After you’ve had the kind of career that Nate Mercereau has had, you can understand why he bristles at the concept of genres. “I’m not necessarily trying to make things to go over people’s heads,” he told PopMatters back in 2019, promoting his genre-bending instrumental solo debut Joy Techniques. “I think that’s always been what jazz has essentially been. People are trying to connect as emotionally as possible. Things get lost along the way, and you can get self-indulgent. So I was aware of making something that is a concise statement.”
As a California kid who grew up attracted to every form of music and eventually getting his first touring gigs on the gospel circuit, he could easily have cut checks by serving as a guitarist, producer, and songwriter in his numerous collaborations with hitmaking producer Ricky Reed. Mercereau has helped create hits for the likes of Kesha, Leon Bridges, Shawn Mendes, Lizzo, John Legend, and The Weeknd. While he can still step into a pop star studio at a moment’s notice, it feels as if he truly found his calling when, in 2021, he released an album of duets with a rarely called-upon legend: the actual Golden Gate Bridge.
“The Golden Gate Bridge duet project was a big opening up for me, opening up to infinite possibility,” Mercereau says to PopMatters in 2024. After seeing an article about noise complaints from San Francisco residents over the “hum” that the bridge generates as wind swoops through it, he brought out his guitars to create new compositions in collaboration with the structure. It was a distinct endeavor that caught Mercereau a lot of press but netted even more fans for his striking compositional ability. When speaking of that infinite possibility, he’s blunt: “That’s something I bring to all aspects of my life now.”
Excellent Traveler is Nate Mercereau’s latest instrumental epic and his first for Jack White’s Third Man Records. While Joy Techniques saw Mercereau bend his guitar into sounds that sounded like synthesizers but ultimately blurred textural boundaries, Excellent Traveler is the result of years of patience, having learned that music can take on heretofore unimagined forms. It’s of no surprise that his own profile has been boosted as of late following his playing with OutKast‘s André 3000 on his daring New Blue Sun project from 2023 and the tour that’s stretched well into 2024.
“The process of making New Blue Sun was, and continues to be, an incredible space for me to explore — it’s always – go further and further,” Mercereau beams. “It is truly awesome, and I give a lot of credit to that environment for allowing ideas to take shape and expand from.”
He’s worked heavily in the Los Angeles “all genre” scene, and his New Blue Sun counterparts are scene legends like keyboardist Surya Botofasina and multi-instrumentalist Carlos Niño. In fact, an album that the trio released shortly after New Blue Sun netted the Los Angeles-based Leaving Records their first-ever charting entry on Billboard, a dynamite feat for music that plays far outside the realm of common commercial expectation.
“For me, everything is about the ability to imagine, and I’m fully Going There,” notes Nate Mercereau. “I’m going ‘all in’ all the time in every aspect of my entire life. ‘Limits beyond’ though, for sure. I really enjoy the process of making music and searching far into those depths. Whether it ends up for an album of mine or for/with someone else, it’s about opening up and seeing what comes through. It’s so different depending on the environment and the collaborators; all possible possibilities factor into what something sounds and feels like.
“Right now, I’m interested in creating room in music for many different things to speak — music that can mean so much at once and also change shape as life changes.”
You can hear this all over Excellent Traveler, which features Mercerau’s ever-flexible guitar textures joining up with samples of other musicians he’s recorded on the fly. These samples are fed in through his guitar and he plays these samples through the fretboards, altering their speed, pitch, and very fabric of existence. “I Am in the Fire Place”, for example, uses a flute and percussion break in quick succession to craft a short song that has structure and propulsion but feels shaken out of time, a work that is contemporary as it could be archaic. To Mercerau, that’s exactly the point.
“I’m full in on everything I do,” he notes of the album’s intentions. “I don’t regard any of my projects as more or less important; I’m full in on all of them. I wanted to blow the roof off of what it means to make a solo instrument album, expand the range of what the guitar can do, and make something representative of my life in a very direct and fresh way. Excellent Traveler is a representation of all the explorations and moments of discovery I recorded over the course of a year and a half. Because it features so many samples of musicians, life movements, and environments recorded all around the world in different places, it has a varied sound. It’s life. I can listen to a song on the record and picture every moment that went into it, and where and who it was from and with.”
These samples he collects stem from legends and friends alike: Carlos Niño, Laraaji, Kamasi Washington, André 3000, Shabaka Hutchings, and many more. The track “Ears As Eyes” goes even further, sampling birdcall and forest sounds but running them through a light reverb to give them a beautiful and strange new presence. In the world of Excellent Traveler, this is just par for the course.
