To see Stonehenge is to witness the human capacity for ingenuity. For songwriter Nate Amos, who records as This Is Lorelei, an encounter with the megalithic structure changed his life: it convinced him to quit smoking weed. The prospect of giving up a habit he'd had almost every day for 15 years was terrifying, but Amos decided to channel his subsequent restless energy into songwriting. Maybe it was the lack of weeds. Perhaps Amos is building off the recent success of his various other projects. perhaps those Neolithic rocks imparted something magical to him – regardless of the resulting album, Box for Buddy, Box for Staris a sharply crafted and wonderfully adventurous set of songs, both serious and endearingly funny.
Amos had his epiphany at Stonehenge while on tour with Water From Your Eyes, with whom he makes sharp art-pop. He is also one half of the whimsical duo My Idea with Palberta's Lily Konisberg. But Amos has been releasing solo music as This Is Lorelei for years, treating the moniker as an outlet for experimentation and unfiltered songwriting, and uploading dozens of releases to Bandcamp dating back a decade. In this way, he shares something of a musical kinship with Alex G, another prolific songwriter who started releasing batches of bedroom recordings on Bandcamp and who—like Amos—combines a love of noise with Americana songwriting. (As for Amos' literal musical kinship: his father is a veteran bluegrass musician whose influence can be heard in the album's moments of wistful twang.)
Box for Buddy, Box for Star represents the first time Amos set out to write a proper This Is Lorelei album. Focusing on classic, solid singing, Amos played, sang or sampled everything on the record himself, and his appetite is huge. there's singer-songwriter singing, Auto-Tuned pop, string samples, a meditative piano interlude. While Amos's ear for detail turns the songs on Water From Your Eyes into pieces of delightful mayhem, here his flourishes are more accessible, if no less deft: the big classic-rock chords that cut after the first verse of “A Song That Sings About You', the keyboards of 'My Boy Limbo', the dreamy vocal melody of 'Two Legs'.
His plaintive lyrics about romance and heartache have a surprisingly clear emotional quality. “Honey, if you said you needed two legs/I'd give you mine,” he promises on “Two Legs.” in “A Song That Sings About You,” he laments, “All these towns seem the same without you.” But even in their most honest moments, his songs are still the recognizably work of a dumbass. “Dancing in the Club” contains a reference to Steely Dan's “Babylon Sisters” and a guitar riff that channels “What's My Age Again”. (Amos claims that Blink-182 “saved” him and taught him to appreciate songs that are “fast, catchy and simple.”) The album's opening moments sound like a curtain rising over a honky-tonk, a steel guitar and strummed-chord soundtrack a touching duet between two breakup lovers—except Amos sings both parts, and it's actually a song about a cowboy who gets kidnapped by an angel.
