To restart her career in music, Nat Summer has come out with a driving, rockabilly love-gone-wrong song called “Bye Bye Bye.”
But it started out as a straight-up love song when she first wrote it a few years ago, when the gift of a guitar propelled her back into music.
“It just describes this beautiful relationship,” she said. “I wrote it and forgot about it.”
His hands on my waist
Want his hands on my waist
And I say to him please come and hold me
“Then I pulled it out again, and I thought it needed something, a break. That’s when I created the bye bye bye chorus.”
Which appears right after “please come and hold me”:
Bye bye bye
I said bye bye bye
“And it turned into a breakup song.”
The stark, sudden shift is as surprising in music as it would be in life.
“In the middle of this beautiful relationship, the girl just realizes that, you know, she needs to run, and then she is running and running, and bye, bye, bye. There’s no explanation why because — women,” she said.
For “Bye Bye Bye,” she wanted an organic sound — real drums, real guitars — “so the story in the song can pass through.”
Her voice, a lovely, clear contralto, has the timbre and range to rock out on whatever kind of music she wants to, and it, too, is organic on this track.
“David refused to Auto-Tune my vocals.” That’s David Patillo, producer and musician on the track. He also has his own band and plays guitar on “Bye Bye Bye.”
Nat has been a model and an actor. One modeling job put her on the cover of Devo’s Something for Everybody album, and hers is the face of several major brands. She went to the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film institute and has movie credits.
But before all that, she had music. Born in Eastern Europe, she was classically trained as a pianist, beginning at age 6; wrote her first song at 11; performed on stage for the first time and released her first album at 15.
She was in a band for eight years, singing, writing lyrics, and collaborating with producers and DJs. While she was with them, the band put out three albums with a dance and electronic focus instead of the rock that is the heart of her music now.
“But that was 20 years ago. This is kind of a comeback, but I think it’s more about music than me,” she said. “A song can have its own life.”
The gift of the guitar, and the beginning of her comeback, began in 2018.
“I’m a piano player, and I knew a little about guitar, a couple of chords, but then I got this beautiful guitar, and I started learning it. It’s easy nowadays — you pull up some YouTube videos and begin. I started playing with it, and I really got into it.”
And the desire to make music returned. She has written many songs since her first one, mostly on piano, but now she began writing songs on her new guitar.
She gives a lot of credit to David, her producer, for the finished version of the new track. “There’s a very intuitive process when I work with David.”
Her filmmaker friend Ilya Popenko made the video. It is ready for release later this year. “He’s incredible, and what we did is such a really fun video.”
“Bye Bye Bye” is clearly the rock-plus-country mix called rockabilly, and she is busy on another that will have a similar sound, but her primary genre will be rock or alternative rock, whatever you want to call it.
“I’m usually against using a lot of labels. I think people listening to music don’t necessarily need to put a word next to it.”
The EP she is working on, coming out some time after the video, will have a couple with the country vibe of “Bye Bye Bye” but will mainly be alt-rock, and some may have a pop feel.
“This is the purest kind of creation. A song that you wrote, it is something you brought into the world by yourself, but when I’m in somebody’s movie, then I’m part of somebody else’s project, somebody else’s vision. But Nat Summer is my vision, something that I’ve created.”
Of all the feedback she has received on “Bye Bye Bye,” her favorite comments are the ones that say, “Your song is in my head!”
“It’s catchy, and people tend to enjoy it, and to me, this is the biggest gift possible. I really want the song to be in everybody’s head.”
Go on, get it in your head. Connect to Nat Summer on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
