Nathaniel Rateliff's' 'Breakout Success' Was 20 Years In The Making

"Yeah, I was hoping to have a more gradual build," Denver-based singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff suggests of his sudden "breakout" success courtesy a performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon of the first single, S.O.B., off the self-titled debut album with his band The Night Sweats. "So I took the last 20 years of my life." Of course, he can't stop himself laughing.

"It's exciting to have all of this happening but at the same time kind of strange because it's like, 'But we've been here this whole time!' We think we've been making good music for a long time — it's just people didn't like what we were doin', so... I might have just been confused with Daniel Radcliffe too," he chuckles again.

"I grew up playin' in church, but it was a Missouri church — it wasn't like a Southern, black gospel church."

While the apprenticeship might have been years in the making, it's only in the past couple of years that Rateliff has turned to the soul/gospel music that's put him on the map.

"I grew up playin' in church," he explains, "but it was a Missouri church — it wasn't like a Southern, black gospel church. I think the love of that really came out of listening to Sam Cooke and Sam & Dave and Otis Redding. My dad was a real lover of vocal harmonies and kind of instilled it in me — Everly Brothers to Sam & Dave, even Crosby, Stills & Nash — and I got really hooked on the way the Stax and even the Motown singers would sing together."

Even so, his initial musical forays took on very different directions, as evidenced in Rateliff's two previous albums, 2007's Desire And Dissolving Men, with The Wheel, and 2010's solo, In Memory Of Loss.

"I was in a rock band for seven or eight years and we went through multiple stylistic changes, from The Band and Allman Brothers to Spoon and Radiohead. And then, I've always been a huge Leonard Cohen fan and I started writing songs similar to that. But I'd wanted to do soul for a long time; it just took a while to figure out how to not make it cheesy.

"The first song I wrote [for this record] was Trying So Hard Not To Know, and once I wrote it I was, like, 'I did it! A mixture of soul and a little honkytonk and a bit of The Band.' And later that night I came up with the idea for Look It Here and then recorded it the next day, and I just kept runnin' with it after that."

Thanks to that Jimmy Fallon performance, the album debuted at #4 on the iTunes album chart and S.O.B. became #1 most viral track in the US.

"We were pretty excited to be on the show in the first place. We understood our position that we didn't have much reason to be there in the first place — only that Jimmy liked the song and wanted to have us on. I'll have to say, in favour of my ignorance, when he was really pumpin' the record, I was, like, 'Is this a good thing? I don't know what's going on.' I was excited about the record prior to that and now it's nice to have that platform to launch it."