PHOTO CREDIT – Tyler Zweip
RELEASES NEW SINGLE
‘PRAY FOR RAIN’
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
MYERS TEAMS WITH THE RECORDING ACADEMY TO HONOUR JOHN PRINE WITH COVER OF
‘I REMEMBER EVERYTHING’
FOR GRAMMYS' REIMAGINED SERIES
WATCH HERE
KOREAN AMERICAN BLUES POET’S DEBUT ALBUM
YELLOW PERIL
PRODUCED BY DAN AUERBACH - OUT JUNE 23 VIA EASY EYE SOUND
“Steeped in history, in epic poetry and old blues 78s, the album captures its creator’s idiosyncrasies as well as the country’s contradictions and his Korean American heritage.”
Holler
Sharing his hope for a brighter future ahead, Nat Myers has released the new single ‘Pray For Rain’, which is taken from his forthcoming debut album Yellow Peril (out June 23 via Easy Eye Sound).
The track premiered with Holler who said “It’s a song you’ll want to blast from your speakers as soon as you wake up. A song you’ll be whistling in the sunshine on your way in to work and whistling still on the way back home. It’s the kind of song that puts a great big smile on your face and a spring in your step no matter what life might be throwing at you.”
While musically channeling "the great Delta bluesmen" (WNYC), Myers' ‘Pray For Rain’ doubles as a breezy ode to tranquility, stability and peace – dreaming of a world where tending to his garden might be among life's major concerns.
Myers says of the song, “I was humming this melody for this song a while, something you can whistle", Myers shares. "I'd been experiencing a lot of yearning and was thinking of how circumstances can turn your love into an island if you ain't careful. I brought that melody to the felluhs and we spent a morning grinning on it, and there's a bit of all three of us round that writing table, Pat, Dan and myself. They was also kind enough to cut the song that hot day in 2022. Leroy Troy from the Tennessee Mafia Jug Band does some of his magic on the cut, too.”
On Yellow Peril, the blues poet is using his voice to fearlessly confront the injustice, otherness and dark wave of Asian hate that accompanied the global pandemic. Like much of the new album, ‘Pray For Rain’ was co-written with Dan Auerbach and Pat McLaughlin – a hero of Myers for his work with John Prine – and recorded by all three musicians inside of Auerbach's own Nashville home.
Listen to ‘Pray For Rain’ and watch the official video directed by Andy Hawkes here.
Speaking of Prine and McLaughlin, Myers also teamed with The Recording Academy this week to pay tribute to the duo as part of the GRAMMYs' Reimagined live covers series. Watch Myers deliver his touching take on Prine's posthumous ‘I Remember Everything’ here.
‘Pray For Rain’ offers the latest look at Myers' debut album Yellow Peril, a collection which finds him carrying on the traditions of the blues while simultaneously shattering every stereotype that comes with them.
A Korean American poet raised on hardcore and hip-hop, Myers came to the hundred-year-old sounds of artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton while discovering "that the real epics were being told by these itinerant musicians from the ’30s and ’40s, even before recorded sound."
With the ultimate goal to "raise my folks up" as Myers puts it, Yellow Peril finds the Kentucky musician pulling from a wide range of historical threads while remaining thoroughly modern – using fleet riffs, complex rhythms, and quick tempos to tell tales full of intelligence, soul, contradiction and nuance.
Yellow Peril is out June 23 via Easy Eye Sound and you can pre-order the album here.
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