Music Q&A with Nathan Leigh of Nathan Leigh & The Crisis Actors
Photo by Nicole Orabona
Nathan Leigh & The Crisis Actors released their new EP, House On Stilts, last week! The EP is a follow up to the band’s latest full-length album, Myths, Conspiracy Theories, and Other Stuff I Made Up To Sound Interesting, which was released in April 2020. The new EP is also accompanied by a stop-motion animated short film and it rules! In this Q&A, Nathan talks about the EP, the short film, how he started writing music and designing sounds for plays, his activism, and more! House On Stilts is out NOW!
Congratulations on the release of your EP, House On Stilts! What does the EP mean to you?
The EP is a culmination of a decade of work, so you can imagine I have a lot of complicated feelings ranging from relief to pride. I’ve been working on the animation for so long, and after a certain point I honestly wasn’t sure I would ever finish it. I stopped telling people about it, but kept working on it in the background. So to have that out and open in the world is really wonderful.
What is your favorite song off House On Stilts?
I think “The Overwhelmed Song” is my favorite. It’s such a weird little song, but probably the most accurate depiction of my internal monologue of anything I’ve ever written!
You wrote “Care Workers’ Nocturne” as a gift to a friend working as an ER doctor in NYC during the pandemic. A lot has happened during this time period. What was it specifically that got you to write this song?
I struggled a lot writing that song. I don’t tend to write songs from other people’s perspectives. If I’ve written something that isn’t me, or at least a version of me, speaking, it’ll end up in one of my plays, not on one of my albums. But in that moment, all I was feeling was anxiety. I had to have part of one of my lungs removed a number of years ago after I was beaten by the NYPD during a protest, so I’m at high risk of death from COVID. I was not exactly chill during those early days of the pandemic.
With everything Lindsey was going through--she was living through the worst of it before anyone really knew anything--the last thing I wanted to do was add more panic to the mix. So I tried to take a step back and think about what I could create that might help ease that feeling. I’m usually a very “write what you know” kind of person, and that song was me trying to do the opposite of that. Write what you wish you knew. It is in every way the mirror image of “The Overwhelmed Song,” which is why I thought it made for the right ending to the EP.
In 2011, you started working on a stop-motion film that accompanies the EP. Hands down. It is AWESOME! How did the idea of creating it come about and also making it part of your music?
The film actually led the EP, not the other way around. I started animating it as a music video for the title track, but stop motion is such a slow medium that I kept coming up with new stuff to add and never finishing it. When I wrote “Call-Out Post” I started planning out a video for it, and realized it was actually the final part in that story, which gave me the push to finally finish the thing.
Stop motion is a medium I’ve always loved, but it takes time to do well. Because it all has to be filmed in real space, there aren’t a lot of shortcuts. Coming from a theatre background where everything is about producing as much as possible as quickly as possible and success comes down to how many shortcuts you know, stop motion has become a really therapeutic part of my process. The medium forces me to slow down even when I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter how quickly I want to finish a project. It’ll be done when it’s done. I think carrying that patience into my own solo music has been really healthy for me, so it feels very natural that they’ve become so intertwined.
How did you get into composing music and designing sound for plays?
When I was in high school, I took classes at this theatre that’s now known as the Cape Cod Theatre Company, but at the time was called the Harwich Junior Theatre. I enjoyed it, but it was more of a social thing than anything I expected to make a career out of. Most shows there didn’t have sound, it was largely an afterthought. Maybe one big dance number or something.
One summer, they hired this sound designer Jay Hagenbuckle, and Nina, the artistic director plucked me up saying “Nathan, you’re a musician and Jay needs an assistant. Can you help him?” Jay let me write some of the preshow music, and that was a really big deal as a 14 year old kid, you know?
The next summer, Nina asked me to design the whole season. I couldn’t drive, and didn’t own a laptop, so I would lug the giant frankensteined desktop I’d built on the bus there and back every day, but I was getting paid to write music. That had been obviously a dream, but not something I really believed was actually possible. I’ve worked on over 300 plays since then. It’s still tough balancing the theatre career and the music career. They’re often in conflict schedule-wise, but it’s worked out OK.
What influenced your decision in starting The People’s Puppets of Occupy Wall Street? Were you involved in activism prior to that?
It’s a similar story, actually. It happened totally by accident. My friend Joe Therrien and I had both been away and were trying to find time to catch up. I’d been out of town when Occupy started, this was like week 2, so I hadn’t gone down to check it out yet. He invited me over for a drink saying “I just got some money from the General Assembly to make a giant puppet, wanna help?” I’ve always loved puppetry, and had started tinkering in animation at that point, but I’d never really done any puppetry in any serious capacity. I’d been involved in a lot of anti-war organizing when I was younger, but it’d been a few years since my activism practice was well, active. But we made the OWS Lady Liberty that night, barely slept, and brought her down to this huge demonstration at Washington Square Park.
People kept coming up to us all day asking if we were part of a group, so we founded the group right there in the park just so we could say “yes.” Part of the reason we get referred to by so many names now (People’s Puppets, The People’s Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, The OWS Puppet Guild, etc…) is because we couldn’t reach consensus on a name that first day, and we’re a consensus-driven organization. The group has had boom years and slow years since then, but we are one of the last remaining GA-approved projects, and Lady Liberty has been shown in a few museums. These days most of our energy is focused on Climate Justice, but we’re still out there, doing the work, and anyone who wants to get involved is welcome! Our doors are always open to new members.
What is your earliest musical memory?
We had a taped-off-TV copy of Harry Nilsson’s The Point, the version with Alan Thicke narrating, that I watched just about every day when I was a kid. That definitely imprinted itself pretty strongly on my musical sensibilities.
We all have our days where it may not be going as well as we’d like. People deal with their worst days in different ways. What helps you get through the bad days? How do you stay positive?
My partner Nicole, and my cat Commodore Welcome are definitely what keep me going when things feel impossible or when I’m dealing with health stuff. I’m very lucky to have a cat with flawless comedic timing. Any time things get tense, she finds a way to diffuse it. I don’t know how, she just does.
Thank you for taking the time for this Q&A. Any last words or final message for the readers?
I’m realizing talking to you how many of the best things in my life came from something unexpected coming up and going “yeah sure, why not?” Embrace that if you can. Who knows, 10 years later something you tried on a whim might be the thing that gives you purpose.