Current Joys: Influences Playlist

Three years before the release of his double-sided 2023 album LOVE+POP, Nick Rattigan found himself in the woody enclaves of Tennessee—alone and walking on emotional, musical landmines. He had just written East My Love, a project that he would eventually put out four years later, but didn’t feel ready enough to confront the raw and emotionally charged lyricism that seemed to spill out of him in a publicly perceivable context.

As he finally got to a place where the songs were more comforting than triggering, Rattigan announced the 12th album under his Current Joys moniker. East My Love is a collection of rich, Americana-soaked ballads and folk tunes that embrace his intricate and honest storytelling through hand-woven tales of heritage and trauma. While Rattigan predicts that some might label East My Love his “country album,” he feels that this is simply a deeper reiteration of the lush, multi-dimensional world he’s created within the project—that just happened to be inspired by the myriad of folky albums, books and movies he was consuming throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’ve been inviting our favorite musicians to compile mixes of the media that has impacted their latest projects the most. Check out Current Joys’ collection, which includes albums by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Steinbeck novels and a film that destroyed the studio that made it, below.

The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Current Joys I wrote the album four years ago, so it’s funny talking about these influences, because I feel like I have to jump back into that time. But that was during September 2020—deep COVID. California was on fire and the skies were red. Everyone was freaking out about everything, and I decided to just get in my car and drive into the middle of the country with no real game plan. I was going to national parks and sleeping in my car, camping when I could at weird little campsites. The whole time, all I was listening to was that album over and over and over again. It seeped into my subconscious. I drove to the exact latitude and longitude of the middle of the country and was sitting by a campfire, and that’s when I wrote “They Shoot Horses,” which was my attempt at making a Sweetheart of the Rodeo style song. I feel like that album is just so comforting, and it was something that was very much in my soundtrack when I was writing this album.

The Grateful Dead: Wake of the Flood

During this time I had become a big Deadhead. It was sort of leading up to it during my 2019 Surf Curse tour. My guitarist Noah is a huge Deadhead, and he would play it for us all the time, and we were just not really fucking with it. I never thought in my life that I would be a Deadhead, but I always say that you don’t get into the Dead—the Dead get into you. Something just clicked on that tour. I think we were driving through Colorado—through the Rockies—and there was just this jam sesh they were going into, and I was like, ‘Oh, I get it.’ I got really deep into a Dead hole, which was when I was writing a lot of this music—this Americana Folk.

Wake of the Flood is my favorite Dead album. It was right after Pigpen died, and he was this really bluesy guy, which seeped into a lot of their music. Once he passed, they wrote this very sorrowful, ballady album. I feel like Wake of the Flood has some Alex G to it, in the way the fiddle is played, and the way the violins are on there reminds me a lot of Rocket. There’s a lot of resistance in their other albums, so if anyone’s trying to start somewhere, start with “Stella Blue” or “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo.”

Bob Dylan: Desire

Another person I went down a deep rabbit hole with while making this record was Bob Dylan. He’s one of the biggest punks in music; I feel like he just did not give a shit what people thought of him, was so politically motivated, and was just such a cool freaking guy. I love his ‘70s Rolling Thunder Revue era, when he was painting his face white and and playing this real folky kind of Americana. Desire was the record, I guess he was touring back then, but Renaldo and Clara was the music movie that Sam Shepard filmed that really got me deep into that world.

I think this record is the best Bob Dylan record. I feel like a lot of these Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan people have this resistance to them. Maybe it’s the harmonica that people don’t love. I feel like this is where it really becomes this beautiful, relaxing music. “Hurricane” is so iconic, but once you get into the rest of the record, it’s just smooth sailing, and these really slow ballads that are really beautiful. I think that’s the Wake of the Flood of the Dylan era, the most easy listening, comforting records to get into.

Flogging Molly: Drunken Lullabies

I grew up on Flogging Molly. My dad is Irish Catholic, and went to school with the nuns. I grew up really attached to this Irish heritage that I have in my family, because Vegas is just a desert with synthetic culture that’s created around it. Flogging Molly was Irish punk rock, and I saw them like five or six times growing up. They were very formative for me. The first songs that I learned on guitar were Flogging Molly songs. With this record I also tried to lean into some Irish Celtic vibes, and a lot of the songs are me leaning into my Flogging Molly side with the fiddle.

Pink Floyd: Meddle

Another artist that I was listening to a lot during this time was Pink Floyd. I really got into them because I had watched Zabriskie Point and they did the soundtrack for that. I just realized this whole other level of Pink Floyd that was pre-Dark Side of the Moon. There’s this song “Green is the Color” that I almost covered for this record that’s more folky, and taps into that Grateful Dead feeling more than their iconic records that everybody knows. Meddle was another thing that was seeping into my subconscious at the time of writing the songs.

Heartworn Highways (1976)

I feel like Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson were a part of that outlaw country I was really attracted to—that 70s vibe when all the country people started smoking weed and being hippies. I was super into Heartworn Highways, this really beautiful doc filmed in this way that’s very sincere and beautiful and artistic, which was just an angle that I had never really thought of with country music before. I was really trying to tap into that sensibility when it came to writing this record.

East of Eden (1952)

This was one that I really got deep into during COVID, with a lot of the religious philosophy in that book. There’s this whole section where they’re talking about Cain and Abel and other sections of the Bible that I was really obsessed with. I think a lot of the religious aspects of this book connects to nature, while also telling this really fucked up family story over the course of however many years. It’s another thing that seeped into the blender. I feel like a lot of this album is more spiritual, because I was getting really interested in Christian iconography and God at the time.

Days of Heaven (1978)

One of the most beautifully shot movies ever made. It was all shot in natural sunlight, and very connected to the nature and the land around it. It’s something that was constantly on while I was recording the record; I just had my laptop pulled up when I was doing vocal takes, just watching this movie over and over again. That’s kind of how I write music—I’ll put a film on in the background. And this was definitely the imagery that I was trying to soundtrack. It feels frozen in the time of like the ‘70s, almost like an artifact.

Heaven’s Gate (1980)

This movie is very controversial because it destroyed the studio that produced it. Michael Camino wanted to make this story about this obscure war that happened in the United States in the early 1900s but the production was super fraught. The movie came out, it lost millions of dollars and it bankrupted the studio. People were like, ‘We’re not going to give money to artists anymore—We’re just going to make Star Wars II.’ So you can thank this movie for pretty much destroying artistic integrity in American cinema, but I watched it and I was like, ‘Oh, this movie is incredible.’ It’s just another film that tapped into that Americana essence that I was looking for. All the Tetris pieces really lined up with the music that I was listening to, and this movie and Days of Heaven were two really important movies in their imagery that influenced how I wrote the record.

Current Joys’ new album, East My Love, is out today via Secretly Canadian.

Influences Playlist: Current Joys

These are the albums, books, and movies that influenced Current Joys' newest album, East My Love, the most.