Workin’ man blues: Nathan Bell rediscovers his inner songwriter

This Nashville maverick walked away from the music biz at a time when his style of twangy alt-country could have ruled the world. Nearly two decades later he’s back with a new album of devastating import.

Nathan Bell didn’t mean to secede. He just didn’t see the point of dancing for Granny down on Music Row.  After a frustrating run in Nashville in the early ’90s, Bell packed it in, moved to the mountains, got a straight job and began raising a family. He put down his guitar and didn’t look back. He didn’t want to. He’d had enough.

Then one day, for no real reason, Bell picked up his guitar again and decided to write a few songs. Then he wrote some more. Then he did some house concerts and made a few home recordings. He never planned on releasing them to anybody but his circle of literary friends. He was just penning songs based on the works of some writers he liked – his dad, the poet Marvin Bell, Larry Brown, Sebastian Matthews, Glen Hirshberg.

The result of all this is Bell’s devastating new collection Black Crow Blue: An American Album, a song-cycle about how busted the American way of life is, how it lays waste to honorable men, leaving them desolate, lost, not clear what the next move will be. It’s a walk into the wilderness, for sure, and one that doesn’t come with a map to get back home.

Black Crow Blue plays like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but with more continuity and a recurring character – The Crow – who guides you across a wasteland of broken dreams and unfulfilled promises. Bell, who was raised in Iowa, calls The Crow “a trickster, ambivalent about not having a home.” He’s equal parts High Plains Drifter and Jack Kerouac tempered with kindness more than studied Buddhist nothingness.

In the album’s liner notes, novelist Hirshberg describes The Crow as “restless, unpredictable, self-destructive, tough, proud, mythic, staring at a world where there’s ‘nowhere left for the light to go’ – (he) certainly sounds deeply rooted in Sebastian Mathews’ literary creation. But he also sounds like a Nathan Bell character, fresh from a pitstop at the El Ranko on his way to vanishing into the Iowa corn. I’m glad to have met him.”

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Listen to “American Crow”:

American Crow

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Bell, who today punches a clock instead of taking appointments in Nashville, believes in the potency of the working life he and most other Americans live. He sees the Music City song-factory method as something wholly divorced from that life, something created in test tubes and Petri dishes – an illusion of authenticity brokered as some kind of Hallmark Americana. Black Crow Blue is pretty much the opposite of a Hallmark card, unless your card reads: “Greetings from Cormac McCarthy.”

“You got a lot of guys pretending to be cowboys, troubadours, vagrants, outsiders,” says Bell. He’s on the phone, somewhere in Georgia, making a call for his real job, and his voice has that parchment sound that comes from too much talking and not enough singing. “But there’s not a lot of middle-aged working guys pretending to be outlaws. We’re too busy working.”

BY MOST standards, Bell had it going on in Nashville two decades ago. He arrived in Music City from Iowa in 1991 after spending much of the ’80s playing and touring with his then-partner Susan Shore as part of the progressive bluegrass duo Bell & Shore. In Nashville he landed a job writing songs for a company run by Alan Jackson’s managers. He cut a record with Richard Bennett, the man responsible for the guitar sounds on Steve Earle’s Guitar Town. But Bell’s rough-hewn lyrics, true blue-collar sensibilities, and raw-boned masculinity made him stand out on Music Row like a real cowboy on the set of a Hollywood western.

Bell in his garage, watched over by Miles Davis.

The son of an acclaimed poet (Marvin Bell, the author of 16 volumes, became Iowa’s first poet laureate in 2000), Bell’s intellectual acuity isn’t like most people’s – it’s sharper, edgier. His lyricism has the same hardness you’d imagine from a Clint Eastwood or Paul Newman character, or from writer Jim Harrison. It’s unblinking, strong, true. Not tough in a brutal way, but more stoic, from the point of view of someone who realizes that this is how it is. Yet he somehow also refuses to relinquish the notion that love remains. “I believe in love,” he says without irony, without flinching. “No matter how harsh I get or how frustrated, love is the only thing that matters.”

Bell’s practical approach to life comes naturally. His dad may have been a celebrated poet, but he also instilled into his son the value of manning up and avoiding histrionics. “We were raised with a minimal amount of the drama and self-loathing that theoretically comes with the arts,” Bell says. “It was very blue-collar, very this-is-what-you-do-next. I had wonderful role models as men: my father, the mentors, even the guy who taught me to play guitar who died far too young. They were steady people you could count on. I don’t see much of that now.”

When Bell realized the Nashville music industry wasn’t something he wanted to be part of, he knew what to do. Somewhere between the promise and critical acclaim of his two Flying Fish albums with Bell & Shore – Little Movies and L-Ranko Motel – and the country-industry flagellation he got as a Music City maverick, he lost his taste for the business. When Hard Weather, the record he did with Bennett, was done, so was Bell. He walked away before anybody could even shop it to labels. Instead, the heard-headed artist moved to Signal Mountain, Tennessee, near Chattanooga, and got a job with the phone company. He learned to play golf. He spent time with his wife Leslie and their two children.

