At some point, all of this moves beyond ourselves” – he gestured toward the back of the house, where the rest of the Night Sweats were hanging out. “My job is to be totally honest,” he went on, “to be open and available to the people we perform for. “I feel like I have a different responsibility than I had three years ago – to my craft, the people around me and now an audience. “The last three years have changed me so much,” Rateliff, 39, said, nursing a can of beer and reflecting on his mid-life ride to success – a gold debut album, worldwide tours, an improbable hit single in the jubilant “S.O.B.” – after he and the Night Sweats introduced that song, actually about alcoholic desperation, to late-night America on The Tonight Show in August 2015. Even after singing for an hour, when it was time for a break, Rateliff adjourned to Pope’s front porch to answer more questions. The next day, Rateliff and the Night Sweats – Pope, drummer Patrick Meese, guitarist Luke Mossman, keyboard player Mark Shusterman, trumpeter Scott Frock and saxophonist Andreas Wild – were rehearsing in that shed, minus one member (saxophonist Jeff Dazey missed a flight from Texas), for some promotional gigs the following week in advance of the band’s second studio album, Tearing at the Seams. Later, there was a visit to Pope’s home nearby, where the bassist had rounded up some friends to staple soundproofing on the walls of a shed next to the house. Then Rateliff – who emigrated from the small town of Hermann, Missouri, with his best friend, Night Sweats bassist Joseph Pope III, two decades ago – stopped in at the Hi-Dive, a bar just up the street where he and Pope played with their first band in town and launched the Night Sweats in 2013. There was one conversation on the first night over a plate of honey-stung chicken at the Hornet, a restaurant on Broadway in Denver’s Baker district, Rateliff’s neighborhood for many years.
The singer, songwriter and leader of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats sat for a few of them – over drinks, at dinner, between band rehearsals and even while waiting at traffic lights as he drove around his adopted hometown of Denver, Colorado, noting points of interest in the city and his musical life there, across two days in February. For his first feature story in Rolling Stone, Nathaniel Rateliff did not just sit down for an interview.
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