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Recent visitors to the "Josh's Journal" page on Josh Rouse's Web site (www.joshrouse.com) would have come across a brief and unexpected wish list from the twenty-nine-year-old singer-songwriter simply called "Things I Would Like to See."
1. Sam Rockwell and John C. Reilly in a movie
together.
2. Vincent Gallo and Harmony Korine in a free fighting match.
3. My own line of T-shirts (if you have a white hanes or fruit of
the loom t-shirt, bring it to the show and I will
demonstrate).
If you are wondering why, why and how, Rouse can explain.
Of Number One he says, "I'm a fan of both of them, and Sam Rockwell -- I just I feel like I know that guy. I feel like I went to school with him somewhere or something. It's really strange." Of Number Two, "He and Harmony just have a big feud going on. You should go to Vincentgallo.com and read some of his essays -- they're hilarious."
For the moment, Numbers One and Two remain wishes, but for a brief while, his last came true -- sort of. "I don't think anybody was happy with what I was writing on the shirts," Rouse, who has since abandoned the project, says. What was he writing? "'Lower middle class,' 'Sad white boy,' 'Living off the old lady,' 'Some guys just want to talk . . . I just want to screw' -- that type of thing, just really crude stuff. [Fans] just wanted me to sign the shirt basically, and that's pretty boring."
That kind of acerbic humor might come as a surprise to those who identify Rouse as the earnest, unassuming, sensitive singer-songwriter from his first two albums, Dressed Up Like Nebraska and Home. It's a humor that turns up when Rouse is very reluctantly talking about himself more often than it does in his music. "It's so boring talking about me all day," the self-mockingly described "sad white boy" says.
Rouse, doesn't need to say much; his music has been doing it for him. For the past four years, he's been making some of the best alt-country/Americana/pop/rock around, and if you think you haven't heard it, you're probably wrong. Rouse's plaintive timbre and range of material, from driving pop songs to heartsick ballads with spare lyrics about longing, disappointment and ultimately hopefulness have been featured on such TV shows as Party of Five, Dawson's Creek, Roswell and Ed, and on the big screen in Hamlet, Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire and Vanilla Sky.
Rouse's third album could be a soundtrack itself. Under the Cold Blue Stars follows the marriage of a young couple through their first house and the inheritance of a farm, the arrival of kids, the farm's failure, infidelity, reconciliation and eventual separation. As the title suggests, Under the Cold Blue Stars is stark and direct, sharing the simple unadorned qualities invoked in his last two albums. Lyrically though, it was a marked change for Rouse, whose lyrics on his past efforts never shed any direct light on a subject but just enough to create a mood and an impression.
Rouse says the decision to connect all the songs on the record happened naturally. "I just sat down and write 'em and it comes out and I think about 'em after the fact," he says. "It's not always that way, but I had a couple songs on the record done and they were all kind of relationship based, so I thought, 'I'll create this little couple and write about them.' I had just pictured this couple -- young, in their twenties, who live in the Midwest and move to the South and inherit a farm. And he's a musician and he tries to work at a farm that's failing and dealing with them having children and it's a lot like a lot of people's relationships -- men and women just trying to get along and the things that they deal with."
In between the events that mark the couple's life together and the passing of time, Rouse tucks in the details that thicken the songs into rich, familiar tales. On the buoyant, poppy, "Miracle," Rouse narrates the couple's first visit to the farm they've inherited, singing, "On the drive, you did not care/You're sun tired and your stomach's bare/When your eyes light up and out of the blue, you scream," and on "Women and Men," when things have fallen apart, Rouse assumes the voice of the weary and regretful husband: "Our babies have known no father, makes it harder to call/I don't bother/Bottle up, bottle down, is how I live."
But musically, Under the Cold Blue Stars builds upon the sounds that have given Rouse his identity at the same time they've made him hard to categorize. While "Christmas With Jesus"' fuzzbox hooks maintain the thread of British New Wave ever present in his work and "Summer Kitchen Ballad" lives up to the alt-country tag Rouse carries, other tracks like the straight-ahead guitar rock of the makeup song "Feeling No Pain" or the pop gem "Miracle" carve out new ground. Within the framework of his characters joys and struggles, Rouse's music opens up and matches the subtleties of emotion so that as the characters' lives change, so does the mood and tone. "Like a movie would change scenes, it kind of does that," Rouse explains. "On 'Miracle' there's that weird keyboard and when you hear that opening riff, it's just like that pure driving joy. It's sunshiny, almost."
And on the title track, Rouse lets the sense of humor and irony, so far saved for "Josh's Journal," come out. "I was thinking about a guy that wants to play music and is out in the bars playing and he's also a farmer. Set to an R&B song, it's pretty funny."
Under the Cold Blue Stars pokes its own wounds in ways that Rouse's previous efforts have not done before, and the effect is an album that is rawer and darker in places than his earlier work. But don't look for Rouse to abandon the quiet sorrow of his folk-pop tunes just yet. Though his artistic insight into human nature may be getting sharper with each effort, he assures his tastes haven't changed. "All that moody, melancholy stuff, I just like the way sad songs sound."
CHRISTINA
SARACENO
(April 19, 2002)