“For 15 years, the guitar did not come out,” Bell says, “other than one time at a company function, where I volunteered. And they had no idea… I completely hated it.” He had watched the people around him live their lives. And he lived his. He was fine. But inside, his creativity would not be stilled. “If I could have taken pictures or written novels, I wouldn’t write songs,” he says. “But I can’t, so this is what I do. For me, it’s been a quest to tell the truth the way Dorothea Lange took pictures. Set the camera up, open the lens, expose the film and trust the image. You’ve got it… and you can move on.”

Bell began to see that everything he was doing was resonant in very powerful ways — not just for him, but for everyone around him. “I was living in a world of enormous significance when I picked up the guitar again in 2007, and I don’t think people even realize,” he says. “The lower middle class isn’t high enough to be safe, nor low enough to be romantic – but they are the majority of the people in this country. What they value is this: family, their community. No one sees how hard they work or how much of their lives they remember and hold on to, how important that is. It’s neither romantic failure nor glorified common effort – it’s just their life, and it’s precious.”

It took leaving Nashville and stopping writing for him to see this.

BELL CONTINUED working his job, even when he started writing again. Occasionally he’d venture up to Nashville and hang out with friends on the fringe of the city’s writerly world, but mostly his new songs lived among a very small group of people he respected and wanted to share things with – people on his website and fan group, which he called “The Cult of 8.”

Songs began tumbling out – like the quiet and pensive“She Only Loves Blue,” which Bell sings over spare acoustic guitar in a voice ragged, like John Prine, but with more resignation in the delivery. It’s about a woman who realizes the records she loves are more faithful and emotionally resonant than the men who’ve passed through her life. Then there’s the dobro-fueled “Me and Larry,” a dirge-like ballad that looks back on the friendship Bell had with the late Mississippi writer Larry Brown before he became famous, and the grace that came from their bond. “Red & White,” with its Native American drum intro, considers the gaps and overlaps between Native people trapped on reservations and the white men who pen them in for “their own good” – or just convenience.

Bell introduces The Crow – who, ultimately, is a man in full, with all the contradictions that entails – in “The American Crow,” the lead-off track, but the character comes into full view in the haunting, spoken-word “The Crow in Oklahoma,” over music reminiscent of a Ry Cooder soundtrack. In that piece, The Crow gets rolled on a desolate highway by a couple of cowboys who steal his boots and leave him with a pair of old shoes. He has few possessions and even less hope – and yet he still thinks he’s doing okay. “That’s the thing about really living,” Bell says. “It doesn’t so much matter where or what (you are) – it’s that you’re engaged. Crow was left with some guy’s old shoes and a warm beer, and he figured he was doing better than a lot of people.”

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Listen to “The Crow in Oklahoma”:

Crow in Oklahoma

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Maybe he was. Half empty. Half full. All heart. Absolutely bankrupt. It is a gift for some people, futile for others – and vertiginous for those lost in the cacophony of white noise that shouts “new-and-improved,” “supersize me,” “bigger, better, more.” Bell says some people might see The Crow as the most extreme type of character, and yet, “There’s nothing extreme about him. He just takes a step out into the wasteland and instead of turning back, he doesn’t.”

Mingled into The Crow’s story are tales of everyday Americans, like the guy in “Stones Throw” whose family exists on the fault line a paycheck away from being wiped out. “Rust” is about a man who realizes the reality of aging is going to prevent him from taking care of the people he loves. “When you’re young you’re full of brave words, chemicals and lust,” Bell sings, “and one day you just stop talking, and you can hear everything turn to rust.”

The man’s physical erosion frightens him. “That’s a problem that he can’t solve,” says Bell. “He can only live with it, find a way to maintain his equilibrium.”

The album’s closer, “We All Get Gone,” is a bluesy elegy for The Crow – but it’s for all of us, really. To Bell, there are lessons to be learned from The Crow’s freewheeling, Woody Guthrie-like choices. “You know, if he can see life as pretty okay in all of that,” says Bell, “well, that explains the way these characters get through their lives.”

NATHAN BELL has arrived. He’s literally sitting in his car, parked outside his appointment. It’s time to return to the real world in which he supports his family. It’s what he does now to pay the bills. And it’s okay. He knows his art’s place in his life. He doesn’t expect his songs will change the world and he certainly doesn’t want to preach or tell anyone how to live. That’s not the point. He’s a storyteller.

“I’ve always been uncomfortable with the Marxist theory about art – that if it isn’t doing something, it’s not good,” he says. “But because I was raised in the environment of academia and poetry, the arts, I do believe that songs need to carry the conversation further. To me, that’s what’s important.”

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Watch Nathan Bell sing “Every Other Day”:

For more information on Bell or to purchase Black Crow Blue, click here.