Country music’s newest resident closeted artist Nate Green released his debut EP ‘Road Map’ this week, off the back of single ‘Wild and Free’ and plenty of marketing to teenage girls as a bonafide heart-throb. In case you didn’t hear, it was discovered a few months ago that Nate was actually Josey Greenwell, an openly gay artist who in 2011 did a number of interviews and provocative photoshoots complaining about how difficult it was to break in Nashville while publicly homosexual. Fast forward to 2015, and his team are denying these claims while continuing to promote an almost effeminate heterosexuality, aimed exclusively at young women and girls interested in the pop side of country. In essence, Nate – or Josey – went back in the closet in order to facilitate success. Not something that I, or any of the LGBT community, take lightly.
It is from this angle that I approach listening to his new EP, a seven-track collection of upbeat, extremely mainstream-sounding youthful love songs. What quickly becomes apparent from this record is that it’s a complicated mix of super pop, R&B/EDM and oddly twangy, rootsy country sounds. The former tends to prevail, holding extra possession through the melody construction, lyrical content and general song structure (‘Line of Fire’ in particular is entirely club-orientated, complete with dubstep beat, heavy synths, auto-tune and rapping), but it should be noted that the latter does make an appearance, however small. On ‘Back Road’ a rural fiddle joins a pretty mandolin melody while an electronic beat and production drive things forward, taking the Sam Hunt effect to its fullest extreme. On ‘Ride’, the kind of arena rock that is oft present in modern country makes an appearance, against a pop hook and R&B phrasing/polish, leaning closer to the kind of “loose” definition pop-country currently holds.
For the most part Nate plays with convention and the “boundaries” of commercial country music on this EP, switching and pulling together styles multiple times on the same song. It’s true I’ve not heard anything quite as dynamically chopping and changing between vastly different genres as this, but I’m also not convinced it’s a good thing. Sure, it takes talent to merge all your influences, but this comes across as more a lack of knowing where to go stylistically. It’s quite jarring to hear so many convoluted sounds all in one, on top of each other, settled adjacent to each other, and generally getting all up in each others’ business. It’s bizarrely confusing when a song like ‘Wild & Free’ has taken quite obviously and directly from pop, country, R&B, EDM and then drops into hip hop without warning. There’s not really any care taken when it comes to this merge; all it is is a cacophony of styles that don’t mesh. I mean, ‘Love Again’ starts with a very rootsy, front porch-esque Irish folk arrangement, along with a melody that can’t seem to decide whether it’s also headed folk or extremely pop, after dubstep has reigned in a very blatant way on the previous material. That doesn’t make sense for anyone.
But by far the most interesting track on this EP is ‘No Fool’, if only for the lyrics. Set apart from the other love and heartbreak material, it directly tackles the intense desire from himself and from others to be famous, beginning with the line, “We all wanna be famous, we all wanna be known, who wouldn’t mind their name in lights, be recognized everywhere you go?” As the pre-chorus comes in, we hear “Well oooh, that’s what you want, what you gonna trade for it? The road up to the top is paved with good intent”, and when the chorus kicks in we’re faced with, “So what would you do for fortune and fame? Would you give your soul? Would you change your name? When it comes around, well let me tell you, you can bet your mama didn’t raise no fool.”
Unless I’m very much mistaken, it seems Nate is directly tackling the discoveries, the rumors, and the industry fallbacks that he has experienced in his life. It could hardly be more in-your-face than “Would you give your soul? Would you change your name?” when considering what we know about him. Slightly unnervingly he seems to embrace the trappings and lure of fame even while knowing how corrupt and false it is, singing, “Name that price and sign here twice, there’s a limo outside for you and me.” Is this Nate admitting that he went back in the closet in order to become a big star? It’s not normal for country artists to outright lust after fame and fortune, and it feels a little odd in this respect. What seems apparent here is that Nate wants to be famous above all else – musical appreciation aside – and just wants to be a celebrity at the cost of everything in his life. His privacy, his truth, maybe even his sanity. Fame can strip you of all your morals and your hold on a sense of things, and in this song in particular he comes across purely driven to be at the top of the world, no matter how or why he gets there. That, in itself, is a scary admission. We know those people are out there, but we don’t expect them to be in our genre.
Why Nate chose country music, then, I have no idea. His music is barely country even by today’s stretch, and it is likely that he’d be able to stay out of the closet by working in the pop sphere. It’s certainly not something that country radio will pick up in any great numbers, and after a brief listen through the EP it’s not something that I ever want to trouble my ears with again. My advice Nate? Go back to being Josey, you’ll be a whole lot happier and likely make some much better music that way. There ain’t no forcing it in this town.
