Few musicians can say they’ve played a gig in the parking lot of McDonalds, but this is just one of the many adventures music has taken singer/guitarist Nathan Roberts on.

Growing up in Italy, the child of Australian parents, Nathan has been surrounded by eclectic sounds and cultural stimuli from a young age. And when he first took guitar lessons at an after-school program in Naples, on a “cheap nylon string guitar,” it laid the foundation for what would become an ongoing exploration of stylistic authenticity.

His love of music accompanied him back to Melbourne, Australia — where he moved as a teenager — and it was during a jam session with a friend that he dove into songwriting.

“I caught up with a good friend of mine and we wrote a song together,” Nathan explains. “I had tried to write songs before, but this was the first one I was really proud of…the lyrics were really meaningful to me.” The result was a fully recorded song, Real Friends, which is quite fittingly about friendships and how they sometimes fall apart. “I recorded that from home and I’m pretty sure I used GarageBand for it. It was basically a terribly recorded demo,” Nathan laughs. However poorly recorded, he remembers the creation of this tune being a therapeutic experience — an element of the artistry that continues to draw him back. The songwriting collab also led to forming the indie-pop band, The Monday Crowd. The band went onto record a more professionally produced EP of originals through a Frankston City Council initiative and play gigs around Melbourne and the Melbourne Peninsula, including: Auskick, the Coburg Night Market and of course, the parking lot of McDonalds!

Playing in The Monday Crowd cemented Nathan’s love of indie music, and as the name suggests, propelled him to push beyond the boundaries of the style he’d become comfortable with. After starting uni, Nathan felt motivated to experiment with new sounds, borrowed mostly from jazz. This is not a typical move for a boy from the Mornington Peninsula, an area typified by its alt-rock act saturation, and understandably, the sentiment that wasn’t shared by his band members. So Nathan embarked on his solo act adventure, named UsThree (Me, myself and I). “What helped with my development is teaching myself songs that I’d enjoyed listening to, and in doing so, I learned a lot more chord structures, like Major 7s and Minor 7s. That pushed me into the jazzier sound that I now use in a lot of my songs. I also started incorporating some of 251 movements and gospel sounds in the chord progressions.”

Nathan’s stylistic redirection came with fresh inspiration and resulted in Swim With Me, a song that won the Bendigo Bank songwriting contest in 2021. “It helped bring some awareness about the type of music I was releasing,” Nathan said. Since forming his solo act, he’s also gone on to release Save Me From My Heart, I’m Over You and his most recent single, Just Come Over, which incorporates an energetic rap cameo courtesy of fellow stylistic outlier, Kid Keeks. Just Come Over was further brought to life with an old-school hip-hop style film clip. “The vision was to get that US west coast 90s hip hop sunny beach vibe and I do feel like we kind of got there,” Nathan said of the filming. “Kid Keeks wasn’t sure how well the style would fit with the song but he really added a lot of value to it.” The song was submitted to Triple J unearthed and received positive reviews from Triple J’s Executive Producer Tommy Faith and Producer Anika Luna.

As a soloist, Nathan has been a regular at Sunday Sessions at Commonfolk Café in Mornington, playing a combination or covers and originals. He is currently working on some new tunes that he anticipates will be more raw than before. “To be honest, I kind of need to do it for my own mental health,” he expresses. He’s currently recording Under the Lemon Tree, which he wrote to describe the process of growing up in two different countries and the emotional highs and lows that can bring. “It’s about processing that cultural adjustments and dealing with the nostalgia that I can’t share with anyone other than my siblings.”

To check out USThree’s music visit Apple Music or Spotify.