Josh Rouse knows it's a bit of cliche. The words come out of his mouth with half a groan and half a grin. But anyone who listens to UNDER COLD BLUE STARS can hardly blame him for the sentiment.
"I hate to be the guy that says, 'I put a lot of soul into this one,' "Rouse ventures. "But it's my favorite one so far. I'm proud of it."
Rightly so. On his third Rykodisc/Slow River release, the Nashville-via-Nebraska singer/ songwriter/guitarist wraps his careful words and heartsick melodies in a more expansive package of cascading textures and urgent riffs, cementing his status as one of America's finest young artists. Produced by Roger Moutenot (Yo La Tengo, Freedy Johnston), UNDER COLD BLUE STARS is also a very loose concept record.
"I was writing the songs when I was on the road and they started going together, so I thought, why not?," Rouse says. "It's almost like a short film or a little screenplay. I took all these relationship themes and decided to make it about a couple."
Rouse's own mid-western clan provided inspiration. "There's all kinds of stories," he says. "About my grandparents, and about relatives who died that I didn't know." The song "Christmas With Jesus," draws on his mother's parochial school experience, where religion was not just something to believe in, but also, he says, "something to be feared."
Rouse grew up in Nebraska with his mother and stepfather, whose construction work also took the family around the West. Looking to stay at the same school for more than a year or two, he spent his teenage time with his father, a career military man who lived first in Georgia, then at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, near Tennessee. Rouse went from a middle school trombonist/violinist to a high school punk/new waver, "but we never played out or anything. We were just a basement band, sitting around watching 120 Minutes."
After a stint at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee, wanderlust reared its head again, sending Rouse to Arizona and South Dakota before he settled near Nashville for good in 1996, "just because it was a city where there are actually clubs and a music scene. I figured maybe I could meet some people."
People like David Henry, an engineer and cellist who'd worked with Cowboy Junkies and Vic Chesnutt. Their home recordings together snowballed into Rouse's debut, 1998's Dressed Up Like Nebraska. It was greeted with universal acclaim, which was somewhat amazing to Rouse, as he hadn't even figured on working with a record company.
"When I was younger, in bands, it was like, we're gonna get a record deal, that's the big dream," he says. "But doing Dressed Up..., it was like, 'ok, this is it, I'm gonna put this out myself, then find something else to do.' Even my mom was like, 'you're getting older...' As soon as I quit caring, a deal popped up."
By the time his second CD, Home, came out in March of 2000, Rouse was able to leave behind day jobs as a hotel valet parking attendant and barista. He toured with David Gray, Aimee Mann, Son Volt, and Golden Smog, and also recorded an EP, Chester, with Kurt Wagner of Lambchop, kindred spirits in the left-of-center Nashville scene. Rouse also still gets the occasional royalty check from his songs being used in TV's Ed, Roswell, and Party Of Five, as well as in the films Hamlet and Smiling Fish & Goat On Fire. The latest feather in his cap is an appearance on the soundtrack of the new Cameron Crowe movie Vanilla Sky. He can still remember driving to South Dakota when he was 20, listening to the Singles soundtrack. "So it's kind of neat to think that Cameron Crowe knows my music," he says.
UNDER COLD BLUE STARS is the first time Rouse has worked with another producer, but he and Henry were already pals with Moutenot, the Hoboken knob-twirler who has also worked with such disparate talents as John Zorn, Lou Reed, Paula Cole, and Beulah. "We all kind of produced it actually," Rouse says. "It wasn't the uncomfortable producer going, 'OK, this is what we're gonna do.' He's good at saying 'this doesn't sound right,' or 'let's try this.' He spends a lot of time hooking up equipment when I'm like, I just want to record!"
Moutenot's care paid off. With the help of former Ben Folds Five drummer Darren Jessee and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone (Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, Joseph Arthur, The Autumn Defense), Rouse has augmented the sturdy foundation of his songcraft with ornate sonic interior design, including loops, horns, processed strings and other atmospherics. The title track, with its spooky keyboards and loping groove, is outright R&B, while the anthemic "Feeling No Pain" rolls and crests on a guitar thrum, hitting its zenith when Rouse's voice breaks in breathless near-falsetto at the bridge.
"It's a make-up song," Rouse says. "And also, you know how you get those little glimpses of a place or time when you were younger, a song reminds you of it, you feel good for about a minute and you forget it? It's kind of like that."
Source: http://www.rykodisc.com/RykoInternal/Features/343/bio.html
