1.25.15
​NATE ERICKSON

You should know Nate for a number of reasons. The first being he is an excellent guy. Second, is he is the only person besides myself to play on Ilsa, adding an unbelievable amount of “the goods” with his piano chops. And third, he is super tall and makes me look like a ventriloquist dummy when we are photographed together. 


Nate and I met on New Years Eve a couple years back and quickly became friends, playing and hanging on the regular , which quickly led into some recording sessions the first week of February that year. Nate was only supposed to come in and track piano, but stayed to hang out, help and give feedback. Nate is a real actual honest to goodness musician who possesses  mountains of technical ability and skill. With massive proficiency often comes rigidity and an unwillingness to not play “the right notes” (translation; sometimes musicians that really know what they are doing are boring) but Nate has the unique ability to translate those notes into something more interesting and a willingness to go for it that never makes his playing boring. 


When it came time to record the new record, Nate took making Ilsa as seriously as I did, bringing notebooks of ideas to the sessions and taking a lot of time before we hit record to get things right. In one particular instance where we were discussing a certain section, he said “so you want me to just pound on the keys?” I couldn't tell if it was horror, excitement or both that I heard in is voice in that moment but Nate figured out a way to make it work. Sometimes he would suffer my rudimentary piano playing and would nod and say “oh, ok,” sit down and make that idea 100 times better than I could have imagined. I always felt like Nate took some ownership in the songs because when we’d be writing and he’d never just phone it in or throw up his hands and say “thats good enough.” He’d be positive that he could come up with something better, something more suited to the mood of the song, something that felt better. We were on the same wavelength, a rare and invaluable experience when making music with someone.


Ilsa was always supposed to be a dynamic recording, filled with noise and space and ferocity and beauty, and I think that without Nate, it would not have gotten there. 
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12.31.15
​ILSA
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