MINNEAPOLIS — Rosali performed at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis on July 15 with opener David Nance and the Mowed Sound.
Before her show, she sat down for an interview with KAXE Producer Andrew Dziengel. They discussed her history with music, the recording process for her new album Bite Down, the connection with David Nance and the Mowed Sound, and songwriting after the COVID pandemic.
Edited for length and clarity.
Andrew: So first off, I usually interview artists of all kinds; painters, sculptors, and stuff like that. So my first question I always ask is how did you first get interested in art? Was music your first go-to?
Rosali: Both really. Both my parents are musicians, and my mother is an artist, a visual artist, so I grew up in a household [where] there were musical instruments around all the time and art supplies. That's just kind of how we grew up exploring the world to occupy our time. So, I was really interested in both.
I actually have a degree in art. That's what I studied in school, and I actually work as a graphic designer part-time as well. But music speaks to me on a really deep soul spiritual level, so that's what I primarily put my artistic energy into. But I love visual arts as well.
Andrew: Was guitar your first go-to instrument or was it piano?
Rosali: Guitar and singing first. I did a lot of choir. I was in our state honors choir. I would do small ensembles, so singing was primarily what I did. We had a piano. I don't really know how to play properly, but I can figure things out. When I started playing guitar, I was about 13 years old.
Andrew: Tonight, you're playing with David Nance and the Mowed Sound. How did that connection get made?
Rosali: So I was living in Philly for years and I met those guys when they would come to town and play shows. We were aware of each other and kind of connected and friends through the larger small underground music scene.
This other band I was in, Long Hots, which were like a garage rock trio, we both had 7 inches come out at Third Man [Records] at the same time. We did a two-week tour [in] 2019, maybe in the summer, with Dave and us. We were all riding in the same van and just became the best of friends, and midway through they suggested that they wanted to be my backing band for the next record. So I took them up on the dare and went out to Omaha that November and we made No Medium.
At that time, I thought that that would just be kind of like, “Oh this record I make with this band, and we'll hopefully play some shows.” Then the pandemic hit and then I was like, “Well, I guess we're not we're going to play some shows.”
When things started to pick up again, we got a lot of offers to go on the road, so after doing a month with Destroyer, we just really felt like we were just getting to know each other deeply and getting started.
All of us wanted to explore this together and around that time I had signed with Merge. So I was like, “Well, I have this other record that I'm working on already. Let's do it. Let's make this plan.” Now we feel like we're a real band, not just like Rosali with a backing band.
Andrew: How did you approach the recording process? Did you have the songs or had ideas for them and let the band add their own touch to them?
Rosali: Yes, for No Medium, I had a very clear idea for the songs and all the melodies and chord progressions and lyrics. We tracked all the rhythm section live and then people would come in to kind of add their parts, and then for Bite Down we did it more like in the round, playing all together and figuring it out. I still had all the chord progressions and mostly the lyrics finished.
I wanted to leave it loose and not have a fully formed concept of how I want it to be because now we have this deep trust and understanding of how we all play together, so we just let them come out how we play.
But music speaks to me on a really deep soul spiritual level, so that's what I primarily put my artistic energy into.Rosali
We play them a few times before starting to track, just to kind of get the feel and be like, oh, that works. Oh no, it should be faster. [We] figure all that out as a group, which I think you can really feel. The record feels like a band that's working together all sharing in the direction.
Andrew: Were there any songs that you came with that kind of surprised you how they turned out at the end?
Rosali: Yeah, “On Tonight,” the opening track on the record, that one I was playing more like almost a Townes Van Zandt style finger picking to it. That ended up being a really poppy song with synthesizers. I love where it went, because we tried that a few times and it was too slow and then it's too dark. It's supposed to be more carefree in this way and then just talking it through, 'Oh, that's fun. Let's level it up. Let's make it definitely more pop.'
“Bite Down,” that one I think we only tracked it once and we played it for 13 minutes just repeating things over and over again to kind of get into a groove. Where it went with that kind of groove late night feel, it wasn't really what I imagined. But then as we started to do it, it was like, “Oh, this is really magical and kind of meditative.” Then when we trimmed it down, we found the part that we were all really locked in. That's what ends up being the song.
Andrew: I notice there's a lot of tender moments on the record. Was that something you had coming in as an idea for the sound of the record?
