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“I feel like I’m finally starting to own it,” says singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Reynolds — aka Rose Hotel — when asked about the risks of not fitting neatly into one genre. “It’s caused me a lot of anxiety in the past. Even in the studio when we were mixing the new album, Drew [Vandenberg] and I had a conversation about how this is a bit of a gamble, making a record that's not easily identifiable as one thing, because some people might not know what to do with it.” 

Rose Hotel’s forthcoming label debut, A Pawn Surrender, sees the Atlanta-based artist claiming her agency with a 10-track set of nuanced indie-rock songcraft that pulls from a palette of psychedelic shimmer and folk influence via her Southeastern roots. With a drive to pay homage to the legends of the art form, she uses the trappings of psychedelic rock not as source material, but as ornamentation, as she explores relationships, feminine rage, lust, temptation, blissful ignorance, frightening apathy, delusions, and illusions.

Where 2019’s I Will Only Come When It’s a Yes presented a coming-of-age tale, A Pawn Surrender nourishes the garden of adulthood with a cohesive but genre-spanning approach that Reynolds was empowered to achieve through a chess metaphor: “I was playing a lot of chess when I wrote this album, so I started to think about these songs as if they were all different pieces on the board representing varying aspects of my songwriting, personality, and experience. Each piece has its own specific purpose and its own strength to utilize, but you can't play the game with only your queen or your knights, or whatever. That became such a comforting idea and ethos to operate within – not just accepting variety but finding its inherent value. I went into the studio without any fear of being all over the board. I wanted to be limitless in letting my influences shine through the music in different ways. The throughline of Rose Hotel is my lyricism and my voice, but musically, I wanted to stretch out."

A Pawn Surrender’s opening gambit “Fall in Love Again and Again” welcomes the listener into Reynolds’ kaleidoscope of sounds, described by Paste Magazine as “a miraculous mix of psych-rock, pop and jazz,” before fading into the trippy temptation of “Fruit Tree.” This alluring manifestation of slick bass and synthesized flute sees the dreamy shoegaze of Rose Hotel’s debut ripening into the peach skin fuzz of psychedelia. “Seems like I’m a beauty, until you look a little longer,” she sings, her voice pacing like that of a beckoning lotus-eater. “Seems like I’m a fruit tree, and the aroma’s getting stronger,” she warns, her spell crescendoing into a dissonant crash of poppy seeds and guitar distortion à la early Strawberry Alarm Clock. 

"Don’t you hate how I set myself free,” Reynolds sings on “Drown,” the succeeding slacker rock-infused thesis for her meditations on ignorance as bliss, intergenerational grief, sentimental tendencies, and the self-acceptance that binds and frees them all. On “King & A Pawn,” she further explores a steady adage that asserts the act of sacrifice as a necessary precursor to abundance. She is buoyed by cautious optimism, sharpened by the edges of experience, and grounded in her folk-forward approach to storytelling that waves no white flags, but rather, opens its arms to the throes of life in its entirety. 

Like the allegorical chessboard for which the record is named, A Pawn Surrender quilts a patchwork tapestry of region-crossing, decade-spanning influence, and Reynolds is the central visionary tenaciously threading the panels together. The prodigious group of studio musicians she assembled for the project nods to her time spent in DIY scenes throughout the Southeast: Michael Ruth (Rich Ruth, S.G. Goodman) on synth, Jack Blauvelt (Neighbor Lady, Night Palace, CDSM) on lead guitar and drums, Luke Schneider (Margo Price, Caitlin Rose, Orville Peck) on pedal steel, Payton Collier (Neighbor Lady) on bass and drums, and Denny Hanson (RumorsATL, Nomenclature) on bass and piano, among others. 

Reynolds co-produced the album with Atlanta-based engineers Damon Moon (Standard Electric Recorders) and Graham Tavel (Mirror Mirror Recording) and tapped acclaimed Athens, Georgia producer Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, S.G Goodman, Kristine Leschper) for mixing and additional production.

“I brought Damon and Graham together to form one unified brain with me,” she explains. “Damon’s incredibly curated studio space has a certain crispness that I was after. He knows how to get that clean, beautiful, organic sound. On the other end of the spectrum, Graham comes from a background in Punk and DIY, and brings a really unique analog approach. Together, I think we found a sweet spot between HiFi and LoFi.”

From her hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, Reynolds started her music career playing keys for psych-rockers Buffalo Rodeo when she was 19. “We bought an Econoline van that didn’t even have seats in it for like $1,500. We fixed it up, and I learned how to be in a band,” she says. “I learned how to communicate with sound guys, how to fix a pedal board on the fly, how to be the only girl on a tour with 10 dudes. It was a super formative time for me. When rubber hit the road, I was like ‘oh, this is actually what I really want to be doing.’”

Those formative years paid off as Reynolds has built a career as a side musician playing keys and guitar and singing for acts like Neighbor Lady, Susto, Faye Webster, and She Returns From War — all while continuing to write and record as Rose Hotel. She first collaborated with longtime friend Michael Ruth in 2017 to produce Rose Hotel’s debut EP, Always a Good Reason, which was passed around like a secret in small-town music scenes of the Southeast. Rose Hotel’s self-released 2019 full-length I Will Only Come When It’s a Yes came together with the help of a cultivated group of DIY musicians in her new home base of East Atlanta and gained praise from Vice as “a wonderfully collaborative LP” where “Reynolds’ songwriting shines as she navigates the gray areas in love and life.” More recently, Rose Hotel released a double cassingle, Drive Alone b/w Constant (2020), and an EP called The House That We Knew (2021), both on Nashville’s Cold Lunch Recordings.

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press: jake@luckybirdmedia.com