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The thing about this record is there ’ s a whole lot of southern boy gone bad and got down and dirty . I ’ ve got Hammond B3 , banjo , R & B delta , there ’ s a little bit of everything on this record . It ’ s so pure . Give me the vibe in that studio .
NATE : You know , we just kind of designed the vibe while we were there , and created one . There were so many things flying . Like I said before , we pretty much wrote that record while in the studio . There were so many ideas just flying off the walls . We were just trying stuff , and experimenting , and trying to be scientists and stuff . It couldn ’ t help but to have been some genre mixing and it is very southern . There ’ s some Motown in there . There ’ s a little bit of metal in there . I think that ’ s what you get when you truly have more than one person controlling the flow of creativity . This was everyone throwing out their raw , basic ideas and trying to meld that into some sort of song . I was really going through a phase recently of some of that darker Motown stuff . But , especially on this record , most of that R & B vibe has to be established . For instance , even in “ Come Up ”, where it just keeps moving along and all I can do is just scream along .
Speaking of which , how ’ s the voice holding up ?
NATE : It ’ s good man . Once you get this deep in a tour , it ’ s all about survival . You are trying to perform . You perform every night , obviously , and you perform at the best of your ability . But you also know that you have to do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day .
I wanted to ask this question when we were on the bus , being someone who trained and sang for a while . But I really wanted to take that moment and ask you because it ’ s so personal . It is something that I am dealing with now . What was that moment like when you got that news of what you had to go through ?
NATE : I was on my way to the studio for the last record . I was just trying to figure out why I was having trouble singing on stuff that I normally wasn ’ t having any problems with . I needed an answer for it . There was a small part of me that was actually relieved that there was a reason . It wasn ’ t just the fact that I can ’ t sing anymore . There was a cause for it . It was , obviously , devastating . The first thing you hear when you have cancer is I ’ m going to die . This is it . But then you get through that initial shock and you start figuring out how to work around it or through it . And lucky enough , I was making that record so I wasn ’ t completely focused on the fact that I had cancer . I was focusing on wanting to change this part out here , and the logistics of making a record . I think that was important because I think sometimes we can manifest the severity of our sickness based on where our mind ’ s at .