Nate Wood might be the ultimate “drummer’s drummer” of the current age.
Speak to practically any drummer who cut their teeth in the 20-teens, no matter what their genre, and it’s a fair bet you’ll find a Nate Wood fan.
Many innovators end up sounding “mainstream” by virtue of everybody imitating them, but if you can your mind back to 2006, those of us listening to illegal Kneebody bootlegs smuggled at great personal peril on VHS tapes, were like “whaaaaaat’s up with this drummer.”
The sound. The textures. The risks. The aggression. The whimsy.
Fast forward, and now a there are a lot of imitators.
I first sat down with Nate in 2016, and we only had 20 minutes for that convo, so I was excited to “run it back” - this time for a much longer and wider-ranging conversation.
Nate talks about:
How fatherhood affects creativity
How he prioritizes his time in his life, and in the shed
When he realized Kneebody was becoming “a thing”
Whether the internet is a net positive or net negative for drummers today
What I’ve been calling “radical creativity”, an approach of complete trust of your musical instincts in the moment
…and more…
He also critiques my performance of a Kneebody song called Greenblatt, from their record The Line.
If you haven’t seen the video about that process, it’s below.