’s more than the music that holds them together. “That's the thing that makes us unique: we are a band of people who happen to love to create music together. When we go somewhere, people are confused, like, ‘Are you guys a friend group or a band?’” Rateliff’s answer, on every occasion, is the same: "We're a friend group. We are a family.”