BAND: Rosey
INTERVIEWER: Kelly Engle (KellyE@bandvibe.com)
INTERVIEWEE: Rosey
DATE OF INTERVIEW: 03.25.08

BAND MEMBERS:
Trumpet-Gabe Johnson
Drums-Scott Seiver
Bass-Kaveh Rasteghar
Sax-Ben Wendel
Keys-Adam Benjamin
Lead Vocals- Rosey

BV: When did you know that you wanted to pursue music as a career?

Rosey: It was my senior year of college. It was pretty much the minute I picked up my first guitar and played my first cord. I’ve always sung in school, like in the chorus, and did musicals and stuff like that. I never thought that there was anything particularly interesting about my voice until I attempted to write my first song. I didn’t even know how to play guitar. I asked my boyfriend if he would buy me a guitar and an amp for my birthday and he thought it was the funniest thing in the world. He thought oh that’s so cute that my girlfriend wants to be like me and play and sing. So he got me an amp and guitar from like 1972 or something, practically just shot. I plugged it in and I just found some cord and I played it and started singing. I was kind of shocked and thought oh my god I never heard this in my voice before. It kind of blew me away and I was really excited. I knew pretty much right away that I had found the thing I was looking for and just in time to graduate college. My parents were absolutely fucking horrified. They didn’t talk to me for like two years after that. It’s ok because I really needed time to develop my sound. I moved to San Francisco, where I didn’t know anybody, because every single one of my friends was a musician in Boston and in New York. I thought oh my god I don’t want to be around them. So I decided I wanted to go where I knew no one. I could get up on stage and if I made an ass of myself I didn’t care because I didn’t know anybody. It was necessary I think and it was good. I came back years later and had a band and had it together. It took me about four years to get it together and record enough demos to then eventually get signed.

BV: Do you think your jazz/blues genre allows you more room for creativity and independence?

Rosey: Sometimes I worry. I don’t want to paint myself too much into a jazz box. I want to be able to play shows that aren’t just jazz. I think I found a way around that because I love all kinds of music. I want to keep incorporating that stuff into my set. I imagine that I’ll do, I have before and I still will do, sets that are just jazz. But we’re making a remix record right now. Some of the mixes are gonna be like hip hop style or one is gonna be like a rock steady seventies vibe. We can perform songs like that live too, which will be really fun. I’ve always headed towards a pretty independent vibe.

BV: What’s it like hearing your songs on major movies and TV shows?

Rosey: It’s great! I feel really lucky about that because that’s been one of the things that has actually been able to help me pay the bills the last few years while I’ve been in between record deals and figuring it out.

BV: If someone asked you to recommend one of your songs that embodied the style and message of your music, which would you tell them to listen to?

Rosey: That’s hard. I guess I would tell them to listen to the Love Koop remix only because it’s just fun and it’s kind of jazzy, but it’s also just this sort of loungey vibe.

BV: How is your recently released CD different from past recordings?

Rosey: Well, it’s my first self-produced record. I was in L.A. and I had finished doing a touring cycle for Dirty Child and I had gotten pretty heavily into co-writing with other artists. I’ve been doing that for a few years. I made this rock record too, which never got put out because we got into this kind of legal battle with somebody who produced it. That was a bummer because I spent a year on that and that didn’t end up coming out. I pretty much lost myself for a while in co-writing because it’s pretty easy to do that I think. There’s no shortage of little kids who need someone to write songs for them. I was doing that for a while and that’s when I met Kelis and Nas and I wrote a song for Kelis for her last record. Then after I did that I kind of freaked out and thought if I don’t focus on my own career for a while I might just lose it. I knew that I wanted to do something really different, but I wasn’t sure what. I just knew that whatever it was I just wanted it to be, after writing pop songs for like four years for other people, I just wanted to work on something incredibly challenging and complicated. Where the music was just really really complicated. I got so sick of the two cord songs. It just made sense to work on jazz because I do love a good challenge and I was not a jazz singer. I thought this was something I would really have to throw myself into completely and wholeheartedly. So, I went to New York and I hung out with a couple of my friends who were jazz players. I spent a lot of time with my friend John Chin, he’s a jazz pianist. We just sat and listened to jazz for hours, drank a lot of wine and smoked a lot of cigarettes. He played me all of his favorites and we just had a great time, just really taking it all in. I was just kind of taking apart the arrangements in my mind and just thinking like how can I do this? A lot of people were pushing me to do a standards album. I thought I don’t want to do that because I’m a songwriter. The most important thing to me is to get my own sort of ideas out there, so that I can get them out of myself. I was kind of learning to use Pro Tools at the same time. It took about a year and a half to write the record and in that time I became a much better engineer. The demos were sounding really good and that’s when someone said I want to give you some money to make a record. So I went back to L.A. where all my favorite musicians are, and John Chin came with me, and I recorded the band live to tape which was really great because I was going for that old school kind of jazz sound. I knew I had to record it in the old school way and kind of lay off the whole computer sound. We recorded the record in a couple weeks. It took me about a year to get a label, to get signed, and actually get put out for real. So then here we are.

BV: What steps and choices did you make to get to this point in your career?

Rosey: It’s been a hard road. It’s not easy being an artist unless you’re independently wealthy, which I’m not. It’s definitely being in the trenches and struggling to get by but it’s totally worth it because I absolutely love what I do. I supplement my income by also doing music for commercials. A friend of mine and I are scoring a film, we’re doing all the music for that right now. It’s blues music and it’s really really fun. It’s kind of like a dream come true because I love blues so much. Once that’s done we’ll pretty much have a whole new record of songs. So we’ll probably end up selling that or trying to get it signed to another independent label. I stay up really late at night haha. I work until five o’clock in the morning. It’s nice because there’s nobody awake to tell you no.

BV: What advice would you give to other young singers and musicians trying to brake into music?

Rosey: I would say go for it because right now is the time. The sky is the limit. People are just doing whatever they want and pulling it off. There’s a lot more cool radio stations out there that are playing every kind of freaky music you can come up with. I feel so lucky that I’m not stuck on a major label anymore. I don’t have any exclusivity in my contracts. I can have as many independent deals as I want or just put out my own music. I live my life. It’s fantastic. It’s the best time in the world to be in the music industry. I mean I wish people bought more music but fuck it that’s not what being an artist is about. It’s not about how much money you make. It’s about the freedom to make the kind of art that you want. If you can do that you’re rich in so many other ways.

BV: What would you like to say to your fans at Bandvibe?

Rosey: Thanks for hanging in there with me and being patient because I haven’t had a record out in probably like five years. It’s been a long period of working and self-discovery. I’m really excited that I was able to come out of my own little cave.

For more official information on Rosey, please log onto:
http://www.roseymusic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/rosey