16 the first time he played a guitar. A school night at a friend’s loft in the country, the lone black guitar stood, intimidating with all the strings and frets. With the headphones on, no one could hear him. The sound wrapped around him, calm and consuming. It seemed impossible to have lived so long without discovering the music. It all made perfect sense. The child never experienced such a sensation ever again, before or after. The act of guitar articulated something that up to that point in life was void. Whether he knew it or not, in that moment he had found his place.
It would be a week until odd jobs, yard work, and sunburns would buy him his very own black guitar. It would be months before journal notes turned into quiet tape cassette recordings, captured behind locked doors.
Nate Eckman is currently writing and rehearsing in his studio in Los Angeles. "Tale of the Man-Sized Bird" is his second full-length independent record in which he performs and produces all the various instrumentation.
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