Raina Rose: It’s a Hard, Beautiful Living
Raina Rose
Not For Sale
“If you look at my songwriting journals, it’s all cross outs,” Rose describes at one point in our conversation. “I try to write in pen so I can’t erase anything. Sometimes the first thing was the best, but your internal editor is on overdrive. So I try to keep everything. It’s funny because I can’t get rid of those books. I have gotten rid of so much of my stuff. Everything I own fits in my Subaru, and I could sleep in there with it, but in my parents house there’s a box of writing journals from the time I was thirteen years old that I can’t get rid of. Because someday I’m going to through those, when I’m like 60 years old, and see what I was writing about when I was thirteen.”
Rose has been working at this for years, and she’s traveling the folk music scene at an opportune time. As the huge record companies are going the way of the dinosaur, their role as taste-makers, which she aptly describes as turning music into, “a saleable product – like junk food or Coca Cola,” is giving way to a viral, web-based approach to disseminating music.
“Seeing the United States especially scoff at that [old model] is really beautiful because we are such a consumer culture,” Rose reflects. “Going from this big pop music phenomenon, all this crappy shit that is out there, seeing people reject that and wanting something honest that is actually art is amazing. It’s hard as Americans to go against the grain sometimes because we are so inundated with advertising. So I love [the changes in the industry] for that reason.”
In that spirit, Rose doesn’t worry too much about album sales or chart placements. She doesn’t mind if fans share her music, just as long as they’re listening.
“Digital is such an easily transferrable medium,” she reflects. “Which means you’re not going to get paid every time somebody listens to your song. But you can make fans and if you’re playing shows people will come out that you never met, they heard of you through the friend of a friend of a friend. So I definitely think that if people don’t have enough money to buy my cds, I’ll sell them for cheaper, and I always tell people, ‘If you buy the CD, feel free to share it with friends.’ If you want to, that’s awesome. That’s so flattering. Burn it, give it to people, just bring more people to the show next time. I love that.”
“I think that the word of mouth and grassroots nature of that is awesome,” she continues. “I mean, the whole goal of playing music is to do it for yourself first, and then do it for people who can relate and appreciate second. At least those are my goals. The new musical climate is awesome for that. And I’m happy to play for a hushed room of 20 people over a loud bar of a hundred people who don’t give a shit. I mean, it’s hard making a living, but I’ll keep doing it as long as I can feed myself.”
In many ways, Rose represents the new DIY model for musicians trying to do just that – make a living. It can be a difficult path to travel, but trumping the inevitable exhaustion and frustration is pure satisfaction and joy in the work itself.
“I fall in love with it every time I do it,” Rose says of the songwriting process. “Because it feels so magical still, even though I’ve been doing it for 15 odd years. It’s you, it’s a pen and paper, it’s your guitar, but there’s something else. There’s some kind of magical thing when it’s right. When you write a song that you’re in love with, there’s something else that’s a part of it. It’s an exciting process.”
Coda: ‘Desdemona’
Rose performing on Ardent Sessions.
“That was one of those I wrote sitting in the passenger seat, listening to an album while we were driving. It was right after Kerrville one year, so it was a beautiful June, and we were driving through from Austin to Telluride. I had really wanted to write a story. A lot of my songs that I had been writing at that point, it was June 2008, had been like, I-feel-devestated, loss-of-love songs. I was like, ‘Oh, god I’ve got to get out of that, at least for a moment, and write something thats not even necessarily about me.’ I was thinking of Bonnie Rait singing ‘Angel from Montgomery.’ How awesome that sounds in her voice and how John Prine wrote it as a male from a female perspective. So I wanted to write a song thats a female writing from a male perspective. So I created this story.
It was just this moment where I needed to step out of my own present situation and write something that really was just a good story. That was what I tried to do. Plus I wanted to write a name song. I always loved those songs like ‘Ophelia,’ or my friend Jonathan Byrd has a song called the ‘Ballad of Larry,’ he’s got a song about a woman named ‘Diana Jones.’ People can really attach to these songs that have a name. And ‘Desdemona’ was the right amount of syllables. I studied Shakespeare for awhile and I love the Shakespearian names and the stories behind them. So it just felt like the right thing. That was the practice: can I write a story?
… I tried to make it gender nonspecific. This is a song about this woman, it doesn’t really matter who its coming from, even if it’s from that persons perspective. In my head I think it was a dude, but it doesnt have to be. That’s the beauty of songs, you write them, they’re out there in the world, and anyone can interpret them anyway they want to. It’s not stagnant.”
You can find Raina Rose’s latest tour dates here.
Jeffrey Says:
