Raina Rose: It’s a Hard, Beautiful Living
Words: Sarah Hagerman
Raina Rose
I’ve been careless
I’ve been clumsy
I’ve been cavalier
I’ve been clutching at something
Like there is something here
And there’s one thing to be sure of
Nothing is cast in stone
And even stone must go down to the earth
To find a home
- “Heart Broken Open”
Life is a series of fluctuations, but we’re pretty darn good at fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise. Sometimes though, the universe likes to give us a not-so-friendly reminder, as the ground crumbles beneath our feet, the reins we confidently held suddenly snap, the rug that tied the room together is miterated upon. We’re left dazed and confused, searching for answers. But sometimes, as we sift through the rubble, we can find inspiration.
In May 2008, singer/songwriter Raina Rose had moved out of the house where she was living and broken up with her boyfriend. Needing to clear her head, she and her dog Hopi drove to the dunes of South Padre Island to camp out in her VW bus for a couple weeks. It was, as she described, “a bad idea”:
“Everything was kind of shifting then. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. Then John [Elliott] and I embarked on this tour opening up for Green Mountain Grass that was a total disaster. It was when gas was five dollars a gallon. There weren’t enough shows to feed and pay everybody. It was one of those tours where, it’s beautiful sometimes, but there was just no money in it. We had two vehicles, we had a 15 passenger van, and John and I were in a VW Passat wagon. At one point we were so broke, that somebody had given us a jar of almond butter, a really big one, and we were so thrilled to have been given this gift. We lived on that almond butter for a week, three of us pretty much only ate almond butter sandwiches.”
It was during that summer and into the fall that Rose wrote the majority of the songs that would comprise her latest album, the simply stunning When May Came (Constant Clip Records). Pulled from these moments of flux, the songs reflect the hope and heartbreak that can be gleaned from moments where all we can do is pick up the pieces. It strikes listeners as a wrenchingly raw and honest piece of work, the product of someone unafraid to examine their own bruises (and those they’ve inflicted on others). It’s also fantastically artful, with vivid details and images that burrow in your brain. Simply put, Rose knows how to tell a story, whether it’s about her own life or the lives of the characters she’s picked up while staring out of car windows, notebook in lap and eyes turns to the passing scenery.
Rose certainly spends a lot of time staring out of car windows. A relentlessly hard worker, for whom the descriptor “road warrior” seems like a vast understatement, she’s spent the last five years more or less living on the road, playing gigs to everyone from festival crowds to noisy open mic night bar patrons. She’ll take the odd week or so off to catch her breath in her adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, but she’s soon packing up her guitar and hitting that highway again. It’s a way of life for the 28-year-old, with all it’s hardships and beauty, but she certainly isn’t quitting any time soon.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Portland, Oregon, Rose grew up in a family that loved language. Her grandmother was one of the first female newspaper editors in Los Angeles County. Her mother was a poet, her father a songwriter, and her sister, who holds a degree in creative writing, is a food writer working on a book about potlucks. “My Dad, when when we were growing up, pretended not to hear us if we spoke incorrectly, like if we used bad grammar. So words were really important in my house,” Rose describes.
This carries over in her approach to songwriting. Although many songwriters will write the melody first, Rose puts the words down before anything else.
“The words are the part for me that take the most time, and have the most of myself in them,” she explains. “I have just recently started realizing how important melody is because I am such a word freak … but the words for me are the key to my self-expression and the melody and the chords tend to be, not secondary in importance, but just secondary in the writing process. It’s funny because most of the songwriters I know do the exact opposite of that. They find a progression and then sit down and write words to it. I think it’s just whatever discipline means the most to you. For me, it’s the words, and I try to make every word count. I try not to use rhyme traps. Like ‘fire’ and ‘desire.’ Or ‘baby’ and ‘maybe.’ But sometimes that works. Sometimes all those words count and it works.”
Although she’s deliberate with her words, Rose isn’t possessive of them. A lot of songwriters get annoyed if you misinterpret their lyrics. Although she describes most of her work as personal (“therapeutic,” she says with a hearty laugh), she doesn’t worry about inevitable reinterpretations.
“I don’t think it’s misinterpretation,” she says. “I mean, songs that saved my life so many times in my personal experience with them have nothing to do with what the person writing it experienced. Folk music is all about human interaction and human connection. Any time anybody wants to misinterpret, or I guess reinterpret, or even rewrite, and put their own experience into a song – that’s beautiful. That is totally one of the reasons I do it.”
Like the best songwriters, Rose knows how to leave things open. She has an uncanny knack for making her stories your stories.
“I think music is one of those things which is a universal language,” she muses. “It’s one of the things that connects people so strongly. And I really think it does save lives. I mean you’ve got the vibration of the music and the vibration of the words. I’m getting a little new agey [laughs]. It’s a really powerful human experience. I would hate to box my songs in as just being mine. They’re as much for some random person in Kansas as they are for me. I don’t think you ever own them, you know? You’re just a conduit. It’s definitely selfish, I definitely love doing it for me, but it doesnt have to be selfish. It’s for everybody as much as just for me.”
Interlude 1: “Neighbor’s Trampoline”
Filmed at the Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas. Rose is joined by Andrew Pressman on bass and Trevor Smith on banjo.
“I wrote it in Telluride. I tend to write songs there because it’s so beautiful. I’ve never played the festival, I’m just there hanging out and watching music. So in that way it’s incredibly inspiring. That one I wrote last summer about something that happened the summer before. I had slept on a friend’s trampoline in Montana. and it was one of those nights you remember really clearly. The stars were out, it’s beautiful, there were three of us sleeping in sleeping bags on the trampoline and it was such a good nights sleep. We had stayed up watching stars until 2 in the morning after a crazy show with Green Mountain Grass. That was actually a really fun show in this dive bar in Bozeman. I don’t remember what it was called, but there was a stuffed moose on the wall, a jukebox and everybody got pretty tight, tying one on you know?
I didn’t even really think about it, but the night stayed with me, I was in Telluride and just thinking about that last summer. That song is actually a love song for a friend. Because it was just at that point where I had had this friendship that was really close and was starting to get really cubersome and really awkward. Not even for any reason, just sometimes you spend a lot of time with someone and you need to take a break. Then I was out there the next summer without them and it felt like, ‘Ug, I miss this person so much,’ remembering all these things from that summer. That night was really particular.
And that last verse is totally true most of the time. I am worn out. It’s a hard job, it’s a wonderful amazing fufilling job, but it’s also really exhausting. Sometimes you put so much into it and you don’t get back as much, so that can be really rough.”
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Jeffrey Says:
