Alexa Rose

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A few summers ago, on a sweltering August day, Alexa Rose found herself chasing a particularly disheveled-looking cloud. “Like a bruise,” she recalls, “a swirl of black and red and yellow, the angriest looking sky I’ve ever seen.” This was somewhere in the Midwest, in between towns on tour. She sat in a parking lot, marveling, until the cloud broke open and poured the rain and resolved itself into a glorious, weeping mess of a sunset.

“Why are we drawn to such a thing, as the weather alert on our phone advises us to seek shelter?” Rose asks. “Are we just looking for ourselves, longing to take the lid off our own darkness, to find the mercy of softer colors waiting?” Her third studio album, ‘Atmosphere’ explores that question, attending to the symbiosis of joy and grief, terror and hope, heaviness and lightness in our daily lives.

Rose recorded the album at Betty’s, a studio created by Sylvan Esso nestled in the North Carolina woods. Shortly after the session, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, washing away lives and landscapes in the hometowns of half the band. The storm’s wake, eerie and desolate and decisive, cast a new light upon the record. “I related to the music in a different way,” says Rose. “I had just moved into a new place after losing access to my house, and felt a little tossed around the way everyone did. The experience deepened my love for my home and my belief in the resilience of the land and communities in Appalachia.” Rose spent the harsh winter to follow revisiting the album and re-recording certain songs in her cabin outside Asheville, replacing studio shimmer with intimate sparsity, a deliberate bareness to better express her feeling at the time. “Stripping the songs down felt truer: nothing to hide behind anymore, but believing the roots are strong enough to hold.”

Rose has spent her life in small Appalachian towns. On album standout “Lilacs,” she pays heartfelt homage to a backroad that winds through the hills of Alleghany County, Virginia, land that once belonged to her family. She shares, “There’s an old black and white photo of my grandmother as a girl along this road, holding a pint glass of milk in her hand, dirt on her knees.” Rose’s voice comes through pure and piercing as golden light over a gravel path, illuminating a heartbreaking wistfulness for a home one’s never known. “The farm and all the land was sold long before I was born, but in the springtime when the lilacs are in bloom, I imagine my great great grandmother planting them. I always cut a few and place them in a mason jar. Did you know lilacs can live for over a hundred years? I think it’s so lovely that you can plant something that can long outlive you, and I wonder if that very thought ever crossed her mind, as she clipped blossoms for her own bedside table a hundred years ago.”

Rose embraces the pangs and pleasures of every place, reveling and wrestling with what it means to belong. She wrote “Anywhere, OH” on tour, about a town she stopped in for coffee. “I was only there for half an hour passing through, but I felt homesick when I left. I remember the way the colors of houses and old oaks poked out from the fog, a line of kids dressed up for Halloween, waiting to go into some church party.” The song has an autumnal moan, evoking the visceral melancholy of seasons changing, when a shift in the air sets a thousand different memories alight. “There’s a bittersweetness in making small talk with the person behind the coffee counter, who assumes you know about whatever local news is going on—and you just nod along, knowing you’ll likely never stop there again.” That sense—of simultaneous wonder and mourning—pervades ‘Atmosphere,’ a spiritual tension that builds until it precipitates, offering listeners their own catharsis.

Rose’s collaborators comprise a masterclass of unrelenting, sonic emotion. Produced by Ryan Gustafson of The Dead Tongues and mixed by Grammy-winning Matt Ross Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, John Prine), ‘Atmosphere’ features pedal steel from Mat Davidson (Twain, Big Thief), percussion from Dom Billet (Dr. Dog, The Weather Station), bass from Jeff Ratner (Langhorne Slim), cello from Hilary James (Matt Pond PA, Esmé Patterson), banjo from Helena Rose (Holler Choir), and truly haunting harmonies from Josh Oliver (Watchhouse, Tyler Childers). Once praised by NPR as “the soul child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton,” here Rose dwells between the shimmering falsetto of Alison Krauss and the supernatural tone of Adrianne Lenker, classic and modern at once.

“This album is all about tenderness,” Rose says. “It’s about going out on a limb to feel the full swirl of what life throws at you.” Each song has a companion: one for feeling at home and one for when you’re completely lost, one for grieving the violent nature of the world and one for the gentler, kinder days. Ten songs flow like a gradient, centered around the idea that our experiences move through us like storms, and if we don’t hide from them, we can watch the skies unfold beautifully.

Atmosphere

Out Now on First City Artists

PRESS IMAGE BY ZACH STRUM

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