A
t first, Nat Myers thought his problems could be blamed on a crummy mattress.
On tour behind his 2023 release, the Dan Auerbach-produced Yellow Peril, Myers’ back had started to hurt. Slowly, surely, never really going away. Life as a touring artist is hard on the body, he thought: cheap beds in worse hotels, endless hours on the road, lugging heavy equipment from town to town. He was an otherwise healthy guy, and like so many others, he didn’t have health insurance. It’s not like he could just duck in easily for an affordable checkup or X-ray to see what was up.
The pain started to get worse. Myers bought a new mattress at home, but that didn’t help, and when he watched a video of himself playing the guitar, he could see that he was wincing. He thinks about that moment frequently, and the other times he got hints that something was deeply wrong. When did the signs start to surface?
“See, I’ve been asking myself that question a lot,” Myers says in his relaxed Kentucky drawl. We’re at a coffee shop in East Nashville, where he’s passing through on the road to fetch his bass player. A John Deere cap sits crooked on his bald head, his once dark and thick brows now gone. In the days before he got sick, he sported a thick mustache and two long black braids.
He doesn’t have to work very hard to remember when it all changed. It was February 2025, and Myers had arrived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to play one of his biggest headlining shows yet, right as Yellow Peril was connecting with fans. Rooted in the blues and anchored by both Myers’ deep, ancient tone, it reflected on life as an Asian American in a country riddled with injustice and prejudice that only grew worse and more violent during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Right before he was set to go onstage, Myers suffered what he remembers as a “crazy attack of pain.” He called his friend Carol, a nurse. “I was like, ‘Is it fucked up to take five Tylenol?’” he asked her. “Because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get up and play.”
Myers made it through the show, but driving back to his girlfriend Morgan’s house in South Carolina, he “felt like the Tin Man.” It wasn’t just his back anymore, either. He’d started having some breathing problems and assumed he’d picked up a lung infection. But once he got to Morgan’s, and she laid her head on his chest, she insisted he see a doctor immediately.
“She said it was like a balloon deflating and reinflating,” Myers remembers. “So I was like, ‘OK. I’ll go to fucking urgent care.’ And then it’s like this weird Monty Python-esque dark comedy of what happened to me.”
What they thought might be a one- or two-night stay in the ER on Feb. 9 turned to weeks. Not long after he arrived, Myers was being referred from his bed in the hospital to end-of-life care, diagnosed with Stage 4 intimal sarcoma, a rare cancer that had grown around his heart and pulmonary artery. After surgeries, ultrasounds, and endless other tests, they finally discovered that the pain Myers had been feeling was from the tumors pressing on the lining of his lungs. “Plural pain,” they call it. Some people with his cancer never find out they have it; instead, families discover the diagnosis only after their loved one’s death.
At the hospital, one of Myers’ many doctors pulled Morgan aside. “You’ve got to be prepared,” he told her. “Because we don’t think he’s ever going to get out of here.”
BEFORE THE DIAGNOSIS, MYERS was just a musician raised in Kentucky who fell in love with the blues. Born in Kansas, he and his family lived in Memphis for a spell before settling in the Bluegrass State. His father, who died last year, was an Army veteran who met his wife — Myers’ mother — when he was stationed in South Korea. Myers became enamored with poetry before anything else: the classics, like Homer, Virgil, Dante, and regional poets like Frank Stafford, who told stories deeply rooted in place, carrying the soul of the soil in their writing.
He loved music too (mostly rap and hardcore at first), and when he was 13, his parents noticed that their boy had a tendency to sit in the living room and sing along to records, pretending to strum.
“I got caught enough times for my parents to realize, ‘Maybe he wants a guitar,’” Myers says. “So they fetched me one when I was real young.” Myers was always drawn to blues artists like Charlie Patton and others who sang in a cadence that felt, to him, like poetry to music. It reflected the pain he often felt as a Korean American growing up in Kentucky, often bullied and teased by white classmates who called him derogatory names or pulled on their eyelids to mock him.
In 2015, he enrolled at the New School in New York, studying poetry and selling weed by bike courier to earn some cash. He never really thought about making a living as an artist — even his professors at school were realistic enough to encourage students to seek alternate sources of income or more stable jobs that actually offered benefits. But one day, he decided to give busking on the street a go. Up to that point, he’d mostly played music quietly in his room, and he was so embarrassed at his first public attempt that he faced the wall while singing.
“It was the first time I’d ever made money as a poet,” says Myers, who is now based in Covington, Kentucky. “I poured thousands of dollars into trying to get a degree in the damn shit, but it wasn’t until I was actually on the block when I was able to do something with it.” Street gigs turned into real venues, and then he was playing full-length shows, until the city shut down for Covid-19. Myers pivoted to working on transcriptions for a conservative radio-show host who he patently didn’t agree with, just to pay the bills. He found himself having to listen to interviews with figures like Mike Huckabee claiming that “every Chinese student in America is a potential fucking agent for the Chinese Communist Party,” and tweeting racist jokes while hate crimes against Asian Americans rose at a terrifying pace. “A lot of my inspiration for Yellow Peril came from that,” he adds.
