Emma Rose Has Been Waiting for This Moment

Front Range bluegrass artist and songwriter Emma Rose formed her band, Sound of Honey, in the midst of the pandemic to record the songs she had written throughout several years and create an album. One of those songs, “City,” is now set to be released as the band's first single on Wednesday, February 2. The song is one of seven that compose the upcoming album, Dozens of Colors, set to be released in April or May.

Dozens of Colors is the first album Rose has recorded, but she isn’t new to performing; she's a member of four bands, including her own. She describes herself as a professional upright bassist, playing predominantly bluegrass, old-time and folk music. As her career has grown — especially this last year — she’s been learning how to balance performing and making time to create new music.

“I’ve never been in a rush to get the songs out,” she says. “But I realized I have to put music out for people to know what I sound like.” All of the songs on Dozens of Colors were written over the course of the last five or six years, she explains, but “City” came out in a burst during the summer of 2020.

During those months, Rose was living in her dad’s basement and after an argument, she found herself sitting with her guitar and hammering out chords alongside a stream of direct lyrics. The punk and indie-rock drive is reminiscent of the styles of Phoebe Bridgers or Lucy Dacus, she explains, and deviates from her typical folky sound. It’s also one of her only songs that came out almost entirely in one go.

“City” reflects the desire for distraction while feeling bored and restless. It’s a cross between a breakup song and a message about quarantine-induced liminal space. But despite the bitter processing involved with the song’s theme, “City” carries an endearing tone, filled with warm vocal harmonies and tight drums that drive the song. Rose says the single tells the story of a “small town girl [who] drives to a big city and experiences all the hustle and bustle of how her life has changed.”
When she wrote it, Rose had also recently gone through a breakup, and the lyrics reflect both personal antidotes and imagined entities. ”I didn’t necessarily write it about myself,” she says. “I was just thinking about that particular situation.”

She does, however, draw from real moments of her life with lyrics such as “paint a picture every day / make yourself some coffee” and “start a garden in the yard.” These are actions she took during quarantine and embody the sense of “rushing out of a relationship and trying to do things to keep your mind off of it,” she says.

Rose managed to find substantial ways to stay occupied in the months following her breakup. She says she decided that “I need to get [the songs] out there because life is short, and I like them, and it would be fun to record them.” In August 2020, she reached out to her longtime friend and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Rose, of the former Elephant Revival, to help record her music. Her drummer, Tobias Bank, and bassist, William Kuepper, also joined in on the recording. (Sound of Honey currently includes electric guitarist Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose.)

The journey to create Sound of Honey has been interesting, Rose reflects. She’s been playing music all her life. She started by accompanying her parents in their folk and bluegrass duo act, and picking up bass and singing in her middle school choir. Rose says she didn’t take music seriously, however, until she graduated high school and moved to Austin, Texas, for two years.

“I started playing upright with bluegrass musicians out there, and I really got my butt kicked,” she says.

The Austin bluegrass scene is more traditional and holds strict standards, Rose says. “We’d call some of those people grassholes,” she recalls, because they’d insist that “bluegrass has to be played this specific way.”
While she learned a lot in Austin, she was happy to move back to Colorado, where she feels that younger musicians are more experimental with their traditional roots. She started a duo, Rose & Björn, with her former partner, but it ended with their relationship in 2020.

Since then, Rose has found no shortage of musical opportunities. Aside from recording her upcoming album, she started playing upright bass with Daniel Rodriguez (also of the former Elephant Revival), joined Whippoorwill and started Big Richard, a four-piece bluegrass band with Bonnie Sims, Eve Panning and Joy Adams. Big Richards is gaining enough momentum that Rose anticipates the band will be on tour for much of 2022 and 2023.

With all that action, she says she’s trying to focus on the present moment rather than dwell on the future. Thinking ahead too much “takes me away from my creativity,” she explains. “Writing songs comes from what we have inside of ourselves, and you can’t really tap into that well if you’re just passing through and trying to get a little sip of water, especially if the well is low, or if it’s dry.”

"I think it takes a lot of presence and stability to fill that well as much as it takes having experiences in life and traveling and moving really fast,” she adds. “I think it’s important to take that time to really be present and process stuff in a poetic way.”

Rose hopes that such an approach will allow her to create more of her own music and book more shows with Sound of Honey in the upcoming months. One thing is certain, she’s no longer in that bored and restless space that allowed her to write “City.”

"City" drops Wednesday, February 2 and can be streamed through Sound of Honey's Instagram, on Spotify or YouTube. Emma Rose and Sound of Honey play Cervantes' Masterpiece Ballroom, 2637 Welton Street; Friday, February 12. Tickets are $15. They play the Fox Theatre, 1135 13th Street, Boulder, Friday, February 18. Tickets are $15.