There are too many musicians/writers to name.ĬNN: Are you surprised that Rhino put together a "best of"? Josh Rouse: Anything that is soulful and honest is an influence. So, though it's a cliché, what are your influences? The following is an edited version of the interview.ĬNN: Your music showcases a number of styles - the fairly basic sound of the early records, the early-'70s infused stuff from "1972," and then there are songs like "Miserable South" that would sound comfortable coming from Otis Redding or Al Green. Rouse answered several questions via e-mail for CNN.com. he was already a thoughtful writer with a heartbreakingly intimate voice and the unfailing ability to wrap his melancholy in warm and sweet melodies." it's plain that Josh Rouse arrived fully formed," writes 's Tim Sendra. "Listening to this collection of tracks taken. On, Rouse's Web site, he sells his "Bedroom Classics" - dozens of songs Rouse recorded live or in random locations (hotel rooms, apartments) available to fans.įor those who like a more traditional medium, the CD, Rhino Records recently compiled a two-disc set of Rouse's material - including several demos and outtakes - for "The Best of the Rykodisc Years," which covers the first seven years of Rouse's career. On the business side, he's marching to his own drummer.
"She called me and said, 'I love "1972," ' and I was like, 'I was listening to you when I was 16 - and you're married to Paul Simon!' " Rouse told the paper. In 2004, the Australian newspaper The (Melbourne) Age noted Rouse was going to have dinner with Edie Brickell, the "What I Am" singer who is married to Paul Simon.
Though he has yet to have a breakthrough single in the United States, his music has appeared in the movie "Vanilla Sky" and TV shows including "Dawson's Creek" and "Party of Five." "There's an openness to the sound that I think I got from moving to, say, a big city in California to a Wyoming town of five or six hundred." "It really shaped me as a person," he told the Toronto Sun. Rouse was born in Nebraska and grew up around the West and the South. The 36-year-old singer's willingness to follow several paths may have come from moving around as a child. Aside from Rouse's rough, intimate voice, that album sounds little like 2003's "1972," which features songs such as "Love Vibration" and "Comeback (Light Therapy)" and has a funkier, more upbeat production to match. Whatever the circumstances of the actual recordings, they seem to have worked: 1972 is a delightful album, its 10 songs redolent of the spirit and sound of the era, with understated echoes of period heroes, from Al Green and Marvin Gaye to Neil Young and James Taylor, and an underlying theme of impending change, for better or worse.Listeners to his first album, 1998's "Dressed Up Like Nebraska," may have lumped him into the alt-country movement. So when Josh Rouse told his producer Brad Jones that for his fourth album, he wanted to make a record that sounded like 1972, Jones jokingly replied that was fine by him, he just wanted lots of cocaine, pot and random women scattered around the studio. It must have been a strange time to be embarking upon one's adolescence, with a string of dismal, dim-bulb singer-songwriters serving as the unacknowledged legislators of one's culture, and a drug-worn California still regarded as Shangri-La. For Americans, it was a less readily defined time, the country's sheer size and the slow response-time of its mainstream media ensuring that the last enervated waves of hippie culture were still lapping through midwest towns, even as the boogie boom spearheaded by the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd was rising in the South, ready to swamp everything in its path. For British pop fans, 1972 was the high-water mark of glam, a period bestrode by Bolan and Bowie, who released The Slider and Ziggy Stardust that same year.