Myers, wearing his hospital bracelet, picks his guitar in September.
Andres Tabares
Myers kept playing music, and because the blues community is small, his songs were often passed from one person to another. First, they landed with the U.K.-based artist K.K. Hammond, then on to the actor Michael Raymond-James. Many more in between heard Myers’ songs, until they finally populated the inbox of Auerbach, who produced the record and released it on his Easy Eye Sound imprint. “That was an amazing time,” Myers reflects. “I’ve had a lot of bad luck to have so much good luck, too. I really came out of nothing, to operate on a level of music that I’d never really dreamed of.”
Things were looking good for a while, until the pain started. He was touring across the country and through Europe, with artists like Parker Millsap, Willi Carlisle, and Charley Crockett. He was posting videos of new songs picked artfully on his resonator guitar on Instagram until two days before he arrived at the hospital in South Carolina, songs that made the blues feel urgent and accessible for a new generation. “He’s one of those people you are drawn to and enjoy their company off the bat,” Crockett says. “His mix of country, blues, folk music, the way that he was doing it was just so genuine. I knew it was coming from the heart.”
When Myers was diagnosed, someone on his care team asked if he wanted to speak with other people in the cancer community for support; when he responded that he’d hoped to talk specifically with someone who had the same type as him, he was told that wouldn’t be possible. “And the reason why is that most people with my cancer died,” Myers says. “One person compared it to being struck by lightning, twice.” He was given weeks to live — days, even, by certain doctors. The one who made the case that it was too early for hospice, Dr. Ben Thompson, later showed up at one of Myers’ first gigs back after chemo.
“Doctors saved my life, doctors almost killed me, you know what I mean?” Myers says. “The thing with rare cancers, as I have come to learn, is your outcome can really be determined by an individual oncologist, or an individual outcome.”
Tour dates and festival slots were replaced with chemotherapy: six rounds, each requiring five days as an inpatient. The costs were going to be exorbitant. Doctors told him that, even if he was able to get insured, “this was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your own pocket,” Myers says, who is being treated at both Ohio State University Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Like many uninsured, he launched a GoFundMe to help cover expenses, boosted by the help of friends like Crockett. The lack of affordable healthcare has been a constant crisis for musicians, who function primarily as independent contractors: Therefore, the majority are not eligible for employee coverage unless they are signed to a major label and can qualify through SAG-AFTRA. Preventive care is prohibitively expensive, leading many artists to delay care until things turn for the worst, and even then, they still have difficulty accessing doctors due to long wait lists.
Organizations like MusiCares and Music Health Alliance work to bridge the gaps, but premiums — especially since subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act were left to expire by the Trump administration — have risen drastically, far beyond what most working artists can afford. It’s an issue that Chappell Roan tried to draw attention to when she accepted her Best New Artist Award at the Grammys in 2025. “Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection,” Roan said. It’s a complex problem, though, says Tatum Allsep, CEO and founder of Music Health Alliance. “If an artist became an employee, then their product is owned completely by the label.”
Allsep and Music Health Alliance help musicians like Myers obtain the best health-insurance options. Often that has been through the Affordable Care Act, though Allsep has watched costs rise astronomically in the past two years. “It’s getting harder to navigate because costs are increasing,” she says. “It’s become a political pawn on both sides.”
Myers wasn’t even aware of the resources at Music Health Alliance at first. He credits music executive Ayappa Biddanda for connecting him with the organization that helped him secure insurance (talk to Myers long enough and he makes sure to repeatedly call out doctors, friends, and advocates who have helped along the way). “I had no idea about Music Health Alliance until I needed it,” Myers says. “And I think that’s another thing. It’s like, ‘How can you get somebody the thing they need before they realize they need it?’”
It’s never been more important, as cancer rates are rising in certain communities. Younger demographics are being diagnosed with increasing cases of colon cancer, and people of color face disproportionately higher mortality rates from the disease. Appalachia, including parts of Myers’ home state, sees some of the highest numbers in the country, where a confluence of elements makes the oft-neglected population even more vulnerable, many of whom are left bankrupt by medical bills.
What happens, though, when you’re desperate? And when the healthcare system is flawed to its core and disinformation about alternative treatments spreads rapidly online? It pains Myers to watch as fellow cancer patients turn to questionable (or even scientifically debunked) options spread by MAHA and manosphere influencers, like using ivermectin as a treatment substitute.
“Grifters and charlatans come into the equation,” he says. “If you were just a bird’s-eye alien looking at America’s perspective of what cancer treatment is, you’d think the vast majority of Americans think it’s either a conspiracy, a sugar-intake problem, or a parasite. You’d think the majority of Americans believe that, and it’s not true. I got a head on my shoulders — not to say other people don’t — but it’s a tragedy.” Celebrities like Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson, who help spread these bogus treatments, make him furious.