“‘Ears As Eyes’ contains a lot of samples from various places, the full title is ‘Ears As Eyes (Benton, Tujunga, Mayer)’, and those are the places some of the sounds come from,” Nate Mercereau explains. “Among many things on this one, I’m playing the sound of a stream with the guitar, meaning I can play the stream sound in any pitch, so it becomes a kind of water instrument. The bird sounds and all bird sounds on the album are samples of myself doing bird impersonations with the guitar. When I replay the samples as a chord with the midi-guitar, it sounds like a flock of birds all chirping in different pitches and speeds. I originally created the first version of that sound for ‘Every Moment Is The First And Last’ on [2021 album] SUNDAYS. I’ve made lots of other versions of it since, and it pops up on records here and there. Guitar Birds.”
Yet Guitar Birds aren’t the only explicit collaborative call-outs. While Dré is given an explicit flute and vocoder credit, the percussion of Carlos Niño also gets a standalone mention. When PopMatters spoke to Leaving Records founder Matthew McQueen earlier in the year, McQueen found Niño as a sort of mentor. Mercereau’s connection with the bandleader is quite different.
“My relationship with Carlos is active; it includes a lot, and we do a lot for each other,” Mercereau notes. “Carlos actually suggested the idea of doing a solo guitar album early on in our relationship, right when we began making music together after Joy Techniques came out. I’m very stoked to be around musicians and creators and people like Carlos Niño and Surya Botofasina, André 3000, Deantoni Parks, and so many others I consider close friends and collaborators. We really do a lot for each other and show up for each other in big, expansive ways.”
While the writeup for the album refers to Nate Mercereau’s sample-breaking ways as a kind of naturalistic DJ’ing, I couldn’t help but zone in on the title of one song as “DJinn'”, which itself could be a reference to the spirits known as Djinns from religious mythology. The composition itself is somewhat chaotic, as flutes and a non-bridge type of sustained hum float above a hurried and chaotic tornado of percussion. Yet Mercereau bristled at referring to his music, or even the process of making it, as spiritual.
“I don’t use the term ‘spiritual’ to describe my music or what I’m doing because that word comes along with a lot of ideas of what it already means for people, which I’m not interested in representing,” he explains. “I want new descriptors and fresh intentions. I love thinking of terms or phrases for music and the way it happens. I consider myself a present person with very active inner and outer and multi-dimensional worlds, and I show up fully for those infinite possibilities to come through. If someone feels spiritually lit up through the music I share, I support it.”
In a later part of our conversation, he goes one step further on the limits of labels and descriptors like “ambient” or “experimental” being tied to his creations: “I avoid calling music anything relating to words like ‘instrumental’ or ‘soundscape’ because those words put a ceiling on what the music could mean or do. I’m much more into the intention of the music and the feeling in the music as it’s being expressed or received … but even that, I’ve begun to let go of at this point. I’m here. I consider music to be dynamic, multi-dimensional, and beyond. The Music Is Intense, Full On, Possible Realities. I feel extreme and passionate playing and making it.”
While Joy Techniques came out via his own How So Records, the boundary-pushing Excellent Traveler has found a new champion in the form of Third Man Records, Jack White’s uncompromising record label. While it may seem like an unusual pairing on its surface, Third Man has been nothing but supportive of records that challenge common musical and commercial notions, making Excellent Traveler an excellent candidate for release under the imprint.
“Third Man has been into it,” Nate Mercereau notes. “They are into what I’m up to, and we have a good relationship that way because I’m also into what they are doing and how they do it. It is an interesting record to have more exposure — from the label support, to the many guests featured as samples, but it’s just what’s happening right now, it feels very aligned. My creative output has always found its own path, and at whatever juncture people tune into it, the folks who get it will get it, and it will be meaningful for them. It’s meaningful for me and feels like a great way to continue expanding.”
As Nate Mercereau continues to tour with the New Blue Sun crew and prep for the Excellent Traveler release, he seems more excited than ever at the sheer possibilities he has as a musician. Excellent Traveler expands upon his numerous livestream experiments and collaborations to become something bolder, grander, and more daring than ever. Bending sonic boundaries in how Mercereau is doing requires incredible skill and determination, but he is approaching it all with a sense of awe and wonder. Even as he occasionally works on new pop records, his definitions of what is possible become more unbound by the day.
“I’m not really into rules, but I do like getting into processes and fully exploring them,” he beams. “Excellent Traveler was to be a solo guitar album, but completely opening up the ways that could happen by playing any sound available, creating new ones, and making things radical by any means — anything happening that makes sound available to be made into a playable reality, or an ‘instrument,’ through the guitar. My goals were to make the most expansive album I could through the guitar and feature as many people and experiences in my life as possible, with intuitive musical creations.”
Nate Mercereau then signs off with a textural collage that feels like the spirit of Excellent Traveler summed up perfectly: “Worlds Within Worlds, Worlds Upon Worlds, furthering and playing realities, zooming in, Instant Sonic Collaging, playing Not Notes, Going There and reporting back, Accelerating Reality, Exploratory Music with a Sense of Discovery.”
We couldn’t agree more.