Nate Bjorge is a singer-songwriter based in Milwaukee, transplanted from Chicago. He fronts the band Wildered – who are currently working on a new album – in addition to his solo work.
ME: How did you get involved with Wisconsin Music Ventures?
NATE: It’s kind of funny, actually. I moved to the area not too long ago…going on two years here…and I wasn’t doing much during COVID other than some Internet videos on YouTube. Somehow I came across Orlando Pena…I came across his page or he came across my page…and he suggested an open mic that Wisconsin Music Ventures runs. I was just looking to get connected and stuff, so I went there and chatted with Bruce, and the rest is history (laughs).
ME: Good old Bruce. Where’d you move from?
NATE: The Chicagoland area.
ME: I’m from Chicago too – the south suburbs.
NATE: I grew up in the northwest suburbs, like McHenry County…but I had been living west of the city near Lombard and Villa Park.
ME: Cool! So I was looking at your Bandcamp and I noticed your band Wildered. Could you tell me more?
NATE: Yeah, you could probably say it’s my main project, especially right now because we’re working on a full-length album.
ME: Are you playing with musicians here or back from Chicago?
NATE: It’s interesting because I’ve always collaborated with multiple people for that project; most notably I’ve been collaborating with an artist named Joshua Miranda and he now lives in Austin, Texas. He’s still a big part of the record but I think when I moved here, I knew I was going to be meeting new people and that the live Wildered stuff would change how it looked.
ME: Tell me about the new album!
NATE: I’m super excited about it so I’ll try not to ramble forever (laughs). Kind of the deal with Wildered is that it’s folk music but it has electric guitars and in some cases full band…so it has that folk influence but it’s very indie-alternative. All of our earlier singles are pretty melancholy, and that will continue to be a theme in the new songs but also the idea of this album is really just forward motion and adventure. I know concept albums aren’t a huge thing anymore but there’s even this subtle narrative and imagery of this grand, mythical, crazy place that you’re journeying through as you go through the album. We’ll be doing some livestreaming of the album with a sort of narrative experience. I’m excited.
ME: Awesome, thank you for sharing all of that! Let me know when it drops.
ME: I wanted to hear a bit more about your most recent tracks…tell me about the song “Come Again, Though.”
NATE: Yeah…that song came from me on and off doing the YouTube grind. I somehow found a video that the channel RoomieOfficial was doing – he’s a big music YouTuber – and he was featuring smaller YouTubers’ songs. He ended up featuring a song that I did, and that resulted in a big influx of people onto that video and my channel, so that was the song that I wrote. The banjo riff in the beginning was a melody that he gave everybody to write off of, and people ended up really liking the song.
ME: Cool. Tell me about “Raincheck.”
NATE: That song I actually wrote a while ago and I wrote it with a friend, Nick Bifano; he lives in Alton, Illinois in the St. Louis area. It was primarily me writing and then he came on board with it; it’s just acoustic rock where were just belting out, singing about being over girls (laughs). That was a great tune to get out of our system.
ME: Hey, that’s what singer-songwriters do best!
ME: My last question is, what’s to come in the next few months?
NATE: I’m in the middle of a lot of tracking and recording for this Wildered album, so hopefully we’ll be wrapping that all up in a month or two, and then start mixing it and promoting it. Then slowly but surely as it starts getting nicer, we’ll be getting a bit more plugged in with the live scene.
Visit Nate Bjorge’s website here.
