Singer-songwriter Esther Rose has a small songwriting ritual. She puts down her guitar, puts in her headphones, and listens to the demo she just recorded on a walk through New Orleans’ French Quarter. Rose makes her way to some benches by the levee that she has been drawn to since she moved to the city ten years ago. And though the romantic love that brought her to the city has since ended, the love she feels for New Orleans has grown stronger.
This love, and her songwriting ritual, are featured in the music video for Rose’s “How Many Times,” the title track for her upcoming album, slated to release on Father/Daughter Records on March 26. The camera follows Rose through the desolate streets, back and forth from the benches at the levee. Along the way, she is joined by various eclectic characters: brides in papier-mâché masks, dogs in homemade collars and Hot Tamale Guy, a well-known street vendor in the French Quarter who willingly walked into the frame.
“That’s another thing I learned from and loved about New Orleans: connection, the way that people greet each other and appreciate each other, and interact with each other,” Rose says. “The streets we shot on are so familiar to me, and to so many people who spent time in the French Quarter.” Rose and the video’s director, Sarah Danzinger, joked that the video could have been filmed in 2010, since it traverses the locations they were drawn to upon moving to the city.
How Many Times is a twangy heartbreak record; Rose wrote the songs in 2018, after the relationship that led her to New Orleans ended. But the record is not spiteful, like others incited by the aftermath of a long love. “I’m glad it was you who broke my heart,” Rose sings, on “Songs Remain.” “It had to be you who broke my heart.” Her airy voice lilts upward at the end of the phrase, as if breaking a heart can be done with a light touch.
How Many Times follows Rose’s 2019 debut with Father/Daughter, You Made it This Far, which received a 7.5 rating from the online music publication Pitchfork. Reviewer Sam Sodomsky called the album’s final song, “Don’t Blame It On The Moon,” its strongest. The song details two lovers at a crossroads, questioning whether their relationship is fated to end. How Many Times picks up that inquiry. It’s over. “We know that we can’t blame it on the moon,” Rose sings in “When You Go,” one of the album’s most emotional tracks.
The album is sheltered from a typical heartbreak record’s animosity and woe-is-me wallowing by Rose’s introspective songwriting, and the band’s affinity for 90s country dancehall music. According to Rose, production was influenced by partner two-stepping. The fiddle melodies and easygoing vocals pull listeners right into a wood-paneled dance hall, with scuffed floors and cigarette smoke. When one hears Rose’s exuberant vocal flourish at the end of “How Many Times,” it’s possible to forget that the word “pain” appears in every preceding verse. And in “My Bad Mood,” Rose personifies her heartbreak as if it is the life partner that replaced her lost love. It’s nearly tongue-in-cheek; she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and is mature enough to place blame for her pain on an entity other than her lover.
“I’m terrified of being misunderstood, and you have to let that go if you’re going to be releasing anything into the world that’s personal,” Rose says. She doesn’t want listeners to think about her relationship. She’s reserved, and does not believe to hold a monopoly on emotion. Once her songs are released, they belong to the listener, just as much as they belong to Rose. It’s why the “groovy” dancehall arrangements work. A listener can hear the song differently moment-to-moment: a call for either commiseration or communal dance.
The songs on How Many Times feel pre-pandemic to Rose in their preoccupation with romantic love. “Now, when I sit down to write,” Rose says, “sometimes my pen starts a love song, and I’m like, nope! I want to think about anything else. There are so many other important things, like safety and health and family.” These days, her inspiration comes from conversations about inequality, greed, economic stability. Regardless, she isn’t tired of How Many Times just yet, even though the record has been in progress for years. “There was so much learning in these songs for me when I wrote them, that it remains like a time capsule,” she says.
More and more often, streaming culture influences musicians to release music consistently, disincentivizing the slow creative process. It becomes uncommon to hear an artist tinker with a record for two years. But sustained attention is not Rose’s ultimate goal.
“Nobody knows what ‘making it’ looks like anymore,” she says. “No one knows what success is, at all, so I just focus on being grateful. For me, success is getting up and writing a song and being full of possibility."
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January 25, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Esther Rose Announces Album ‘How Many Times’ - Forbes
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