Rosali middleman: “it’s very exciting to see young women picking up the guitar as a tool of empowerment”
The electric guitar is really prominent on this record, whereas your first album was a lot more acoustic. Was that something you were thinking about while writing? I really love electric guitar. I’ve been playing a long time. With the first record I did the majority of playing, except for my friend Gerhardt Koerner, who played drums and bass. For this one I knew I wanted it to have a fuller sound. It was very important to have a group that felt whole. As these songs came into being and as I was recording, I kept thinking, ‘Oh man, I want Mike Polizze [ from Purling Hiss] on this song so bad.’ We’d all be in the study playing air guitar just imagining what he would play. It was great with this crew… I could tell them what kind of vibe I wanted and just let them do their thing. Not just the guitarists, but everybody. Letting their own expression come out was super important to me.
Most of those musicians are based in Philadelphia. What is the scene like there? It’s been changing a lot in the last few years. I’ve lived here for about 12 years, and in the past 3-5 years it’s become a lot more developed. That has good sides and bad sides. When I first moved here, there was a huge house-show scene, a lot more DIY spaces. You would see a lot of the same people there, and the community was smaller and tighter. Now there are a lot more people. People will ask, “Do you know this band or that person?” “No, I don’t know these people at all…” But a good side is that it’s hard to define a specific sound. There’s definitely a vibe, though. There’s a toughness. It’s still a very gritty city, and we even have a new mascot to prove it [the bizarre new mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team]!
is there a sound associated with the current scene? It’s definitely a rock’n’roll town, which is great. Sometimes people say rock’n’roll is dead, or the electric guitar is over, but that’s not happening here. I have three, sometimes four guitars in my backing band when I play live. A lot of it is women. How a woman plays electric guitar might be totally different from how a man would play it. Women can be aggressive and tough, but maybe still have a different kind of sensuality to it. There’s a huge resurgence… or maybe it’s an emergence of women guitarists in rock bands. A lot in Philly, but also elsewhere. It’s very exciting to see young women picking up the guitar as a tool of empowerment. You can be really loud and express those feelings of anger and frustration.
What can you tell me about your songwriting process? I have a history of being an improvisational musician. I used to be in a duo called Blood Like Mine where I tried to sing from a place of intuition. That requires a lot of patience to craft a song. I’ll have a melody or a line, and I’ll build around that. I’m trying to figure out what the parts are, what the lyrics are. It’s all about improvising, and I guess it’s a gut feeling when you know they’re done.