He grew up in Milwaukee, but always looked towards the big city as where he would end up. He felt a bit claustrophobic in his hometown, like he needed a city as big as he was. 

Music was always his joy, but usually in a very unstructured way. His house had an old upright piano in it that no one played. He took to it at an early age, and was picking out melodies by ear when he was five. His parents decided to feed that interest, and gave him piano lessons...which he hated. Too much structure, not enough experimentation. So, he dropped those after a year, and went back to finding and learning instruments his own way.  

His first exposure to musicals was a high school production of Oklahoma that his sister was involved in. He wasn't sure what it was, but the spectacle of it was undeniable.  It wasn't like he went out the next day and started writing, but it planted a seed that would spring forth later on.

Nathan wasn't a fantastic performer...make no mistake, he was good, but he knew that his future wasn't in performing music. He wasn't writing music at this point, just taking in all the music around him.  He didn't think that he was able to write an original song, and was convinced that anything he tried to write would sound like something else he had heard.

That all changed when he found an old 4-track tape recorder at a rummage sale. He started experimenting, and was surprised to find that writing music was as natural as breathing. Things always came quickly to Nathan, but threw himself into this with a vengeance. *this* was what he was meant to do, and he soon had very little patience for anything that distracted him from it. Like any teenager, he had an electric guitar, and soon filled countless tapes with riffs and ideas. He wasn't what you would think of as a metalhead, though...he enjoyed the experimental, and tended towards groups like the Velvet Undergound, Queen, and Sonic Youth. These influences were tempered by the other music he was exposed to growing up, mainly a lot of Big Band like Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. 

He went to High School of the Arts, but still was feeling unsatisfied...he wasn't able to write there as much as he want, it was mainly focused on performance, and was more structured than he wanted. Not to mention he had little patience for classroom learning anyway. He was the one who always had notebooks crammed full of ideas, and would go home and try them out. However, there was one positive thing that came out of his high school days: he was exposed to the "grand musical", shows like Showboat, The King and I, Chess. The seed that was planted years before started to grow. This was a form that grabbed hold of him and wouldn't let go.

Nathan got involved in theater, and learned the form from the inside out.  This was where Nathan truly started to come into his own, and started to bloom. The discovery of what truly spoke to him caused his confidence to explode, and that translated very well to the stage. He didn't have a classically beautiful voice, but it had power and presence, and he threw himself into it. Much like the music he enjoyed, he had power, and it was practically a tangible thing.

His teachers told him hat he should go to college for theater. Nathan went, but that felt far too restrictive to Nathan, who was accustomed to learning by doing, rather going to classrooms. So, after two years in college, he moved to New York, just like a million other aspiring artists. 

By this time, Nathan had a small portfolio of small shows that he had written. His work gave him confidence, so he went to dozens of small theaters, trying to get his foot in the door with performance, and to get his work looked at. Most everywhere he went was astounded by his music, but thought that his words were far too raw for good theater. Undaunted,  he kept at it, kept writing, and kept his foot in the door at small summer stock shows and community theaters.

It was during this time that Nathan first met Maurice. Nathan was in the theater, sitting at the piano, working on one of his songs, singing. Maurice was involved in the crew, and was listening. Nathan was stopped, pondering over a phrase, when Maurice suggested a lyric to him. Nathan tried it, and thought it was pretty good...he used it. (Although his response was something along the lines of, "huh, that's pretty good. Thanks."...and then went back to playing.) Maurice went back to his work as well. 

That pattern continued for a while, Nathan playing, Maurice suggesting lyrics in passing. After a while, Nathan was playing one of those songs when the director of the show he was working on arrived. The director was immediately taken with how the words and music worked together, and asked if he had anything else. He played a few other songs for the director, but none of them had the same spark as the one he had been working on "with" Maurice. 

It rankled him a little that his music didn't get noticed until someone else's lyrics were on it, but Nathan knew he was onto something with he collaborative work he had started with Maurice. After rehearsal that evening, he sought out Maurice, and asked if he wanted to get together and really work on something. Maurice agreed.

As it turned out, their words and music were a natural together. After a few months, they had developed a short piece that they presented to the director. The director thought it was brilliant, and immediately started work to put it into production. 

This started a collaboration that had a solid upward trajectory. Each show was better received than the last. Nathan finally lost his overt resentment of needing someone else's help with music, but it still manifests itself in certain ways...

When the curtain rises on Unfinished, we're seeing the end of their first major breakthrough piece, the one that truly cemented their names as starts of musical theater.