Alan Rose, fourth from left, and the Restless Elements are releasing their new CD this weekend; the Castaways show begins at 7:30pm on Saturday. Photo provided
AFTER YEARS OF PLANNING, months of practicing and just a few days of recording, the long wait is over. Ithaca singer-songwriter Alan Rose has finally finished his new CD, “American Hands,” and will celebrate the occasion with a massive celebration on Saturday, August 7 at Castaways.
But it’s no ordinary CD release show; rather, it’s a mini-festival that also spotlights some other area bands, most of whom have recently, or are about to, release new CDs of their own. Kicking off the night at 7:30 p.m. are The Weeping Willards, followed by a solo set from Revision’s Nick Bullock. Rose and the Restless Elements will take the stage at 9:30 p.m. for their first set, which will lead into a set from the Fall Creek Brass Band. Rose and company will then return to finish out their set, followed by concluded set from local duo Blow! Cover is $7. Call 272-1370 for more information.
Rose describes “American Hands” as “kind of” a concert album, inspired by various events in a post-9/11 world. He did the bulk of the songwriting in 2003-04, when the Iraq war and the DC-area sniper attacks were in the headlines.
Unlike his first two CD, which he described as “very ‘me’ oriented,” Rose said the new one took a different viewpoint.
“I was starting to look at things from other people’s perspectives,” he said. “As the songs continued to come out, I realized that these are different people’s experiences with the American dream as it stands right now.”
Rose will be joined at the show by the Restless Elements, his seven-piece band that comprises the members of Kites in Space (Benn Bartishevich, Scott Nelson, Chris Ploss, Stephen Burton) and The Weeping Willards (Danny Abowd, Isaac Schwartz, Jesse Gottlieb), two area bands with which he has formed a musical kinship.
“I’ve been looking for bandmates forever, especially since 2003,” Rose said in an interview last weekend. “But it took awhile to find people who were interested and available and who had the right breadth of ability. We have a lot of players Ithaca who are really good at reggae or jazz, but I was looking for some folks who were adept at various forms of rock. That was harder come by-finding people who weren’t already playing in half-dozen other projects.
“The big break came when I met the guys in Seth Feldman (the forerunners of Kites in Space) during the summer of 2005 at the GrassRoots Band Contest,” he continued. “We hit it off personally and musically, and they said ‘We’d love to play with you,’ but it took about a year to get started on that. Then they went away to college, so they were here there months a year. Then we added horn section in 2007 (from the band Chester, now the Weeping Willards), so we had to teach them everything. That was done by end of summer 2008, so I said summer 2009 is when we’ll record. But it felt like an eternity.”
When he finally got into Electric Wilburland Studio in Newfield to work with producer Will Russell, Rose decided to go all out. “We went in really well prepared. But I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, so I was nervous as hell,” he said. “But Will helped to calm my nerves, and once I heard the basic tracks, I decided, ‘Yeah, why not get it right? I don’t want to look back in 10 years and wish I done it differently. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. With a one or two expectations, it matched the vision that I went in with, which I’ve never been able to do before, and may never be able to do again. But here it is.”
Many of the album’s songs feature complex arrangements that recall early Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison albums. “We came to that in an organic way,” Rose said. “The other guys introduced their own elements as we went along, which I really appreciated. When I had a fixed or set idea, we would work on getting what that was gong to be. It was important that we not have a bunch of people bashing away, but that we had really thought-out parts and a lot of hooks. So there were a lot of things to remember.”
One hallmark of the new album are the intricate horn parts that permeate several songs. Most of those parts were arranged by trumpeter Isaac Schwartz of the Weeping Willards, though Willards bandmate Danny Abowd arranged one song, “Rats.” (The third Willard, Jesse Gottlieb, arranged a yet-to-be recorded song. “They are tremendous musicians and all have amazing ideas,” Rose said They’ve all really got strong melodic senses, and it was definitely arranged more like you’d arrange for a ska band than punctuation style horns. That’s been a gift playing with them.”
Rose has long been a strong supporter of the local music scene, hosting the band contest at GrassRoots, emceeing a stage at the Ithaca Festival, hosting the acoustic stage at MuseFest, and spending nearly every night he can out watching other local bands.
“I love the local scene, it’s really what brought me back to Ithaca in 2000 after I had left for a year,” he said. “The thing I like about it is that there are so many different elements that all connect together and it tends to be a very supportive and strong mentoring environment. There’s a really good youth music scene that the older musicians help to support. You see a lot of that going on with the Ithaca Underground group of folks. There are a lot of high school students learning how to produce their own shows and make their own music and playing right alongside the Sutras and Candypants at shows.
“Some of that I saw before moving out of town at Whiplash (a now-defunct annual party in Trumansburg),” he continued. “The guys in (then high school band) The Funnest Game were jamming with Donna the Buffalo and Sunny Weather and you had this whole intergenerational mix of things that was feeding off of each other and learning and supporting. That’s something I’ve never encountered anywhere else. It really is a music community in a lot of ways.”
To learn more about Rose, visit his web site at www.AlanRoseMusic.com.