NATE MICHAEL | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW

There’s something timeless about the way Nate Michael writes songs, raw enough to sting, but honest enough to heal. His upcoming EP, Self Portraits of a John Doe (out October 24), is a haunting mix of grunge grit and folk storytelling, each track painting fragments of the human condition with both tenderness and tension.

Raised in Warrnambool, Victoria, Nate’s music feels steeped in small-town weather — resilient, windswept, and quietly defiant. Across songs like Grunge Country, Trainspotting, and Cable Ties, he turns everyday moments into cinematic vignettes about longing, forgiveness, and the art of simply showing up.

We caught up with Nate to talk about identity, isolation, and the sound of turning wounds into strength.

TRACK REVIEW

Stadium drums hit first, bold, cinematic, and commanding, before Grunge Country slides into a riff that feels equal parts mysterious and magnetic. There’s a haunting patience in the way Nate Michael builds this track: the gentle pluck of strings draped over that thick grunge tone, giving space for his voice to creep in, calm yet heavy with emotion.

It feels like marching through memory... steady, deliberate, and unshaken. The song walks the fine line between grit and grace, echoing the spirit of Pink Floyd’s epic atmosphere while keeping its boots planted firmly in the dirt of small-town realism. Grunge Country isn’t just a sound, it’s a statement, a sprawling blend of raw songwriting and haunting restraint, built to fill both a stadium and a soul.

LISTEN HERE

“Self Portraits of a John Doe” feels like a title about identity and invisibility, who is the John Doe in your story, and how much of him is you? 

The John Doe is me, but the John Doe is everyone else too. Sometimes I take an aspect of myself and inflate it to flesh out a narrative or latch on to a piece of someone else's experience and do the same. Sometimes the John Doe is the anonymous figure in the crowd who still has their own entire world inside them, and writing these songs gives a voice to that unseen figure. Theres always plenty of me within my songwriting, but I hope listeners find some of themselves in there also.  

There’s a cinematic quality to your writing, if this EP were a film, what would the opening scene look like? 

I think it would be stark, simple, bleak and beautiful. A lot of my music contends with feelings of isolationism, so it may show a lone figure surrounded by a beautiful sunrise, with music that feels too heavy to stay silent.  

You blend grunge, folk, country, and blues, if those genres were people sitting at a bar, what kind of conversation would they be having? 

I think they would be shocked to hear how much they have in common with each other, especially lyrically. Blues, Country and Grunge are all singing about pain, or heartache, or joy or escape. They are all trying to portray the human experience, just some use a DS1 pedal to do it.  

Your songs carry both darkness and defiance. What emotion do you find harder to write about, anger or forgiveness? 

Forgiveness is much harder to write about as it is much harder to authentically experience. Anger is raw and quick to appear. Anger is often a flash reaction and can be an energizing force. To experience forgiveness, you must be willing to sit in your pain, confront it and decide it won’t have a hold on you. Forgiveness is far more multidimensional.  

“Trainspotting” and “Grunge Country” are such evocative titles. What drew you to those words and are they metaphors, memories, or both? 

They’re both. “Trainspotting” came from that image of waiting for something that doesn’t arrive, which felt like the perfect metaphor for missed chances and restless hope, like waiting for the one train that leaves your small town when you’re growing up. “Grunge Country” started almost as a joke about my sound — too country for the metal-heads, too grunge/rock for country purists... I didn’t fit neatly into either genre, so why not claim the clash of both? It also directly reflects the feeling of growing up in a small town where there is literally nothing for young people to do, so you just run around causing mischief. 

You’ve described this record as holding both ‘longing’ and ‘resilience’. Was there a moment while writing it when you realised you’d turned a wound into strength? 

At first, Trainspotting felt like it’s just a song about waiting, about futility. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized there was a defiance in simply holding on, in still showing up at that platform even when you know the train might not come. Many of my songs reflect this idea that simply turning up each day is the greatest act of resilience. 

Small-town life can shape an artist’s voice in big ways, what’s a sound, smell, or scene from Warrnambool that still finds its way into your songs? 

There are the usual answers, like the Norfolk Island Pines that line the streets that used to be made into ship masts, or the ocean. But mainly, when I reflect on Warrnambool, I think of relentless rain that hits you sideways with 100 mile an hour wind. Many people see the postcards of summer days and blue skies, but only locals know that for most of the year that is simply not the reality.  

“Self Portraits of a John Doe” feels like an album that could only be made at this point in your life. What would it have sounded like if you’d written it five years ago? 

There would be far less guitars and overdrive for a start... However, it would have been less focused. Now there’s more patience in the writing, more willingness to let a song breathe. This record carries scars, but it also carries perspective, and I don’t think I had that earlier. 

When you write about struggle and survival, do you think of your songs as self-therapy, or more like postcards from the past? 

Once again, it’s both. Sometimes writing can be cathartic. Sometimes they’re postcards from the past, and sometimes they’re photographs from experiences that aren't mine. However, it’s all about making sense of experiences through sound.  

If someone listens to this EP alone, front to back, late at night, what do you hope they walk away feeling? 

I hope they feel less alone. These songs carry weight, but they’re not meant to leave you in the dark. They’re meant to remind you that darkness can be shared, and that even in struggle, there’s beauty. 

LISTEN HERE