EXPATRIATE CANUCK NOW A TEXAS ROSE AT HEART
New six-song collection inspired by the vibrant Austin music scene
It’s a backstory that almost seems too perfect to be true.
Country singer Whitney Rose insists her earliest memories of performing were at her grandparents’ house in Prince Edward Island. Rose lived there for the first part of her childhood with her young mother. Grandma and Grandpa were country-loving bar owners with a habit of bringing the party home after closing up for the night. At three or four years of age, little Whitney — a future neotraditional country singer with a love for vintage sounds — got her first paid gigs.
“I would have been in bed for a number of hours and I’d hear them come home and I’d get up and I’d want to sing with them,” she says, in an interview from a tour stop in Toronto. “There would be a guitar going around ... They used to give me a dollar to sing There’s a Tear in My Beer by Hank Williams.”
Those early renditions presumably sounded different from Rose’s chill cover of the same tune, which elegantly closes her 2015 sophomore record, Heartbreaker of the Year. But including the song was a nice tribute to the singer-songwriter’s earliest musical memories, many of which revolved around soaking up traditional country sounds from her Grandparents’ jukebox.
“There was always music playing at the bar — Hank Williams, Keith Whitely, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash,” Rose says. “So I come by it
fairly honestly because that’s what I was drawn to from a young age. My mom was young and so she was playing what was considered cool and new and I didn’t like any of that. I just wanted to listen to my grandparents’ music.”
One of the great ironies of modern country music is that the artists who seem best suited to carry the torch for the genre’s golden years are relegated to sub-genre status. But not unlike fellow Canuck expat Lindi Ortega, Rose seems miles away from Nashville’s current crop of hitmakers thanks to her country-classicist leanings. Her style and beyond-her-years songwriting skills have earned her high-profile kudos from Rolling Stone and The New York Times. Heartbreaker of the Year was produced by Raul Malo, the lead singer of the Mavericks. He co-produced the Nashville-recorded followup as well, which will be released later this year under Toronto’s Six Shooter Records.
She signed with that indie label last year. Not long afterwards, she relocated to Austin, Texas, which is home of the South by Southwest music festival and may be the perfect location for a country singer with both a reverence for the past and insistence on blazing her own trail. The city was immediately inspiring for Rose. So inspiring that she decided to hit the recording studio as soon as possible.
The resulting EP, South Texas Suite, is a six-song collection that showcases Rose’s schooling in Texas sounds, from the Tex-Mex flavouring of Three Minute Love Affair, to the jaunty two-step twang of My Boots, to the Texas swing of Analog, which finds the singer pining for vintage sounds and other simple pleasures.
“I was probably trying to do something a little more cohesive,” Rose says. “Because stylistically it does change, but I think in a way that makes sense. You really can’t help but soak it up when you’re there. When I’m in Austin and I’m not playing, I’m always going to see live music. There’s so much incredible music at your fingertips, and it does vary.”
There’s also a lot of incredible musicians at your fingertips, which Rose was only too happy to take advantage of. Earl Poole Ball, who played piano for Johnny Cash, virtuoso fiddler Erik Hokkanen and guitarist Redd Volkaert, who played with Merle Haggard, were all in the studio with Rose.
“A lot of people leave Nashville once they hit a certain point in their life and a lot of them end up in Austin,” she says. “There’s so much experience, collectively, in that scene and so there’s so much to learn from these musicians and their years of experience. I can’t say enough about what the city has to offer.”
Since arriving in Austin, Rose has been sharpening her skills with a Thursday-night residency at the famous Continental Club, which left her more than road-ready for the three-month tour that brings her to Calgary’s Commonwealth Bar and Stage on Saturday. While her followup record was recorded in Nashville, Rose says she isn’t remotely influenced by that city’s elaborate star-making machinery. She signed to Six Shooter — a label whose tag line is “Life is too short to listen to sh--ty music” — with the understanding she would be free to follow her own instincts. She plans to do just that.
“Of course that (Nashville) scene very much exists but I’m not a part of it, nor do I have any desire to be,” she says. “Six Shooter is such a supportive label and so nurturing. They’ve never persuaded me to go in any direction. They trust me to do the best I can do. They signed me knowing what I do. So I’m not going to make a new country album now. I’m lucky to be in that position. I’ve heard so many stories of artists who are under a ton of pressure to do what will make the most money. With Six Shooter — I mean obviously they want to make money — but they also want to make art. That overrides everything else.”