But it’s part of why he made the decision early on in his diagnosis to document his experience online, in hopes that sharing what he’s gone through could urge others to get that strange pain checked out, or help them cut through the alternative treatment-pushing slop being marketed by “doctors” out to make a buck. Being a public patient hasn’t come without its difficulties, though. He’s used to being referred to as “that cancer musician,” or having people leave bizarre comments on his Instagram page as if he can’t read them himself (a recent one said something to the tune of “It’s crazy he’s still alive”). When he started playing shows again, fans started to approach him at the merch table to pray for him, “making me bow my head with them while I’m just trying to sell merchandise.”
Myers has asked himself repeatedly if he walked willingly into a “social media minefield.” It’s rough out there, online. Recently, he’s been following the reaction to musician Stella Lefty, who has been subject to accusations of plagiarism and nepotism — some people going so far as to claim that her father, Eric Lefkofsky, was somehow an AI mastermind of her career. Lefkofsky is the founder of Tempus AI, a company that uses artificial intelligence to address cancer outcomes and treatments. “Tempus AI saved my life,” Myers says. “When they ran my shit, they found treatments for me.”
Amid it all, Myers just wants to play songs and sing the blues. He’s been back on tour, striking a tricky balance between chemo treatments and shows, but he’s making it work. He started with some dates opening for Southern-rock band Blackberry Smoke (who tragically lost their drummer to cancer), and hit multiple festivals over the summer. Shortly after our coffee, he’s scheduled to head out with Crockett for a series of shows beginning in Charlottesville, Virginia — afterward, he will fly home to commemorate the anniversary of his father’s death and then over to Columbus for treatment before another date. Crockett is more than happy to be flexible for his friend.
“I’ve rarely seen somebody with the kind of positive response to adversity than that Kentucky boy Nat Myers,” Crockett says. “I’m lucky to know his ass.”
New music is coming, too. He released two songs this year and recently went into the studio with producer Andrew Watt and Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as blues-rock bandleader Tyler Bryant. Myers liked how Watt, known for his work with Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, and Brandi Carlile among many others, helped him push into some new territory. “I don’t think I’m a traditional blues player,” Myers says. “I think what attracts me to Watt is his ability to take those influences and maybe make something new with it. I’m a new man in a certain way. Maybe my sound needs to change a little bit, too. I can always make a fucking traditional record. All I need is a can.”
Myers was one show into a tour with Charley Crockett when he had to exit to receive new treatment.
Andres Tabares
There’s also the chance, down the road, that his ability to make music in the same capacity could shift. Doctors have warned Myers that his voice could change if the tumor grows or even shrinks, or if he has to undergo radiation. His particular cancer also surrounds his pulmonary artery, which contains a nerve connected directly to the vocal cords. Even the way his fingers operate, which now pick so deftly at the guitar, could be impacted.
We’re finished with our coffee, and Myers needs to pick up his bassist, so we start to walk through the Five Points area of East Nashville. Todd Snider’s Purple Building is down the block, and Myers remembers a time at AmericanaFest three years ago, before he got sick, when he met Snider for the first time. Snider’s gone and so much has changed in such a short time, but that’s life: Like a blues song, the rhythm of it all keeps you chugging through the hard stuff.
“Death didn’t give me a hug, but it winked at me a bunch,” Myers says before heading down the street on foot. “But I don’t plan on going nowhere for a while.”
MYERS MADE IT TO ONE SHOW on this leg of the Crockett tour, Sept. 7 in Virginia. He wore a striped shirt, his trucker hat, and bantered with the crowd, playing a bright-red guitar. The next day, he received the result of some scans, which showed that his cancer had grown. He would have to quit the tour and begin a series of 15 rounds of radiation right away. Even though the side effects are brutal, he’s still looking toward the future: He already has a date for the Big Blues Bender in Las Vegas on his calendar for 2027, and he will be opening for Joy Oladokun in November. Crockett is eager to have him out again, too, as soon as he’s well enough. His message for Myers: “When you lick it again, come back out here for some more.”
“These past two weeks have been a reminder of how lucky I am as a performer to do what I do, and having it all taken away from me again reminds me again what a privilege it is to be making music and make a living,” Myers says via text message. “It reminds me I gotta kill this thing before it kills me. But despite the difficulties, friends, family, fans, and good music continue to pull me through.”
He posted the news of his scans to Instagram alongside a video where he’s playing his song “Young Mind Old Soul,” recorded in the chemo ward during his last infusion. The buttons on his flannel are undone to allow access to the port on his chest, covered with a bandage. His fingers move quickly as his leg taps, shaking the IV line to vibrate along with the beat.
“This ain’t going backward, this is falling forward,” Myers wrote. “All I know is I ain’t gon nowhere. I’ma keep course, and keeping fighting like hell. If the other shoe is bound to fall, it’ll get to fallin. This is a setback, not a throwback. If you like me, out the torrents of summer a cool autumn breeze can carry you thru months of bad rain.”
