“I’d say, simply put, 98 percent of suffering is self-made,” he says. “All the suffering in my life comes from my perception of how life is relating to me, or how I’m relating to life, and it’s usually a misperception.”
Rose speaks calmy, choosing his words deliberately like a modern-day Dharma bum. But as a natural-born singer-songwriter, he’s found that music is the best way to share his ideology, and he’s been doing it with his Boulder-based band Gasoline Lollipops since 2004.
The alt-country quintet shares its latest album, Kill The Architect, on Friday, June 13, via ALP Recordings, and Rose gives a little glimpse into what the band’s sixth studio album is all about, starting with the title. “It pertains to the idea that we are each the architect of our own reality and experience, and we really don’t experience anything other than our mind and perception of things,” he shares.
But Rose, who grew up Buddhist, sees how the Eastern religion’s use of the architect concept as it pertains to the greater scheme of things can cause more harm than good. “Clearly, the collective consciousness has designed a pretty dysfunctional reality for us all to experience together, so it’s killing the architect of these conceptual constraints that leave us all in classes and races and political parties and all the division that we sow,” he explains.
“What is the experience that remains if we stop translating the experience through the lens of the architect?”
It’s something he admits to mulling over “obsessively” about his whole life. Of course, there is no one true answer to arrive at. There are a multitude of avenues to explore that Rose believes requires balance, and there seems to be a significant imbalance right now.
“A lot of my songs I talk about good and evil, and heaven and hell, and God and the devil. It’s a common language that people can understand what I’m talking about,” he explains. “Through my own lens, I’m talking about Buddhist concepts, but the language is totally interchangeable.”
Clay Rose, the creative force behind Gas Pops, typically pulls from philosophical teachings and ideologies when writing.
Courtesy Be Boulder Photography
With Gas Pops, Rose, guitarist Don Ambory, keys player Scott Coulter, bassist Brad Morse and drummer Kevin Matthews take listeners through unexpected twists and turns on Kill The Architect.
If you’re familiar with the group already, you won’t be too surprised when the five-piece shifts from outlaw country to punk, then Americana, indie rock and all those subgenres Gas Pops frequently visit. But it’s still just as impressive as it’s always been.
Rose & Co. teamed up with producer Steve Berlin, of Los Lobos, on the twelve songs that eventually made it to Kill The Architect, marking the first time the band abandoned its independent DIY approach. “We were missing something, and we all knew it. Every record we made, we would play what we played, and the songs were the songs I wrote, but when we would listen back, it was not hitting us the way that it should,” Rose shares. “I knew a lot of that was just because there’s no captain of the ship.”
Most of the tracklist were initially pieces Rose wrote for a ballet called Sam & Deliah, his fourth project with the contemporary dance company Wonderbound. But Berlin did a good job of “trimming the fat.”
“My philosophy on art is free expression. Through free expression, we come up with originality. Each person in the band is expressing themselves truly, and they all have a different take on a song, and expressing the way this song makes them feel, and then it comes out in this very unique way, and that’s great,” Rose says. “But we got to stay in our lane, and if there’s no captain, we don’t know where those lanes are.”
Gas Pops found the inside track all right. “Horse or the Cart,” featuring Fruition’s Mimi Naja, is a country and Western throwback, while “Elvis” is a cowpunk rager.
“I went to Graceland before they sold it, and it was one experience. Then I went back to Graceland after they sold it, and it was like fucking Disneyland,” Rose says of his homage to the King. “There was not a trace of Elvis’s spirit left in that place. It’s so sterilized and commodified it doesn’t feel like Elvis anymore, and I was pissed off about it, so I wrote that song.”
He recruited his old busking buddy Gregory Alan Isakov, an original Gas Pops member before he launched his own successful solo career, on the soulful “Mercy.”
“We’ve been friends for a long time, but it had been a while, and it was really nice to have him singing with me again. It felt like old times,” Rose says, sharing that the two initially met in 2002, when he stopped to watch Isakov play on a corner of Pearl Street.
The previously released single “Tennessee Nights” was a family affair, as Rose teamed up with his mother, Donna Farar, who’s a longtime singer-songwriter in Nashville and wrote Willie Nelson’s “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning.”
“It’s pretty easy working with Mom, the hardest part is she just writes way faster than I do,” he says. The outlaw ditty is an autobiographical ode to her and his dad, a “draft-dodging, hippie truck-driver” who lived in Colorado.
While Rose and Gas Pops might be pulling from some deeper, “hardcore shit” on Kill The Architect, it’s all in the name of creating some unity and connecting.
“It’s put to a dance beat and people are out there exorcising the demons on the dance floor and they’re doing it together and they’re doing it for the same reason,” Rose concludes. “That’s the juice. That’s why we’re here, and that’s what we’re here for.”
Kill The Architect is available on all streaming platforms.
