Nat Myers

Nat Myers sings, plays guitar, and writes songs that blend the sounds of early acoustic blues and folk traditions while confronting contemporary questions of race and society. The Korean-American musician, now settled in Kentucky, first encountered the blues while immersed in poetry; he regards the pioneering figures from the 1920s and 1930s as modern counterparts to ancient epic narrators and channels that lineage into stories of ordinary existence alongside the bigotry directed at Asian communities. Two albums he captured at home drew the ear of Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys, who placed Myers on the Easy Eye Sound roster and oversaw the making of 2023’s Yellow Peril, a candid, soul-steeped portrait of his work.

Born in Kansas, Myers spent his early years on the move after his family relocated first to West Tennessee and later to Northern Kentucky. A trumpet supplied by his parents marked his initial brush with music, yet dissatisfaction with the school band prompted him to smash the instrument. During adolescence his listening favored hardcore and punk; eventually his mother supplied a low-cost guitar that he mastered on his own. High-school exposure to poetry and classic literature—Homer and Shakespeare foremost—deepened when he explored his father’s archive of vintage blues discs and recognized parallels between the sweeping narratives of those poets and the gritty vignettes delivered by the genre’s originators. He absorbed the rural blues idiom through self-instruction, and in 2017 an acquaintance loaned him a vintage Presto disc-cutting lathe, allowing him to cut tracks with the same mechanical means employed by his forebears.

Myers moved to New York City to pursue poetry studies at the New School, converting his verse into songs during off hours. While juggling miscellaneous jobs to cover expenses, he turned to busking on sidewalks and subway platforms in hopes of extra income; earning twenty dollars on his first outing convinced him that live performance offered a sustainable path. The COVID-19 pandemic halted New York’s street-music circuit in 2020, so he returned to Kentucky, persisted with songwriting, and posted videos of solo guitar-and-vocal performances on social platforms. Growing notice led to the digital release of the six-song EP Field Recordings in 2020—drawn from the Presto lathe sessions—followed in 2021 by the seven-song Hobo Wine & Remedy Blues, which showcased only his voice, guitar, and percussive foot. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys reached out, hosted Myers in Nashville for joint playing, and introduced him to songwriters Pat McLaughlin and Alvin Youngblood Hart, both of whom later contributed to new pieces. Auerbach signed Myers to Easy Eye Sound, and Yellow Peril was tracked in a temporary home studio at Auerbach’s residence to preserve the unadorned character of earlier recordings. Its ten tracks encompassed the classic motifs of “Ramble No More” and “Misbehavin’ Mama” as well as the title cut’s indictment of racism.