The story
True stories, out of the notebook.
Nathanael Joseph writes true stories from blue-collar America — faith, family, and the people who built him. Ten of them became a record.
The people in these songs are neighbours, in-laws, brothers by choice. Most of them live within a tank of gas. Two of them are named; the rest go by the song. That is on purpose — the stories are true, but nobody signed up to be famous.
The Voice
Every story on this record is true. The people are real. I've sat at their tables, stood at their gravesides, gone under the water with some of them.
What I don't have is a recording voice, a band, or a studio. What I have is a day job, a family, and a stack of stories that deserved better than staying in a notebook.
So I did what songwriters have always done: I handed my songs to a voice that could carry them.
For a hundred years, that voice belonged to whoever the publisher could book. The men and women who wrote half the songs you love never sang a note of them. Mine happens to be rendered by a machine — a session band I could actually afford — and I'll tell you that plainly, every time, on every platform, because the one thing this record cannot survive is a lie. It's an album about the opposite of that.
The machine didn't live these stories. It didn't watch a bloom open every morning for twenty-five years, or lose a brother, or sit in a gas station parking lot making the same promise again. It doesn't know what any of it cost.
I do. That's my job on this record. The voice is just the truck that carries it to you.
All stories true. That part was never artificial.