From outside, the Mansion at Strathmore is quiet, primly guarding its contents from the passersby who only use its sprawling grounds as a shortcut. Yet inside, on March 14, an electric guitar’s wails shake the walls, so unexpectedly and painfully loud that someone should really tell the musicmaker to take his teenage angst some place else.
No one does. The guitar player is a teenager, but he’s earned his place in Strathmore’s wood-paneled Dorothy M. and Maurice C. Shapiro Music Room. At 17 years old, Nate Foley has already released two CDs, earned the Washington Area Music Association (WAMA) 2011 award for “Best New Artist of the Year,” won the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night Contest eight consecutive times and has been selected as an Artist in Residence at Strathmore, a non-profit that provides a wide variety of arts programming in north Bethesda.
On Wednesday, he will perform in concert at the mansion, premiering the new music he’s been working on through the Strathmore program.
Foley refuses to admit any of that is unique (except for the wins at the Apollo Theater – he’s admittedly very proud of that streak). Deep down, he’s a relatively normal 17-year-old. He thinks high school is “terrible” and “boring.” He performs locally as a part of fusion band FLLD (Foley, Lieder, Lieder and Dunnevant). He hates talking in front of a crowd, an issue he’s had to face frequently as a performer.
“For a guy getting a lot of attention, I don’t think he’s letting it go to his head,” said Dan Hovey, Foley’s mentor at the Artist in Residence program. “I think he realizes that there are skills he needs to develop more to be a full-on professional, and I think he’s very serious about getting those skills.”
Although Foley had a childhood dream of being a herpetologist (he still has a fascination with snakes), he has always wanted to be a musician. When he was about six years old, he told his parents he wanted to play guitar. They told him he had to first play piano for a year to prove he was committed. On his first day of lessons, the piano teacher opened the door, and Foley immediately said, “I’m only doing this so I can play the guitar.”
“[The teacher] was kind of taken aback,” said Nate’s father, Maurice Foley, chuckling. “We didn’t know where he would end up, but we knew he did have skill.”
Then came the guitars. The toy guitar from Toys “R” Us that was such a letdown after that rough year of piano. The three-quarter size classical guitar because he learned classical first. The Squier Stratocaster that has had skewed strings ever since he accidentally hit the bridge against a bus. The Paul Reed Smith (PRS) Student Edition that became unusable when one of the potentiometers broke. The Epiphone Les Paul that simply faded into the background when PRS decided to sponsor Foley and sent him two guitars. His favorite is the PRS Custom 24, which sells for about $3,000 in stores.
“The neck is perfect. The action is perfect. It’s just perfect. It sounds awesome. To the max,” Foley said.
Foley could play by ear at seven, although he says he wasn’t even good until age 12 when he became the guitarist at the Sharon Bible Fellowship Church. He grew up splitting his listening time between his father’s soul and funk and his mother’s contemporary Christian gospel, so his church’s hymns are just as valuable to him as the work of Funkadelic or Jimi Hendrix (At the concert Foley gave for Strathmore donors on March 14, his jazzed-up rendition of “Amazing Grace” received more applause than any other song).
Foley auditioned for the last season of the TV show Showtime at the Apollo when he was about 12 years old. He didn’t make it, but his name was mistakenly put on the bill. As an apology, he was put on the weekly variety show, and so began his legendary winning streak.
“The first time I played at the Apollo was when I lost all nervousness for all gigs in the future,” Foley said. “That’s like the peak of fear because they can boo you off the stage, and if they like you or don’t like you determines if you win or not, and that’s just so frightening.”
Drummer and bandmate Miles Lieder disputed Foley’s claim.
“He got nervous last week,” Lieder said, referring to the band’s concert debuting music from their new CD, Noon Time Moon Shine, a play off the band’s former, also-paradoxical name, Midnight Sun.
Foley glared at his friend but smiled as he asked, “What the hell, man?”
His goal is to win a Grammy before he’s 22, after he heads off to either Belmont University or the University of Southern California to pursue a degree in guitar performance. Yet Foley has never had goals in the past.
“I trust that things work out ’cause they usually do, and I think setting goals would have prohibited me from doing a lot of things I have done,” Foley said. “I didn’t want to do to the Apollo; I didn’t want to do Artist in Residence, but I don’t listen to my head a lot of times. I’m not going with the scared part of me; I’m going with the courageous part of me.”
