Collection: Nate Fredrick

Somewhere in trying to figure out how to craft a good song, I figured out how not to just write a pile of sad songs,” Nate Fredrick says about his new album​, Different Shade of Blue​. “It’s not that my situation is different or even better, but I’ve found a different way to perceive my personal circumstances.”

That level of introspection is clear throughout Fredrick’s debut album, 11 tracks recorded at Nashville’s Farmland Studios with producer David Dorn. The collection sounds as familiar as what you might hear on a friend’s back porch, but Fredrick’s lyrics are bound to get stuck in your head as he works through his relationship to both himself and his home—where he’s from as well as Nashville, where he moved in 2015. A native Missourian, Nate learned to play guitar after his dad brought one home—that he never learned to play—when Nate was 12. But he didn’t start writing songs until a decade later. “A friend and I were running from the police one night, and I accidentally fell off a cliff,” Nate says. “During the two-year recovery process, I started actually making music instead of just playing music. The first show I ever had, I played with my jaw wired shut.” His bluesy Americana style is the result of influences such as Guy Clark, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Van Morrison, to name a few. Fredrick wrote more than 100 songs in the two years after he moved to Music City. “I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people who were willing to grow together,” Fredrick says of the writing process. “It’s a culmination of the best I could give with a bunch of people who are now my best friends.”

The first single from ​Different Shade of Blue is "Paducah," a love letter of sorts to the process of finding yourself through miles spent on the highway.  "I traveled back home to Springfield, Missouri, every other weekend during my first few years of living in Nashville, partly for a relationship, and partly from being truly homesick,” Fredrick says. “Paducah, Kentucky was the halfway point and during those long drives, I had the feeling I was leaving something but also heading to something from both directions. Home changed in meaning for me, and I changed a lot as a person, eventually into someone who felt like Nashville was finally home."