More about Nathan Bell below the song player.
Here's the album details:
ALBUM: LOVE>FEAR (48 hours in traitorland)
RELEASE: June 30 via Stone Barn Records
PRE-ORDER: www.----------
“One of those increasingly rare finds: an unpretentious, unified set of literate and witty songs, impeccably performed." - Rolling Stone
"Nathan Bell may be the Woody Guthrie we need in the age of globalization." - The Bitter Southerner
Bell has created a song cycle that is both moving and timely." - Paste
“A gifted and thought-provoking songwriter." - No Depression
"His mellow, world-weary folk music chronicles the endless grind of all shades of the working person in America, from mine workers to middle managers." - PopMatters
“A crisp, literary quality, a tough blue-collar sensibility and a terse, muscular musicality." - Nashville Scene
"With his crisp, handcrafted playing and intimate, incisive lyrics, Bell documents an America teetering on the edge." - Acoustic Guitar Magazine
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Nathan Bell - LOVE > FEAR (48 Hours in Traitorland)
Nathan Bell is a songwriter’s songwriter—at 57, the troubadour’s
weary voice bleeds experience. He made his bones sharing bills with
legends like Townes Van Zandt, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal and Norman
Blake. The son of a poet and professor, the Iowa-born/Chatt
“Right before we did the deed and elected an oligarch, PT Barnum-style scam artist, I started thinking it was time to collect some of thepolitical songs I’d written over the years, and combine them with some of the new ones I’d been working on," Bell says. "I’ve always been resistant to slogans and catchphrases, so Traitorland is more an album of pointed stories about people affected by the callousness of thewealthy and the power brokers. Nowadays, they’re so disconnected from the working
class—they’re even more cruel than Carnegie was. Paul Ryan—I don’t know
how he sleeps at night. I don’t know how a man like Steve Bannon is
allowed to spend a day near whoever’s in power. My family’s half
Jewish, and I look at Bannon and think, ‘Great, we’re either gonna have
to run or fight again.’ So the album comes from that.”
Bell is no Johnny-come-lately at speaking truth to power. Back in the ’70s, his first gig as a teenager was a rally against the Vietnam War. “I’ve been doing this—and, trust me, it’s not the most profitable way to navigate the music industry—for a long, long time,” Bell says. “I’d take more credit for it, morally, except I don’t think I could’ve done it any other way.
I never set out to be a songwriter—I wanted to be a journalist, I
wanted to be Steinbeck or Hemingway. But I can’t write prose the way I
can write songs. Now, Hemingway—as famous, wealthy and full of shit as
he sometimes was—when he saw there was something to say about the Spanish
Civil War, he said it. And he didn’t do it by getting on a soapbox and
writing some heavy-handed political poem—he did it by telling stories
about people.”
Turns out Bell and his literary heroes are pretty damn simpatico. On Love>Fear, his
characters are portrayed with such painstaking detail and emotional
depth, you wouldn’t flinch if they walked straight out of your stereo
speakers, sat down on the couch and asked you for a cup of coffee. There’s a tattooed failure with nowhere to turn. A broken widower in the midst of a crisis of faith. A first-time mobile-home owner staring down a
foreclosure. A beautiful woman struggling to be appreciated for her
talent, intelligence and hard work. An obese veterinarian in love with a
skinny, secretly transgender patent-attorney rodeo clown. The impoverished
sick committing armed robbery to pay for healthcare. An active-duty
soldier turned conscientious objector who opts for the stockade over the battlefield. A middled-aged man caught in the for-profit
prison system, his best years slipping through his fingers. These songs
are stories about real Americans—there is no black & white, no
oversimplification, no us-vs.-them Left/Right posturing, just beautiful,
inclusive, somehow vibrant shades of grey.
“There are people all around us who believe differently than we do,” Bell says. “Good people. And in the basics of their daily life, the political sign in their yard is no reflection on who they are to their neighbors. Over the last few years, we’ve forgotten this, and a certain level of humanity has disappeared. To me, the whole
point of liberal politics is, we let people in even if they’ve made a
mistake. I was out walking my dogs a few weeks ago, and I ran into one
of my neighbors down the street,
and she says, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump, and I'm scared shitless. Did you
vote for Trump?’ Now that's a golden opportunity. I said, ‘No, I didn't
vote for him. He scares the hell
out of me, and he's got a Nazi working with him.’ So we stood there and
talked for awhile, and I find out she's a fiscal conservative, she's a
little bit socially conservative, but like a lot of people in the South, she's got six gay cousins she likes just fine. So we had a conversation, which is what we're supposed to do. Let the other side be exclusive, keep people out, and pretend everyone should be divided up into groups; at the end of the day, no matter how hard we fight, even if it means physical dissent, when the war is over, people are still people. It's how you avoid theHutus and the Tutsis
warring back and forth, chopping each other up with machetes. If
someone comes to you and says, 'Look, I shouldn't have voted for
assholes the last 12 years. How do we put our country back
together and make sure everybody's protected?' then you've got to
accept that. It's hard, but you've gotta look some assholes in the eye
and accept that maybe they've changed. I can't forgive a fucking Nazi, I
think—until I meet some guy who was a skinhead for 25 years, and
spends the rest of his life working in the AIDS ward trying to atone for it. There's always some reason for you to doubt your certainty.”
Love > Fear captures the stark, unadorned directness of Bell’s solo acoustic performances. Many of the tracks were recorded live-in-thestudio
in front of a small audience. There’s no doubling and almost no
overdubs—just a man with a harp around his neck and a guitar in his
weathered hands, singing and playing his heart out. At times, the sound is earthy and optimistic, a silver glimmer breaking through theclouds above an Appalachian peak; other times, it’s sparse, haunting and distant, a warning flare erupting across the dusk. But no matter the track, it’s unvarnished and immediate, the songs given room to shine in all their expertly constructed glory, shot through with the grace & grit of the finest American prose.
“I felt like this record was my chance to use what I’ve been doing for a long time,
what I feel most comfortable doing, and that’s telling stories,” Bell
says, “giving people a chance to use their knowledge of others to feel
hopeful. Sure, there’s some sad shit on there, but ultimately it’s a
hopeful record. My big goal in life is to make it so much better to love
people that, after a while, hating people seems like a lot of work. You
only need one commandment, right? If you love everybody, then all the other
commandments are unnecessary. I'm not a religious man at all. As a
matter of fact, I'm completely anti-religion. But if I could give
everybody just one commandment, it would be, love each other."
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