Frankie Rose & the Outs Save Northside, Prep Debut LP for Slumberland
“I feel like being in a band is so hard, I just don’t know how people do it,” Frankie Rose tells me on the patio at Bruar Falls recently. “It’s like a business. If you don’t have a big chunk of money to start with and get things off the ground it’s really hard. And all my girls are women with jobs and boyfriends and rent so it’s almost impossible for us to just take off.”
Miss Frankie Rose and her girls had saved my Saturday two days prior at the recent Northside Festival, as she took her “baby band” and newly minted solo turn as Frankie Rose & the Outs down the block for a short set at Death By Audio. Her girls – the Outs – are old friends Kate Ryan, Margot Bianca and Caroline Yes.
“It was definitely different than last week where we had twenty 25-year-old boys moshing and crowd surfing,” she tells me over drinks. “I feel like they were into it, but it was definitely mellow.” Those were my thoughts on the festival exactly, unfortunately nowhere close to explaining some of the recent choices from this nomadic Brooklyn fixture.
Rose co-founded local darlings Vivian Girls in 2007, penning the standout single “Where Do You Run To” off the debut LP (In the Red, 2008), drummed and toured extensively with the pleasantly half-awake Crystal Stilts throughout 2008 before joining and recently splitting again with Dum Dum Girls, the band of Southern California ladies that fell into the helping hands of Sub Pop last year.
“There’s no way I can do both,” she tells me, explaining the easy choice and amicable split. “[Dum Dum Girls] are on an insane touring schedule right now where I would basically have to kiss them goodbye and make my own music.”
“Once you get a booker and you’re touring all the time, there’s no time for creative,” she says. “Unless you like playing every night, but that’s not creative to me.”
I throw in a few more reasons that might come as no surprise to anyone with creative ADD, or an aversion to the sort of scheduling that comes when a band leaves the basement.
“It’s as simple as that,” she says. “And in fact I’m even willing to say that I don’t know what’s going to happen after this record.”
I appreciated these honest words from the 31-year old California native as early press starts to roll on her debut LP (Slumberland), due out September 21. “Touring is so hard," she continued, "and I really like having a life. I really, really like being in Brooklyn and having a job and having close friendships that I can maintain. I just feel like it’s really such a particular lifestyle that if you don’t love it then it can ruin your world, and I like having a garden and a room to sleep in."
“I just can’t imagine committing myself to one thing. I’m not trying to go for it, and that idea to me, given the machinery of the music industry anyway, it’s so nasty and so unkind and I’ve experience it firsthand and I just think the fun is in the making.”
Rose is content when describing how much of what defines her can be found in a four-block radius from Bruar Falls along Grand Avenue and Roebling, including the Civil Defense studio where she recorded her 11-song effort with the help of engineer and roommate Jeremy Scott.
“I’m a little worried about being pigeonholed, yeah," she says, noting the resume and our collective “ipod shuffle brains” that might not give this mellow record an honest listen. "Apparently it's somber," she tells me. Recorded over 21 days last winter between Dum Dum Girls tour commitments, Rose aimed for a higher fidelity recording from the rapid fire, eight or nine day record-mix-master sessions with previous bands.
“I didn’t want it to sound fuzzy or muddy,” she explains from behind a giant Big Gulp she brought that afternoon. “It’s cleaner, it’s moodier. Much moodier.” More than half the record is in this vein apparently, but the band isn't exploring those songs live just yet. Instead they're growing into them naturally as any new band should. "It's so hard to pull off beautiful, slow ballads well," she says. "I'm amazed at bands that do it and hold people's attention."
And with that Frankie sounds genuinely unsure of how the music media machine might reconcile her years of creative leapfrogging with a batch of new mood pieces. She's "waiting for the axe to fall" with respect to promoters and early press, all components in a pyramid with so much influence well before the September release date. In the spirit of supply meeting demand, the band is asking fans to assist them via Kickstarter in buying a van. “We’re just trying to be ourselves so hopefully it’ll translate. We’ll see.”
It's refreshing when artists talk openly about the stresses and expectations of how art is received, especially in Brooklyn’s hyper-aware taste-maker culture where one write up can result in some bankable buzz. It seems disingenuous, even clueless at times, when musicians claim no relationship to the machinery at work. Yet it’s tough not to root for Frankie this fall when she takes her first turn fronting a band, even playing guitar live, after going through the motions so many times already.
“Music seems to be the only thing that really keeps my interest, although I just don’t want it to stop being fun for me because the minute it stops being enjoyable I know I’m gonna go ‘screw this,’” she says. “I don’t know what else I would do.”
Frankie Rose & the Outs will play a secret show on July 17 before leaving for a West Coast record release tour with Hunx and his Punx in September.
