In honor of the start of the summer festival season, our June issue profiles certain bands appearing at numerous festivals across the globe over the next few months. As Bonnaroo nears, get to know Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, who will appear on The Farm this week as well as Firefly, T in the Park, Newport Folk, Panorama, Osheaga, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands and many others. 

“I never owned any Prince records,” Nathaniel Rateliff boldly admits. Never owned any Prince records?! “It’s kind of crazy,” he concedes.

Talking about other music on April 21 feels somewhat inappropriate, given that just a few hours prior to our conversation with Rateliff, Prince died unexpectedly at his Paisley Park estate. On this day, Rateliff is less prone to hyperbole, calling the news “a drag.” He adds: “It makes you feel like, the heroes start to die, and you’re like, ‘Shit, are we ever going to have anybody like that again?’”

With the purple elephant firmly planted in the room, Rateliff jumps into his own rise, which has central themes of overcoming and persevering, much like Prince’s story. He grew up in Hermann, Mo., a rural community on the banks of the Missouri River with a population just a tick north of 2,000. He came of age in a predominately religious home, where his mom played James Taylor and Jim Croce records, while his Dad introduced him to the sweet sounds of Van Morrison.

“It was an interesting time when I was kid,” he reflects. “I was discovering the music that my parents grew up with, and really kind of fell in love with the ‘60s and ‘70s, and even earlier stuff—blues, R&B and soul.”

Rateliff’s work with The Night Sweats clearly grew out of those early influences, but he does admit to going through a Radiohead/Violent Femmes/ Fugazi phase at one point in his youth. “It’s strange—the different phases you go through as a kid when you’re discovering new music and older things you haven’t heard of,” he says, before admitting that the stuff that really sucked him in was The Band, Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

At the tender age of 7, Rateliff used some Led Zeppelin cassette tapes to teach himself how to play drums and, once he decided to pick up the guitar, his mom taught him his first three chords. His best friend taught him three more, and he “went from there.”

Nathaniel Rateliff’s current trajectory started once he made a trip to Denver to do missionary work and ended up finding some musical salvation.

“[Current Night Sweats bandmate] Joseph Pope and I were playing music together,” he recounts. “There weren’t a whole lot of options for work. We were 18 and needed to get out of Missouri, so we followed our friend to Denver and ended up getting pretty good jobs working at a trucking company.”

They decided to stay and had some success playing in the rock act Born in the Flood, but Rateliff admits that he wasn’t all that familiar with navigating the music industry at that time. “You end up doing what everybody does—you play open mics and that kind of thing. There were three songs we played, and they fucking slayed.”

He continues: “As we kept playing, we started to figure out more things and decided we wanted to be a real band.”
Rateliff credits those early days as a lesson in maturing, and he started gigging under the moniker Nathaniel Rateliff & The Wheel, who ended up releasing their debut, Desire and Dissolving Men, in 2007. His next record, 2010’s In Memory of Loss, was a solo release and recorded with Brian Deck (Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse). That change, as he reveals, was a freeing experience.

“I felt it was in my best interest to do what felt the most honest to me,” he explains of his decision to “go solo.”

After signing with Rounder Records, Rateliff translated his newfound success into a spot at New York’s rock-and-roll showcase CMJ, but the full-band concept was always in the back of his mind, and firmly placed in his sights.

“Playing totally solo has always been a little weird,” he admits. “I only did it because I couldn’t afford to keep anybody out on the road, but I had always written and arranged songs to have multiple parts, whether I recorded by myself or not. I always had the scope of the songs [being] much bigger than playing by myself for the performances.”

Following the release of his second solo album, Falling Faster Than You Can Run, Rateliff hit the road with groups like The Lumineers and Dr. Dog, and, shortly after that, he started to put a band back together.

Rateliff called on Pope, keyboardist Mark Shusterman and drummer Patrick Meese, as well as Luke Mossman, Wesley Watkins and Andy Wild to form The Night Sweats, a powerhouse collision of rock, soul and funk, reminiscent of the music Rateliff grew up on back in Hermann.

Their lead single, “S.O.B.,” has already amassed almost 17 million views on YouTube, along with a cool 23 million streams on Spotify. It’s also landed them on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon— where Fallon joined the band on the tune—and has been put in front of numerous other audiences, thanks to live covers by Zac Brown Band, which Rateliff calls “a trip.” Fittingly, Rateliff keeps his roots close, as he and the band normally pair “S.O.B.” with The Band’s “The Shape I’m In.”

As most artists are with their hit, Rateliff downplays the song’s success, saying it “wasn’t my favorite song on the record,” and mentioning that it was actually the last track they cut. “I had no idea it was going to connect with so many people. If someone informed me of that, I would have done it 20 years ago,” he jokes.

While the bandleader makes that comment with a chuckle, it is a sign of the times for Rateliff, 37, who has done the band thing, then the solo thing and is now settling back into the band dynamic. He’s changed labels, played shows where he couldn’t give away tickets, headlined CMJ, appeared at Coachella and is firmly set on an upward trajectory. That success, and the knowledge of its fragility, keeps Rateliff extraordinarily humble.

“I don’t really have the time to soak it in. The only thing I’ve really done is bought some different guitars. It’s been a blast,” he says. But he also admits, “It feels like I’ve been working on this for years and, really, it’s just become more intense. That’s the difference for me.”

The Night Sweats are on the frontline of the current soul revival alongside St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and Leon Bridges, whom Rateliff toured with at the beginning of the year. “I’ve always noticed that you go into a bar, and somebody’s playing something loud and obnoxious and everybody seems kind of uncomfortable. Then you get the bartender to put on Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, and everybody starts to sing along, everybody taps their feet,” explains Rateliff, who says he is already working on a new batch of songs and will prep some new ones for his live show during a break in May. “There is that younger generation that’s coming up now that doesn’t know what rock-and-roll is and didn’t grow up with it. They didn’t live in the ‘60s and ‘70s to really get the beauty of the birth of that style of music.”

Ultimately, Rateliff hopes that his music will encourage millennials to drop a Sam Cooke record on their turntables. “I want them to go back and check it out and look at the catalogs that artists did and see how many great records people used to put out just from having one song.”