Alexa Rose – Atmosphere
Asheville’s Alexa Rose has announced a new album Atmosphere to be released October 31 on First City Artists.
Once praised by NPR as “the soul child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton,” Rose returns with a stunning collection dwelling between the shimmering falsetto of Alison Krauss and the supernatural tone of Adrianne Lenker. The album lyrically attends to the symbiosis of joy and grief, terror and hope, heaviness and lightness in our daily lives.
FLOOD Magazine premiered the first glimpse “Where The Magic Lives,” praising it as “full of wonder.” The song seeks the kind of pure presence our modern world makes so difficult. Rose explains, “Have you ever been in some situation you should be enjoying but somehow just can’t? It’s happened to me at the best concerts and under the starriest skies. This song is about fighting to find enchantment again, and making peace with the time that feels lost. I was thinking a lot about growing up in the early aughts, before I always had a phone in my pocket, and how I felt a curiosity about the world that couldn’t be answered with a quick Google search. Sometimes I think leaving a little mystery is what we need to be able to run towards those dreams, to let ourselves bask in a question before we know the answer.”
Alexa Rose recorded her new 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’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.
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