Nathaniel Rateliff has had a banner year. He became chummy with Mumford & Sons and made tons of other friends on the road, including such kindred artists as the Delta Spirit. On the strength of his excellent Rounder Records debut, In Memory of Loss, the erstwhile Born in the Flood frontman captured the attention of everyone from Amazon.com, which listed his album as the number-one album you might have missed in 2010, to the New York Times, which pushed his show in the Big Apple, to Mojo, which gave his record a four-star review. But his biggest coup to date — and there's a certain irony attached to this — is the fact that Robert Plant (cover boy of the Mojo featuring the four-star review) listed Rateliff's song "Early Spring Till" at number one on his celebrity iTunes playlist, calling it "empty, fragmented and poignant."