Nathan Quick spent years working 190 miles off the shore of Louisiana. Getting to and from the oil rig required a helicopter ride, so personal effects had to be kept to a minimum. That meant no guitar for the young singer-songwriter. But Quick found the far-flung locale helped him fill up lyric books.

“The night is kind of beautiful, man,” he says. “The stars light up in the sky and they don’t look the same as they do at home. You can sit up and write without distractions. It was three weeks on, three weeks off, so it gives you stories and it gives you time to think. You go out on the helideck and look at nothing but water. It’s quiet up there.” He’d bring ideas back from the offshore rig and put them down at SugarHill Recording Studios.

“I could pull songs together in a way I couldn’t when I was offshore,” he says. “There I just had stories, no guitar.” But working in the Gulf came with its complications, too. The 10 minutes of time allotted on the box phone didn’t allow for booking gigs. And departures, Quick says, could be terrifying. “The first thing you do is this nerve wracking turn, 90 degrees,” he says. “In a window seat, all you see is water.” So Quick made a break from that vocation and he’s thrown himself fully into his music. In a short amount of time Quick has made a strong impression with his songs, which draw in part from soul, country, folk, blues and rock. He has session guitarist chops and a howling voice that contrasts his soft-spoken demeanor.

– Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle