Nate Mercereau: Excellent Traveller

Nate Mercereau will show you not only that the guitar can be whatever you want it to be but also that true artists are never done evolving. For the better part of a decade, Mercereau worked in service of the truly famous, serving as a session player and songwriter for the likes of Jay-Z, Lizzo, and Shawn Mendes. He was a key partner to modern soul great Leon Bridges, too. But in 2021, Mercereau released a series of humming duets with the groan and drone of the actual Golden Gate Bridge, catalyzing the process of his emergence as one of the truly curious guitar players of this century. Excellent Traveler—his Third Man debut, released in 2024—finds him using six strings to trigger samples of friends like Laraaji and Kamasi Washington or even strangers chattering, fusing them into electroacoustic streams that can run anywhere.

As Carlos Niño, who plays in the Openness Trio with Mercereau, once noted, André 3000 would often introduce Mercereau the same way during stops on the New Blue Sun tour: “I call him a magician. He plays guitar, but it almost never sounds like a guitar.” Mercereau is something like a New Age-meets-industrial Fennesz, using his instrument to create little musical ceremonies that ride the lines between doom and drift, between noise and beauty. When he performs Excellent Traveler live, it is less about the album’s 17 pieces than the techniques he used to make them. He feeds off the crowd’s energy and even its sound, sometimes sampling what he hears in real time to reflect back into the audience.