"I'M AS SELF-TAUGHT AS YOU CAN BE IN THE 21ST CENTURY"

How NAT MYERS made a beautiful old-school blues album - with help from Dan Auerbach, and just one acoustic guitar

- Ellie Rogers

When Nat Myers received an email out of the blue from a man claiming to be the studio manager for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound record label, he assumed it was spam and almost deleted it. It’s a good thing his curiosity got the better of him, because the offer contained in that email – to come to Nashville and “lay a record down that you can be proud of” – turned out to be entirely legit, and resulted in the making of Nat’s impressive country blues debut, Yellow Peril.

"It was very serendipitous," recalls the Korean-American bluesman, whose musical career up to that point had largely consisted of busking on the streets of New York, playing "for tips gigs" at the Jalopy Theater and sharing homemade recordings of his songs online. "I had heard of Easy Eye Sound before," he says, "because I've listened to a lot of Sharecropper's Son by Robert Finley and I really like that record." But he wasn't even looking for a record deal at the time, let alone a deal with one of the most respected guitarists-come producers working in roots-based music today.