Background
Nathan Douglas began writing songs later in life. After serving in the Army for three years, he studied music briefly at Northern Virginia Community College, but switched majors to art, then theater and film, eventually transferring to Long Beach City College in California, followed by Long Beach State and UCLA’s Graduate Film School. While at UCLA, he wrote his first song, “Wild Women,” a vaudeville tune from a scene in a feature-length screenplay he completed for a scriptwriting class.
After interning as a story analyst for Burt Lancaster, he returned to the D.C. area and worked as a film and video freelancer specializing in political and corporate media. There he met someone who encouraged him to write poetry and songs, which further inspired him to cease his freelancing career and start an independent record label, Mad Dawg Records. That venture eventually bankrupted him, leaving him essentially homeless, but along the way it did provide opportunities to write songs.
Recognizing the harsh, financial realities of life, Nathan returned to work in the film and video world, to find a series of increasingly responsible staff positions. For the next eighteen years, he suppressed his songwriting urges, in order to focus on familial and financial obligations. It was a very difficult period that he now calls his “creative coma.”
At the end of 2010, seeking to reclaim his dream, Nathan retired early and embarked on a mission to study music full time and, most importantly, to write songs on a regular basis. After researching and finding only two schools offering songwriting programs—Berklee in Boston and Long Beach City College—he chose the latter due to its affordability and his familiarity with the institution.
From 2011 through 2013, he was enrolled in the Commercial Music program at LBCC, completing his songwriting certificate just as the program was being shut down for budgetary reasons. One of his last class assignments was to write a song about the budget cuts. His effort, “Sacramento,” convinced him that he could write songs about any topic.
As a direct result of his studies, primarily with Maurice Love, he could now play piano well enough to find notes to melodies he heard in his head, and to add basic chords. Plus he had begun learning how to sing with the help of Tom Dustmann, the LBCC vocal guru. Off-campus, he worked with a Long Beach-based voice coach, Sharon Giarratano. She encouraged Nathan to begin appearing at local open mics, which he did in earnest, beginning in 2014.
Meanwhile, Nathan had begun working with Kevin Kearney, the brilliant LBCC piano accompanist, to develop musical arrangements for songs that he, Nathan, was writing and testing in front of open mic audiences. Between October 2014 and September 2015, he performed over 300 times.
Simultaneously, from December 2014 through December 2015, Nathan co-produced more than 60 demos of songs he had written during the past five years, most featuring other singers. Paring down that aggregate, he chose 50 tunes to be part of Fifty Fast Minutes, a tour de force collection of one-minute clips from his song demos. This demo album was made available in April, 2016, as a promotional CD, and as individual audio streams via this website.
Between April, 2016 and April, 2017, Nathan completed over 100 more demos for additional songs he wrote. Like Fifty Fast Minutes, these were packaged as CD albums and made available via this website: Twenty-Seven Tight Ones (September, 2016), Welcome to My Songs (December, 2016), 22-4-U (February, 2017) and Last Call (April, 2017), which was intended as a final album.
But the next year, he went back into the studio and produced a collection of sixteen originals entitled Encore! (April, 2018). He also created a YouTube channel featuring video demos for an additional twenty new songs. Then, after focusing on live performances for another year, he recorded an album via Skype during the height of the COVID pandemic, Stay at Home (November, 2020).
This was followed eventually by Seal Beach Postcard, a cumulative collection of new and old demos (May, 2022). Although this collection was supposed to be the real final demo album, he still had over 200 songs lurking in his shoebox, so he decided to produce one, truly final CD collection and to retire from active songwriting. This last CD is called Afterthoughts (May, 2023).
Nathan continues to seek serious inquiries from established recording artists, producers, music supervisors, music publishers, advertising agencies and others in the music, film, television and theatrical communities who are looking for fresh and unique material. His songs are from many styles: e.g., country, classic rock, indie rock, punk rock, blues, jazz, theater, and even a little dance, funk, reggae and hip-hop.
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E-mail inquiries to: nathandouglasgo@gmail.com
