Well, he is a great songwriter, but he’s also a great interpreter of other people’s songs. What are some of the reasons you admire him? I feel like that’s such a big part of it for me. It’s always hard for me to wrap my head around being a musician and singer and a performer and songwriter, and not having a live aspect to it. Well, it’s kind of an interesting career, because he never really played any live shows. What would you say distinguishes him from other singer-songwriters? One of the amazing things about him is that he was maybe one of the great pop songwriters of all time, but he also had this insanely gorgeous voice and could easily be considered an interpreter up there with Sinatra or whoever.
But in my years of searching through Nilsson, I’ve certainly dug through outtakes and various things, and found the other six songs of this record that are on some of those other compilations. I was like: Oh, I think I remember this from when I was a kid. And that kind of brought him into my memory. But I didn’t really get Nilsson - I don’t think I had a lot of his records laying around - until I got asked to do a song for “The Point!,” which was years and years ago. Early childhood my dad would always sing, “People let me tell you about my best friend / He’s a warm hearted person who’ll love me to the end.” I held onto that for a long time. I’ve certainly listened to a fair amount. So how deep does your love or obsession with Nilsson go? And I think that’s hard as an artist - to do something that you want to do versus what might benefit your career. Instead of making a followup to “Nilsson Schmilsson” and “Son of Schmilsson,” he was like: “I want to do standards.” His intentions seemed like they were not to chase success, or to follow up. There are multiple reasons I fell in love with the record, but one of them was the story of his idea for doing it. I mean, I feel like the premise of the “Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night” album was strange. I’m a huge Nilsson fan, but the concept for this concert is very strange. Rateliff is a little nervous that several family members of the singer, who died in 1994, will be in attendance at the Disney Hall performance Wednesday - but as Nilsson’s daughter Olivia told him: “Just remember that we’re just so excited that you’re doing this for Dad, and that we’re all rooting for you regardless of what happens.”
and in New York than in Denver, the Colorado Symphony’s Christopher Dragon is conducting at all three shows. Although the players will be different in L.A.
#Wife nathaniel rateliff full#
He’ll be accompanied by a full orchestra at two upcoming shows as well: at Walt Disney Concert Hall Wednesday night, and at New York’s David Geffen Hall on April 1. Rateliff premiered his take on the “Schmilsson” setlist, along with six Nilsson originals, on home turf in Denver last week with the Colorado Symphony. It was a deeply uncool career move at the time, and it also yielded some of the most beautiful versions ever interpreted of classic ballads such as “It Had to Be You” and “As Time Goes By.” Rateliff has wanted to perform that album for more than a decade, and thanks to the support of his hometown Colorado Symphony - who paid to have Jenkins’ lost original charts transcribed by ear - he’s doing just that. And Rateliff knows that, in 1973, Nilsson defied expectations - as he was wont to do - and recorded an album of standards, “A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night,” with opulent orchestral arrangements by Frank Sinatra veteran Gordon Jenkins.
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