For their first major arena tour as headliners, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats hit the road this past spring on their South of Here Tour with a soulful, vintage-inspired production design that reflected their signature blend of folk, Americana, and rhythm & blues. At the heart of the lighting design was the Elation SŌL I Blinder—a key fixture chosen by production and lighting designer Jeremy Roth, who specified 106 units as the core element of the visual aesthetic. Brown Note Productions delivered the full lighting, audio, and rigging systems for the tour.
Roth turned to the SŌL Blinders for their unique blend of retro form factor and modern colour capabilities. “I’m generally attracted to retro-looking fixtures,” he explained. “My preference is to utilise the best aspects of new technology, but ideally in a fixture that has a throwback feel to the earlier days of the lighting industry. I liked the feel of the SŌL—the Fresnel lens, the high CRI, the roundness of the front bevel—it had a nice throwback feel.”
The fixture proved to be a natural fit for Nathaniel Rateliff’s vintage style of music. With its RGBLAW chip, the SŌL I Blinder delivers a full-colour spectrum, including warm and cool shades of white, and a high CRI over 93 for looks that translate beautifully both live and on camera. “They’re great because you can mix some very convincing tungsten in them,” Roth said. “A lot of Nathaniel’s songs fit in that tungsten colour, and they handle chases and flashes really well.”
Roth has always been fascinated by light and its ability to influence human emotions. His design approach for the tour emphasised emotion through simplicity, relying more on static positions, carefully tuned colour temperatures, and intensity shifts rather than fast movement or effects. “The show is about simplicity and holding back. It often starts at low intensity and builds up,” he said.
The band is tight, and Roth says the production needed to match that precision while providing a classic visual look. Although the show’s colour palette remained intentionally limited, Roth used the SŌL I Blinders to shift from a wide range of warm white hues for soul revival songs to CTB, steel, and dark blues for more intimate moments. The fixture’s wide colour temperature range (1800K – 8500K) enabled him to create such nuanced looks with 10-12 shades in the warm range alone.
Roth was also impressed with the fixture’s dimming behavior. His programming approach ofteninvolves syncing effects with the beat while also incorporating a manually controlled element—something that can be brought up or down on a fader to give the light a sense of pulse.
“That ability to emulate the dimming response of a tungsten fixture is incredibly important. It creates the feel that the light isn’t reacting in a literal or immediate way but instead follows with a delayed dimming curve for a more natural feel. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Elation fixtures. They don’t just offer standard dimming curves, they allow for subtle, delayed response curves that closely mimic the behavior of incandescent sources. This makes them well-suited for fader control because it lets the light respond very subtly instead of abruptly. That’s key for me in programming.”
Then there are moments where Roth pushed the fixtures to full intensity. One standout moment came during the song Survivor, when the SŌL Blinders transitioned from warm tungsten-style looks to a full-intensity cold white strobe to match a staccato horn line in the outro.
“Up to that point, they’ve been doing mostly tungsten chases, and you don’t really know that they can do much more than that. It’s a moment where this light that was seemingly innocuous, creating these nice warm looks, suddenly punishes you for a few seconds with 9000 lumens of bright white flashing. The show becomes all about the horns, and the punch from the lights is spectacular in that moment. It kind of bangs you over the head right at the end of the song and then ends with a blackout so you have an after image of all 106 blinders,” Roth said.
Another technique Roth used to great effect was shifting unexpectedly into saturated colours, sometimes even unexpected ones like UV or teal, to create a look that stood apart from everything that came before. “When those colours are brought in during a song or a sequence of songs, the change has a striking impact as it creates a different look and vibe that the audience hadn’t seen up to that point.”
The production also featured a large video component, with three main video screens behind the band plus I-Mag screens. The SŌL I Blinders were used to form a mid-stage frame of light with more fixtures mounted around three large video screens to create a picture frame effect. They were active for roughly 90% of the show, with Roth typically running them at just five to 10% intensity.
Supporting the production was longtime partner Brown Note Productions, who has been Nathaniel Rateliff’s vendor since the start of his touring days. The company worked closely with Roth to bring his vision to life, even purchasing the SŌL Blinders specifically for the tour. “It’s always amazing to have a company so open to bringing in the tools the designer needs,” Roth said.
Brown Note also engineered a custom mounting system for the SŌL fixtures that ensured precise alignment and consistent spacing between the fixtures and the video walls. They also met the challenge of adapting a tightly specified production design to a wide variety of venue sizes and configurations.
For Roth, one fixture stood out as indispensable throughout the South of Here Tour: the SŌL I Blinders. “Honestly, if I had to strip everything else away, I would keep the SŌLs,” he said. “They carry the core energy of the show and are the one fixture I couldn’t substitute. They’re small, travel easily, and are road-worthy. I don’t think we had to replace a single unit.”
The South of Here Tour kicked off in fall 2024 and wrapped in spring 2025, with a scaled-down version planned for the final leg this fall. Even in the reduced setup, the SŌL I Blinders will remain an integral part of the show.
