Natalie Schlabs — Sideways

Nashville-based singer/songwriter Natalie Schlabs writes songs that explore the complicated emotions and perspective-shifting moments that make up family relationships. Her music often blends sublime vocal harmonies with lyrics about the secret desires and difficulties of living life among loved ones.

Her first full-length album, Midnight With No Stars, was celebrated for its willingness to explore the personal. New Slang praised the album for revealing “a rugged truthfulness we often save for conversations with ourselves.” There’s a richness and clarity to Schlabs’ voice reminiscent of artists like Norah Jones and Jill Andrews, making her a popular choice for harmonizing background vocals and a frequent collaborator with other musicians on tour and in the studio. Her stunning duet with Irish-born artist Ben Glover, “Fall Apart,” features vocals that “ring and resound like a fork tapping crystal” and was chosen as a Song of the Week on The Bluegrass Situation. Schlabs’ introduction to Nashville music came through collaboration, singing background vocals for fellow Texan Ryan Culwell, and performing with Katie Herzig at Paste Studio NYC in 2018. “I think there’s something cool about the act of stepping into someone else’s sound and blending with it,” she explains. “It’s a challenge, and a kind of freedom, too.”

Like many other Nashville musicians, the West Texas native grew up singing in church, but unlike others the majority of her early musical experience s took place at home with family. Her three brothers were musicians—one a pianist, one a guitarist and drummer, and one guitarist and songwriter—her mom sang, and her grandfather, a guitarist and vocalist who performed classics, often invited the family to sing with him. “It was very normal for all of us to be together in a room, playing instruments and singing together,” she recalls. “My love for music comes from my family, and my love for family is often the substance of my songwriting.”

Breaking a bit from her country roots, Schlabs’ new album Don’t Look Too Close, set for release on Oct 9, 2020, steps into indie territory with a compelling mix of instrumentation laced with solo vocals that bloom into easy, delicate harmonies. Co - produced by Juan Solorzano and Zachary Dyke , with Caleb Hickman on saxophone and her husband Joshua Rogers on bass, the album swells and ebbs with elegant, absorbing shapes. The songs are moody, candid, and tender , each featuring Schlabs’ characteristically sleek vocals front-and-center, backed by charming instrumental moments that add form and depth to the melodies. “Juan’s got a great ear,” she says. “He created really original textures with layered guitar. That’s a big part of the sound of the record.”

Recorded the year of her 30th birthday and largely written while pregnant with her first child, the album naturally focuses on tension s between past and present. “I was thinking about how to raise a child, how to pass down values,” she reveals. “There’s a dismantling of what I thought I knew. What do I value in my life and where did those things come from? What do I want to share with my children and what do I want to spare them from?” The tracks on Don’t Look Too Close traverse the spectrum of feelings that tend to coincide with love, from bittersweet consideration of “the wilderness caused by depression or illness” in “See What I See,” to the haunting gentleness of “Ophelia,” written for a friend who lost her daughter. The title song “Don’t Look Too Close” addresses the everyday aches and pains people tend to hide from loved ones. “There were entire rooms of things my parents went through that I had no idea about,” she says. “And my kid will have no idea about a lot of things I experience.” The song reflects on love’s blindness, how “sometimes the ones you love will never know how much you love them.”

The album as a whole represents a place, a time, and a pocket of feelings that are as distinctly human as they are beautiful. “Growing up surrounded by family in the flatlands, there’s not a whole lot going on outside of the people,” she continues. “The climate is extreme, and isolation binds you to the people around you. Everyone’s in each other’s business, and you learn that love can go in many directions. Sometimes it’s about solidarity and sacrifice, sometimes it’s obsessive or painful. This record is about navigating those feelings within our closest relationships .”