Nat Keefe

Nat’s panoramic songwriting and baritone vocals play a defining role in Hot Buttered Rum’s sound. Since founding HBR in 1999, Nat has played thousands of shows all over the world and written hundreds of songs.

Singing and pickin Bluegrass and Americana music are the center of Nat’s world, but he also moonlights under the tag BeatMower, performing electronic music. Over the Covid lockdown, Saturday night BeatMower dance parties became an online meeting place for many. BeatMower live-mixes multitrack beats and original and cover tunes, occupying a House music context, focusing on African and African diaspora music. Sometimes this centers on collaborations and recordings Nat made in Ghana, Rwanda, or Zambia, and sometimes on Ziggaboo Modeliste, Thomas Mapfumo, California Honeydrops, Justin Jay, LCD Soundsystem, Bassnectar, and Prince. BeatMower plays at festivals, venues, and parties big and small.

For 17 years now, Nat has produced and presented the Nat Keefe Concert Carnival, a holiday cabaret variety show, with cast and crew of 25+, at the Independent. This has become a cherished San Francisco tradition. 

Nat has produced 15+ projects of others’ music, including Kyle Ledson, Jessica Malone, and Fruition. Helping other people refine and realize their vision is a big part of Nat’s mission. He’s also composed music for use in other places, including Electronic Frontier Foundation’s podcast, a Youtube commission to compose and produce 30 new tracks for an audio library, and a forthcoming Burning Man installation, Field of Flowers.

Nat was inspired at an early age by musical parents and began singing and playing guitar at age 11 and upright and electric bass at 16. The next year, guitar teacher Tony Khalife pushed Nat to study tabla – the north Indian drums. Tabla study resulted in a trip to India. Nat’s teenage years were consumed by bass, upright in the jazz band and electric bass with a prog rock power trio called STEW. When Nat turned 18, his uncle Rodney Bolloni took him to Las Vegas for a crash course in the art of songcraft, and apparently, partying. Nat still cites his uncle Rodney as one of his biggest influences. Nat was ready when he met Erik Yates in the dormitories of Lewis & Clark College. Their bluegrass band in college was the stringband Foggy Notion Boys. Together, in the course of four years, Erik and Nat played Javanese gamelan music, big band jazz, Indian ragas, electronic music, music for modern dance, and sang in choir and a capella group. They both wrote orchestral pieces as part of their senior projects. At the end of college they formed Hot Buttered Rum with friends from UCSD.

HBR took the bulk of Nat’s attention for a decade, the aughts, as Butter premiered on the biggest festival stages in the country. In 2011, Nat, ready to mix things up, lead a group of 12 American musicians on a trip to Ghana. Over the course of two weeks of learning and sharing, in workshops, dance classes, and recording sessions, the group created Nat’s album “Girl Thursday” with Ghanaian colleagues. This Afro-Bluegrass music was recently revived at the Camp Deep End festival, and there are now plans for a 2023 tour.

When not touring, rehearsing, and recording, Nat lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with his hot wife and two young boys. Outside of music, Nat enjoys the same things since he was a boy: flyfishing, backpacking, skiing, urban-adventure bike riding, running on roads & trails & beaches, organizing the garage, and of course, SF Giants baseball.