Nathan talks songwriting and other matters of life and death at Substack. 

Notes From the Road

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Robert Christgau- October Consumer Guide

Nathan Bell: Red, White and American Blues (It Couldn’t Happen Here) (Need to Know) This Chattanooga-based 61-year-old former AT&T middle exec and son of Iowa’s first poet laureate was as unknown to me as his dad until this instant keeper came in the mail. A bunch of albums boiled down to a 46-song Spotify playlist that includes such convincers as the Rust Belt “Stamping Metal,” the Fenway “Ballad of Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee,” and the gay marriage hymn “Really Truly” will hold your attention. But from an “Angola Prison” sung by a sufferer who’ll leave that hell on his back to “Folding Money”’s “Jesus don’t like your folding money or the way you use his name,” this album is better still. Between a talky drawl less than pretty and more than articulate, an acoustic guitar worthy of an ace rhythm section, and the likes of Patty Griffin and Regina McCrary sweetening here and there, the music has so much bite that calling it Americana would be a flat-out lie. One of Griffin’s features is narrated by a .44 Magnum. Lightnin’ Hopkins never plays a note “without the money in his hand.” A whole gruesome bunch of “poor,” “sorry,” “crazy,” “dumb,” “busy,” “lazy,” “angry,” and “useless” “motherfuckers” are “high on meth and Jesus” and “running on the razor like it didn’t have an edge.” Inspirational Verse: “We are taking our lives one day at a time/With bullets and useless poetry/Soon we will be burning together in red, white, and blue/Burn, baby, burn.” 
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Nathan Bell is not a protest singer, but rather, an attentive seismograph of social decline

Blues News (Germany), December 2021

These are songs of incredible texture and skill. Not least the dark blues of the aforementioned “Angola Prison” one of the albums most immediate tracks. Don’t make the mistake, though, of thinking this is Bell. It’s not. Nathan Bell, across this album, proves to be some kind of shapeshifter, a chameleon, and this is a maze of things.

 

Andy Thorley- Maximum Volume Music

Nathan Bell
Red, White and American Blues
(It Couldn’t Happen Here)
Need To Know Music
★★★★★

THESE are hard, unforgiving songs — political chronicles writ with deeply lacerating words that dissect the broken US of today — the odious betrayal of its people, poverty, racism, hopelessness and wanton murder.
Son of the late famed poet-laureate of Iowa, Marvin Bell, Nathan grew up in the company of such notable wordsmiths as Kurt Vonnegut and the inimitable Studs Terkel and it paid a rich radical dividend.
He sums up the system’s cynicism in the pounding and unnerving Wrong Man for the Job, exposes the racism and inhumanity of incarceration in Angola Prison, Louisiana, and pays tribute to Gil Scott Heron: “You can shoot a black man for just walking down the street when you have/the American Blues,” and offers respite with the melodic melancholy of A Lucky Man (dedicated to his father).
A monumental accomplishment.

Morning Star (UK)
Album reviews with Michal Boncza: December 13, 2021
 

Available Now!

Recorded in 2019 in Capitola, California at Skunkworks Studios, delayed two years by the Pandemic, yet still relevant in every way, "Red, White and American Blues (it couldn't happen here) drops on CD and Digital today, September 11, on  Needtoknow Music.

 

In 13 original songs, featuring guest appearances by Patty Griffin, Regina McCrary, and Aubrie Sellers, the album takes the listener on a journey, from the Dead Thumb Blues of South Texas, through Swamp Music, American Roots Rock, and West Coast Spoken Jazz Poetry to the Folk stages of London.

 

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