Australian Nathan Seeckts, from Geelong on the southern coast near Melbourne, first came to my notice with his wonderful 2023 album, Something Rare And Beautiful. It is passionate, big-hearted alt-country crammed full of great tunes and memorable, stirring words. It was my favourite album of that year, and one I still very much enjoy listening to.
He started with two EPs, Oceans of Women and Wine (2013) and A Man Possessed (2016). In both, it is very much him playing his acoustic guitar and singing with a voice that seems to have been hewn out of granite. The music is leavened on different tracks with piano, harmonica, fiddle, banjo, or female backing vocals. It is not dissimilar to people like John Moreland and Otis Gibbs. Fine company to be compared with.
Although his music has developed over time, his lyrical style can be seen from the very start. Oceans of Women and Wine opens with Summer Dresses, a recall of a passionate love affair, and there is a nostalgic thread throughout his work. The next track, Shelby, showcases his storytelling, often of darkly tragic tales, but done with great humanity. This is very reminiscent of Patterson Hood, and there can hardly be greater praise than that. Here, he tells of a girl whose cold father did not love her, and she eventually ends her life.
The next two tracks show his talent for painting vivid pictures with a nice turn of phrase. Sing For Your Supper is set in a bar, as are a number of his songs. Here he is playing and “There’s some game on the TV and the publican swore/ That if I looked at his daughter I won’t play here no more”. He also spots a woman in the audience: “There’s a girl by the stairs with red raw eyes/ Searching for god in each drink”. Then The Heads is another great story of a woman bearing a child, where the father is away at sea: “Will he be like his father, a slave to the boats/ With brine in his veins and a hatred of land”.
A Man Possessed starts with another engaging tale of meeting his troubled first love again on a night out: “I was halfway drunk and singing songs on Brunswick Street/ You were all dolled up, didn’t have time to stay/ Just a quick hello and something about your wedding day”. The title track, with a dobro to give it a bluesy feel, has more tragedy when the singer could not save a friend in an accident and lives with the guilt: “No one could meet my eye/ Your father was pale and your mum just cried”. Ghost In The Fog has a man on the run from the law, and Holding On has a woman moving with her children to build a new life away from her difficulties in a “shitty new town”.
Seeckts goes more electric on his excellent crowdfunded first album, The Heart of the City (2019), and this works very well in giving the music more variety. The choruses and melodies here are somehow more memorable than on the first two EPs, although the themes of the songs are similar. Old Blood is about a washed-up singer, and in Beast Beneath The Bed, the singer has demons: “And there’s a hole within my chest and nothing can fill it”. Then, Sirens and Moonlight Creek deal with tragedy for two women. In the first, the woman has retaliated for the domestic abuse she has suffered, while in the latter, a girl has been murdered by a stranger: “she was stripped of all her grace”. Elsewhere, the words again tell of relationships with troubled women- a drug addict in the gently swinging I’m Your Queen, a drinker in the bluesy Whiskey Drunk. And love is not going well either, in the rocker, Thunder and Rain. Three Soldiers is another slice of wistful nostalgia, this time for the strong friendships he had in his early teens, which he has never quite found again.
The songs on Something Rare And Beautiful started as acoustic tracks but were brought to life in collaboration with bandmates in the studio. Whereas the first two EPs feel like solo records, this is very much a band record. Lead and rhythm electric guitars, keyboard, and particularly pedal steel really lift and enhance the songs. The album has great vigour and absolutely pulses with life. The Wildest Thing, about a woman he met for one night only, and The King Of The Room, where he is livid at someone talking at a gig, are glorious, full-throated songs. But my personal favourite is Little Church, a fabulous Drive-By Truckers-like tale from the bride’s perspective of a wedding gone badly wrong: “You hear your mum crying ‘cause the groom’s drunk”. But perhaps it’s not all bad, “Thinking to yourself I’ll be telling this story ‘til I’m 98/ If I can make it through today”.
However, there are quieter, more reflective moments, such as in the poignant No Ifs, No Doubts, No Maybes where an old man is grateful for the long-term love of his “old lady”. On the very moving I Watched You Slip Away From Me, there is the death of a loved one, “I think I cried enough to fill the sea”. The End Of The Rope urges someone to stay positive through hard times. And there is, of course, more childhood nostalgia about riding in his father’s car on Cassette In The Tapedeck.
You get the feeling that the troubadour life has not always been easy for him. On the earlier Housebound, he sings: “I’ve spent so many nights singing to strangers/ Wonderin’ if they care for what I do”, although he is later heartened by a fan who tells of his words saving his life. It may be a bit much to expect him to come over to the UK to play here, but you hope that he will continue to play live and, particularly, to write and record more great music.
