In May 2008, Nathan Klages packed all of his belongings in his car and embarked on a tour that took him from Nashville, Tennessee—where he had just graduated from Belmont College—down through Florida and back up the east coast.
The tour ended later that summer in Klages’ hometown of Ann Arbor with a performance at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. His plan was to go back to Nashville a few days after the show, but following the performance his car broke down, leaving him stranded at home.
Whether it was fate or just a coincidence, Klages ended up staying in Michigan where he found himself reconnecting with himself and his music in a way he hadn’t expected.
“I had always felt like I wanted an excuse to stay in Michigan, but I couldn’t exactly justify it because I had a lot of opportunities in Nashville that seemed silly to pass up at the time,” said Klages, who performs under the name Nathan K.
“When I was in Nashville I put a lot of pressure on myself to write everyday, but I spent a lot of time frustrated that I felt like I didn’t have anything worthwhile to write about,” he said.
“Every time I came back to Michigan, I would write three or four songs that I just loved. The majority of the songs that I wrote during college I wrote in Michigan.”
Returning home and eventually moving to Ypsilanti proved to be the jump-start to Klages’ music career that he had hoped to find when he moved to Nashville.
Much like the circumstances that led him back to Michigan, the path to recording his new album wasn’t as easy or direct as Klages might have hoped. But in the end, everything that happened during the recording of his debut album “Newspaper & Prayers,” which is set to be released in late March, added something unique to the album.
Even before coming back to Michigan, Klages knew he wanted to record with Jim Roll, owner of Backseat Productions in Ann Arbor. Roll has been involved in the local music industry for several decades, playing in a number of bands, recording as a solo artist and most recently producing albums and acting as the unofficial mentor of the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti music scene.
“The whole time I was in Nashville [Jim Roll] was recording all of my favorite albums, like Chris Bathgate and Frontier Ruckus,” Klages said. “And it was funny because I had moved really far from home to pursue music, and meanwhile, these records were being recorded in the town I grew up in.”
Klages’ first show after settling down in Ypsilanti was with Chris Bathgate at The Elbow Room. During a performance that didn’t go nearly as well as he hoped, he looked out in the crowd and saw Roll shooting pool during his set.
“I thought I had kind of ruined my chances of ever working with him,” Klages said.
“But as soon as I walked off stage he was standing right there and he said, ‘Hey, I’m Jim Roll. It’s so great to finally meet you.’ He said he really liked my stuff and would love to do something. And then we met up a few days later and I showed him some demos I had made while in Nashville, and he said he really believed in my vision for what I wanted to do.”
The album was recorded over three sessions in January and November of 2009. After two sessions in January, Klages ran out of money and Roll became unavailable due to other recording commitments. Instead of accepting a defeat, Klages began playing as many shows as he could throughout the area. Ten months later—and after a near-disaster involving the hard drive containing all of the original recordings from the final session—Klages and Roll mixed and mastered the final album.
“Newspapers & Prayers” earns a spot next to some of the most earnest and heartfelt modern folk records in recent memory, including The Mountain Goats’ “The Sunset Tree,” Iron & Wine’s “Our Endless Numbered Days” and Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago.”
While that might sound like awfully high praise for the debut album of a 23-year-old from Ypsilanti, Klages has a lot more in common with John Darnielle, Sam Beam and Justin Vernon than just a genre.
Like those three musicians, Klages has an aptitude for presenting the world in a way that is both very real and also filtered through the imagination of someone who has learned to take both the good and the bad with stride.
He also shares that same cold-on-the-outside, warm-on-the-inside quality which results in many of the songs on “Newspapers & Prayers” initially coming off as somewhat pessimistic. But they slowly reveal themselves to be more complex than just another sad song over repeat listenings.
On the title track, for example, Klages sings, “How many times I’ve thrown a penny in a wishing well/ Then turned around to see a homeless man and turn him down/ Yeah, more than you think/ And more than I tell you.”
It’s a brutally honest verse similar to the kind John Darnielle writes in almost every Mountain Goats song. And while this situation might seem inconsequential to most people, the lesson that comes from even a small occurrence like the one Klages describes in this song can be life-changing. After all, we’re not perfect and embracing that fact can only make us better. Moments of self-doubt, regret and even disappointment at your own actions don’t have to be negative—they can be just as uplifting as the good moments, and Klages really understands the importance of coming to that realization.
And even when the lyrics are poignant and deeply reflective, the music itself still retains a joyous quality, mostly because of his voice, which has a warm, familiar sound—like listening to an old friend impart words of wisdom over the phone. Though these words of wisdom aren’t all sunshine and rainbows, they still resonate because they are genuine.
To Klages the shift from writing happy songs to writing something a bit more true to the way the world really is has been a gradual one over the last several years of his life.
“Everything at one point was pretty super up-beat pop songs, as far as high school went,” Klages said. “I’ve always had somewhat of a darker set of songs that I just never felt comfortable with, at least performing.”
“I got really depressed in Nashville trying to write a happy song because I was constantly faced with the fact that that wasn’t the way I felt,” he said.
“I feel like I’m not ignoring anything [now]. To write a happy song you kind of have to ignore a lot of sad things, as opposed to just writing something neutral. To write a sad song you have to ignore the happy, and to write a happy song you have to ignore the sad. I feel like I try to take a very neutral approach and recognize both sides.”
“Newspapers & Prayers” is a wonderfully solid collection of folk songs that dig deep, yet have a warm, breezy sound that makes them easy to listen to over and over.
