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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When May Came album cover
Capturing May
Fall 2008 saw the release of Rose’s End of Endless False Starts. Close friend and fellow songwriter John Elliott produced the album, but due to the two’s busy schedules, “It was out there in the ether for a really long time before we got to finish it. So [for the next album] I wanted to do something that was the total opposite of that. I wanted to do it in four or five days, get everything done live like they used to make records, where everybody’s in the room, everybody can see each other, and if somebody fucks up the take, you just don’t use that take.”
Having a bulk of material she was ready to commit to record, Rose initially toyed with the idea of releasing a double album. Instead, she decided to record stripped-down versions of seven of those songs in April 2009, released as an EP called Blackwater. That left her with the songs for When May Came, and Elliott had again agreed to produce, but had to drop out a couple days before the sessions were set to take place in May 2009.
“I was like, ‘Shit!,’” Rose describes. “So that was unsuitable producer number one. He’s still one of my best friends in the whole world, it just wasnt the time. So then we had a great summer tour last year, and all summer I was talking to Jonathan Byrd about coming out and producing the album in November. It turns out he had a huge tour in November, so he figured out he couldn’t do.”
“So then it was in the middle of July that I had this brainstorm – I had this one week off in September. And I just don’t get too much time off, so i was like, ‘Yay, one week off!’ So I talked to Steven Orsack from Some Say Leland, and he has his own little production company. I basically convinced him to come to my friend PJ’s house and record his buddies playing my songs for cheap.”
Rose decided to produce the album herself, but she says, “Really, the only production was picking the right musicians.” Drawing on her friends in the Austin music scene, she assembled a group that included Adam Rader (Some Say Leland, electric guitar), Steve Smith (Some Say Leland, Rhodes), Andrew Pressman (bass), David Moss (The Blue Hit, cello), and Derek Hansen (Wino Vino, drums). Banjo player Trevor Smith (Green Mountain Grass) is also featured on the album, but he wasn’t physically in the sessions because he was in Boston at the time; his parts were recorded in a sound engineer’s living room in Brooklyn and overdubbed later.
Pressman got the musicians together to practice while Rose was coming back from touring in the northwest. Rose provided food and libation, and over four Lone Star-and-whisky-fueled days, the group went to work. Texas in mid-September is hot, but the house’s air conditioning was too noisy. Pressman stood by the AC, turning it off before a take began and promptly switching it back on as soon as the take was done.
“Yeah, it was really sweaty,” Rose recalls. But heat aside, the sessions went smoothly, for the most part.
“I wanted all the musicians to, basically, do what they do. I wanted them to be a part of it, because I trust their ears,” Rose describes. “We set up in there and just did it. It just seemed like everybody was ready to go. I barely did any production work. It was pretty much just like, ‘Ok that sounds good, you lay out here.’..The only thing that was difficult about it was the first track on the album ["Sun Comes Back"]. We did 10 takes [of it]. We did a couple the second night we were recording, and then Sunday, the last day of the sessions, we did eight more takes and nothing was working. That was the one problematic song that felt like it was a push. I really wanted it to be the first track because that seems to be a song that people like. So we did ten takes of it, and then finally, the last take, we decided to play it to a click track. That was the take, and that was it. That song is totally live.”
Interlude 2: ‘Nashville’
Rose with friend A.J. Roach, songwriters in the round.
“We drove into Nashville, me and my friend John. It was the first time I had been there, and everyone was like, ‘Oh Nashville, it sucks.’ So I had this idea in my head, which is never a good way to go into it. We played The Bluebird open mic and it seemed like it was so commercial. Everyone who was there was there to play their own songs, so there was this cutthroat vibe. Then we went to this other open mic, and the woman who was hosting it was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re real nice to travelers, we’ll get you on there, we’ll get you on that stage for sure.” Then she put us on the stage as soon as the place was totally empty of people. But before that, she had been playing [to the crowd]. And thats totally understandable. I get it, I get it. But we were just really frustrated.
We didn’t have a place to stay, so we were just trying to shake peoples’ hands and maybe make a friend and sleep on a couch or a floor. And it happened three times where people were like ‘Hey, great song, nice to meet you, where are you from?’ And they would give us their myspace address and then walk away, unceremoniously. We were just totally disillusioned with the whole thing, and drove to Kentucky and stayed in a campground. We ate breakfast at Lincoln’s Birthplace Diner where two omelettes and hashbrowns and coffee for two people were seven dollars.
It was another one of those nights that just stays with you. I wrote that song while waiting to play the open mic at the second place, just feeling so frustrated. I was just not in a place to have to struggle for that. And that tour was great! We had such a good time, we played a bunch of good shows. Nashville that one night was just a complete zero on the barometer of what a good folk tour is. I’ve gone back and had great times since then, it was just a shitty night [laughs].”
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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:
