Nate Mendel Says Lieutenant’s Lyrics Reflect “Bumpy Road” to Marriage

Image Courtesy of Dine Alone RecordsFoo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel is making his frontman debut with If I Kill This Thing We’re All Going to Eat for a Week, the first album from his first solo project, Lieutenant. One might think the name Lieutenant refers to his status next to the general of modern rock music, Dave Grohl. As Mendel tells ABC Radio, he had a different idea for the name in mind.

"I like the kind of like military uniformity of [Lieutenant], with sort of faceless, anonymous part of a machine element to it. That's what kind of attracted me to it," Mendel says. "Then I thought, 'Aw man, is it going to be like I'm the lieutenant in this other band and I'm going out and doing this thing on my own?' So that wasn't really my idea, but if that's how someone hears it, I don't have a problem with it."

Between his Foo Fighters responsibilities and the creation of Lieutenant, Mendel has been quite busy. In addition, he married his longtime girlfriend, Kate Jackson, in October. For Mendel, the progression in his relationship with his now-wife helped shape the lyrics throughout If I Kill This Thing.

"It was a difficult transition to go from being a single person to a person that is wedded to another," Mendel tells ABC Radio. "That's a huge commitment and I took it very seriously. It was a bumpy road for me to get from one place to the other, and the lyrics represent that."

In particular, Mendel points to the album's single, "Believe the Squalor," as a song that reflects the evolution of his relationship.

"'Believe the Squalor' originally was just a song about the difficulty of [transitioning to marriage]," he says. "[The lyrics] were saying like, 'OK, we're having this difficulty right now, but shouldn't this have been foreseen? Because I'm a known quantity, my faults, and whatever good qualities I have were all self-evident going into this. So how can I be faulted for the negative qualities now?'"

Eventually, as the couple worked through those problems, the lyrics changed in "Believe the Squalor" to reflect Mendel's new perspective.

"As I was working on the song, I was kind of working through the emotions in the relationship and progressing," Mendel says. "So I made a conscious effort on ["Believe the Squalor"] to have it go full circle, from that kind of sense of defiance early on to, at the end of the song, building into this, what I wanted to be, a crescendo and kind of like cathartic release, like, 'Now I've see all the way through this.'"

Mendel will be touring as Lieutenant beginning with an appearance at the South by Southwest festival on March 18. The tour will wrap up April 8 in Los Angeles.

If I Kill This Thing We’re All Going to Eat for a Week is out now.


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