Music critics love to call an artist prolific, particularly if the artist in question releases at least one album per year. But what do you call an artist who has over seventy releases on just one of his Bandcamp pages, racking up numbers that make even 2010s Will Toledo seem like Fiona Apple by comparison? Nate Amos is one such artist, and his solo project This Is Lorelei has spawned dozens of releases in a little over a decade—not even counting his work in art-pop duo Water From Your Eyes or the indie-folk-leaning My Idea. In 2024, Amos released what he considered, nominally, his debut album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star. It was a veritable breakthrough that also yielded a sibling LP of covers from people like Hayley Williams, Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman, Jeff Tweedy, and, the one Amos was most excited about, Tim Heidecker. Like his fellow Bandcamp brethren in Alex G, Mitski, and Car Seat Headrest, Amos has slowed his songwriting output to a slightly more deliberate pace befitting the typical two-to-three-year album promotion cycle. There was the remix album—plus Holo Boy, a 2025 compilation composed of re-recordings of Lorelei staples—but how would Amos’ next batch of original material follow up on the slowly accumulating buzz surrounding his first record? And what makes Box for Buddy a proper album compared to its pile of predecessors? “A lot of the album deals with approaching standardized songwriting elements, in terms of the classic singer-songwriter stuff and playing with that medium,” he told me around the time of its release. “And the idea of actually making it a 43-minute, 10-song album, to me, is the classic album format.” Its follow-up, The Singer in My Band, abides by a similar philosophy, upholding a songwriting tradition that emphasizes narrative and studied cohesion over the extemporaneity that colors earlier entries in Lorelei’s sprawling catalog. Characters such as Sarah, Genevieve, Joey, and the recurring Buddy serve as the album’s guideposts, inhabiting Amos’ lived-in songs as protagonists of their own short stories. More than any other This Is Lorelei release, The Singer in My Band traffics in the beatnik literary customs of authors like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, following one downtrodden character only to redirect your attention toward another, each with their own woeful tale that unfolds before your eyes. Across these eleven songs, Amos crafts vignettes that vacillate between fiction and non-fiction. His father, the bluegrass musician Bob Amos, plays banjo on the title track, and Nate embraces the folk and country music that informed his childhood. Atop a shuffling train beat, it turns into a total family affair; his sister, Sarah, joins on background vocals. “I asked if she would linger, be the singer in my band and she said / “Wish I could, love, I’d love to help / But, hell, I don’t belong to Texas, you’re gonna have to sing yourself,’” the siblings harmonize. It leads directly into the brief instrumental passage “Nitro,” a fingerstyle piece in an odd time signature that shows off Amos’ guitar prowess. He extrapolates and develops those guitar lines in the following track, “Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever.” “Sarah, will we be in pain forever / Will the future hurt, will the memories cry / While the days go by,” he wonders in its mournful outro, as rustic guitar chords and string flourishes underpin his anguish. It’s the twangiest stretch in Lorelei’s catalog, and its central positioning in the tracklist speaks to the album’s pastoral environs. The Singer in My Band is a record rooted in the Earth, ripe with warm folk songs that transport us across its vast countryside. It zooms in on the figures who call it home, connecting their travails like infinitesimal dots that gesture toward greater truths about longing, heartbreak, and community. There is no “Dancing in the Club” or “Perfect Hand” or “Mouth Man,” electro-pop songs that meet the midpoint between the Postal Service and Bruce Hornsby. They’ve all been supplanted with rock, folk, and country songs that take their most discernible cues from Gordon Lightfoot. There’s the country-fried hot rod “The Kid with the Crown”; the heartfelt, pared-down farewell of opening track “I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light”; the bluegrass ode to jilted lovers that is “And I Haven’t Seen My Love in Quite a While.” Singer, in some ways, is the most welcoming This Is Lorelei record release. The characters who populate Amos’ world may be down on their luck, but the music itself is as inviting as a small-town bar where the servers know your name and go-to order. Lead single “Billy Came Back” takes us to one such bar, where we encounter the titular Billy, a karaoke legend. He doesn’t need a screen to sing the lyrics, and he performs with such earnest conviction that his community swells around him, in awe of his vocals and stage presence. As Amos tells it, it’s as if “he’s singing from the bottom of a deep blue sea,” and he’s “got a voice that sings for you and me.” Amos’ song may focus on a fictional character, but, like the best works of fiction, it indicates an overarching realization and sheds light on our shared humanity. When the narrator hears Billy sing, this former stranger becomes a beloved local sensation that bonds folks together. Billy sings a lot of songs, and there’s probably at least one that will connect with you. Given a body of work as enormous as Amos’, there’s likewise plenty of music worth mining, even if you find just one song that resonates. Perhaps Billy and Amos aren’t so different from each other. Like the character he created, Nate Amos has a song for you and me. Maybe you’ll find it on The Singer in My Band. [Matador] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.