Rosali: I think there's always a quality of what I do that has that. I think what I'm trying to convey in the music is this intimacy and tenderness even when it is rocking. Trying to be this comfort, this healing energy in the music. I think some of the songs just really called for it and so I think that was just a natural thing that happened.
Some of it, like the intensity of it, surprised me even. When we were tracking vocals for “May It Be on Offer,” the last song on the record, I started crying mid-take, which I was just feeling. When you're making a record, all your emotions really come to the surface. The song could be inspired by something that happened years ago and all of a sudden when you're in it, actually finalizing what the work is, it's just like, “Oh, I'm here.”
Also, the intensity of just being creative together. I was really just feeling a lot of things and there's a line that says “There is hope upon me. There is reason to try,” and then as I say “try,” [I] started weeping and I had to go outside and take a beat. But I think that emotion is there. It's present. And that's just, I think, the natural way that we all believe. That we have that belief in making music together and those feelings and honesty.
Andrew: So I was wondering with recording music, do you think of it as a snapshot of where you were in life at that moment, or is it kind of once the music's out, it's its own thing?
Rosali: I don't think of it so much as a snapshot. The songs that I write aren't exactly autobiographical. There are some drawn from life, some from observation, just from all over the place. I try not to have them be of a time.
A song I wrote 10 years ago, I obviously didn't have all this life experience. I know where my head was at, but I definitely think then they're off on their own and in the world. Even how we play them live is totally different. We don't have as many instruments, we are in the moment playing it, so I think it's a living thing.
Andrew: Actually being able to tour with the band that recorded the songs for you as a performer, do you just feel more comfortable performing on stage knowing that if you wanted to go on a tangent that the band understands the songs well enough that they could take that road with you?
Rosali: One hundred percent yeah, and we do. We look at each other and make eye contact just enjoy it and we're a unit. We let Jim [Schroeder] go for a while and let him shred as long as he wants to. Sometimes we'll smash songs together. There’s just a lot of wordless communication and the energy that we feel in the room with the audience, too.
There are definitely songs we don't do [when] oh, this is going to be a real rowdy crowd, we're going to skip over some of the quiet songs. Then other times if the room is maybe more tuned to the sensitive stuff, we’ll lay into that stuff. Play it by ear a little bit.
Andrew: On this album, sometimes I can hear Neil Young, and I can hear the Velvet Underground. When you're writing these songs, do you take inspiration from other music? Do you listen to other stuff while writing?
Rosali: I try not to just because I don't want to be derivative of something. Obviously, I love Neil Young. I love Velvet Underground. It's a lot of what I listened to growing up. I still listen to it and they're important artists and bands to me, but I don't ever want to give a reference even to something.
Sometimes in mixing, I'll reference a record that I like, but not in writing. I just let it come out as it comes out, and the melodies come out as they come out. Then people I trust to play with, I know how they play and they're going to play what they hear.
I think we all have similar taste in music, so that's part of our library, right? Just reference points when we learn how to play guitar or tones we gravitate towards, but no, it's never when we're doing it. If something even sounds too much like something, we [have] got to change that up.
Andrew: This is the first album since COVID happened. Was it easier or more difficult to go into songwriting, knowing especially how the music business was impacted during COVID? Did you find it difficult to get back into songwriting mode after that?
Rosali: Well, it's actually harder for me because I put No Medium out during the pandemic and that kind of did really well. In a lot of ways, I think because of things people were going through, they related to it. In some ways my career was kind of building and growing through the pandemic and afterwards.
But the songwriting part of it, I quit drinking and that was a big, challenging aspect to the songwriting because you have a glass of wine or two just to loosen up and being sober, it's kind of like that critic is there. It's present. It's not just like, “Oh, I'm just going to let all this come out and not think about it. Not worry about it,” then go back and edit it.
To kind of get to that point of letting it all come out with a lot of facing those fears, facing that critic, and having to kind of shift how I approached it, it became a lot more meditative, ritualistic, in a way. Like, OK, I'm going to meditate for a little bit. I'm going to set my things up in this way so it's more like a discipline instead of when the spark comes or whatever. That was the challenging part for sure.
Andrew: What do you hope people take away from the record?
Rosali: Well, like I was saying before, I really like to make music that helps people connect to feelings. To help them have a good time. Help them through a hard time. Find hope. Find healing. Expand your mind a little bit. Bring joy. I'm trying to bring joy, bring love through the music.
