Nate Mercereau's new album "Excellent Traveler" is a solo guitar album unlike anything you've heard before. Mercereau is an explorer at heart, constantly recording and capturing sounds around him whether that be while he's out in nature, or rehearsing with other musicians live on tour, or in a studio session. On "Excellent Traveler" he takes some of these field recordings and manipulates them with his guitar, bending the sounds of nature, voice, and other instruments into something truly unique.
In the past Mercereau has worked with artists like Jay-Z, The Weeknd, and John Legend, but most recently he's known for his collaborations with Andre 3000. He helped create the now GRAMMY-nominated album "New Blue Sun" and has spent a lot of the year touring the record as part of Andre's band.
WUNC Music's Brian Burns caught up with Mercereau at DPAC before his performance with Andre 3000 to talk about "Excellent Traveler" and "New Blue Sun."
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
Can you tell us what inspired the title of this record?
It came about when I was actually traveling. I was coming home from a European tour with Carlos Niño and Surya Botofasina. We have a trio that just put out a record earlier this year called "Subtle Movements," and we were out there playing concerts for that. On the way home, I was just with Carlos, and we were kind of like navigating all these airports and I just had this feeling. I was like, I feel like an excellent traveler. I just feel like I'm doing this really well right now.
I feel like, with your music especially, song titles carry a lot of weight with the music. What's your process for giving titles to your music? Does the music come first or vise versa?
Definitely. It's a combo. Sometimes the song title shows up right in the moment of creation, where I'm like, "That's what that's called." Other times, I'll think of a title and I'm like, "I love that title. I know it's going to go somewhere." And so they kind of end up meeting each other when they need to.
You have a unique way of using samples and field recordings, especially on "Excellent Traveler." I'd love to hear about your process for collecting those and incorporating them into your music.
It's a process of paying attention to my surroundings in a way that allows me to hear things with the possible realities that they could become. Right now we're sitting outside of the Durham Performing Arts Center. There's really light traffic noise. There's the sound of this kid and his dad walking, and you can hear their shoes. If I had my phone or a recorder right here I would be recording this with the idea of, like, "I'm gonna do something that represents my time in Durham." I could have a sample of our voices. I could have a sample of the wind going through the microphone. That's like three instruments right there, you know. So that would create something that was like representative of this place. And then I could explore further with a guitar synthesizer sound, kind of bringing out the melodies that I hear or or just that I feel right now in my life.
Outside of your own music you've been playing with Andre 3000 for some time now, helping to create the record "New Blue Sun" and touring that record. Tell us a little bit about how it's been collaborating with Andre.
In short, it's awesome. Andre is a very creative, curious dude, and that kind of reverberates out into our process together. I think there's a reason we're all together, this particular group. We're all exploring, and that's kind of the glue that keeps us together. Everybody in the group is showing up with our whole lives to create a moment together and that creates a lot of freedom and support and love.
"Excellent Traveler" is out now on Third Man Records.
