Nathaniel Bellows Delivers 'The Moat' EP
Folk singer-songwriter Nathaniel Bellows has released his new EP The Moat. A one-of-a-kind, six-song collection of raw authenticity that traverses a variety of musical landscapes with emotional intimacy and stark, poetic storytelling, The Moat explores how the things we put in place to protect us can also cut us off from the rest of the world. The songs tackle what it means to be human with honesty, grace, and grit.
Diving into paradoxical themes of armor and vulnerability, hiding and exposure, insularity and outreach, The Moat was produced by Bellows alongside Michael Hammond. The project explores the contradiction of its namesake as either a fortification of self-protection or a defensive structure necessitated by fear of the outside world. To explore these themes, the songs wind between rollicking, upbeat swings and jazz-inflected inner-searching - all with the goal of deepening our knowledge of who we are in the world.
"In the wake of the pandemic's worst years, I've been thinking a lot about autonomy and self-preservation in contrast to notions of vulnerability, openness, and human connection," shares Bellows on the inspiration for the EP. "Although I write fiction and poetry, these shifting, shadowed themes felt best explored in music, with its innate ability to viscerally register within the body without necessarily being determined - or dictated - by language. Over the course of writing this EP, the six songs of The Moat became a ring of safety and retreat - a recurring visual symbol I used in creating the album's lyric videos - within which I could plumb the depths of this complicated, emotional terrain."
In tandem with the release, Bellows has also shared his soul-baring new single, "True," a textured, poignant ballad that evokes - and ultimately reconciles - aspects of ourselves that represent our "truth" as a map to finding our authentic selves.
The collection includes recent track "That Too," a grounded, acoustic excavation that redefines what "love" is while delving into its ever-changing, unpredictable nature, as well as lead single and self-described introverts' anthem "Works For Me" which recasts loneliness as an empowered state of hard-won self-knowledge. "It's a song for anyone who has come to define-through experience and introspection-the conditions for a safe, sane, functional existence," shares Bellows.
The Moat also welcomes new tracks including "Night in Day," a ballad of manipulation that explores toxic dynamics that can leave you without agency; "Your Fault" which challenges the notion of blame and its place in the process of healing; and "Proof" which closes out the project by asking how we prove our sense of worth in isolation - without external validation - while extolling the value of art-making regardless of audience. Check out the EP here
[an error occurred while processing this directive]