Josh Rouse – The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse
Josh Rouse
The Holiday Sounds Of Josh Rouse
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Josh Rouse has announced the release of his first-ever holiday album, The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse, out November 1 via Yep Roc Records. Rouse has delivered a fresh approach to the holiday season, with a collection of nine new songs that showcase his distinctive blend of vintage folk, pop and rock, yet still fit comfortably alongside more traditional yuletide classics. The album is preceded by the release of opening track “Mediterranaen X-Mas”, featuring a breezy, infectious groove that compliments the accompanying video’s tropical Christmas scenes.
Watch The Video For The First Single “Mediterranean X-Mas”
‘The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse’ isn’t your typical yuletide collection. Written off-and-on over the course of the last ten years, the record is joyful and festive of course, but, much like the holiday season itself, it’s also laced with an undercurrent of longing and melancholy. For every playful portrait of giddy lovers on New Year’s Eve, there’s a stranded traveler spending Christmas alone; for every slick St. Nick in a suit and sunglasses there’s a lonely ex-pat waiting by the mailbox for cards that never seem to come. The arrangements are eclectic and intoxicating, drawing equal influence from Rouse’s Midwestern childhood and his decade-and-a-half spent living in Spain, and the performances here are sparkling and fizzy to match, blending jazz sophistication with rootsy sincerity and sly crooner charm. The result is a holiday record that’s guaranteed to stay with you well after the snow has melted and all the decorations have come down.
“I decided that if I was going to make a holiday record, I didn’t want to load it up with sleigh bells and choirs and sing the same old standards that everybody else has already sung,” says Rouse. “I wanted to write something that folks hadn’t heard before, something they could listen to year-round.”
The album was recorded at Nashville’s Alex The Great studio for a four-day whirlwind of a session produced by longtime friend and collaborator Brad Jones: “We recorded everything, even my vocals, live in just a couple takes,” says Rouse, who cut the album with the same group of musicians that backed him on ‘1972.’ “I’d give the guys some hints and direction here and there, but we work so well together that very little needed to be said. I was smiling after every performance.”
That blissful comfort is abundantly clear from the outset, with album opener ‘Mediterranean X-Mas’ swaying gently like a palm tree in the breeze. Backed on the track by a slippery guitar line and an infectious groove, Rouse catalogs scenes from a beachfront holiday, his narrator wearing flip flops as he struggles to remember his high school Spanish and makes “faux snow angels in the sand.”
“I pictured that song as a postcard from someone who’s living or traveling abroad,” says Rouse. “The narrator’s experiencing a very different kind of Christmas than he grew up with, and he wants to share that with the people he cares about back home.”
Finding yourself far from home for the holidays is a frequent theme on the record. On the dreamy “Christmas Songs,” Rouse sings as a stranded international traveler taking comfort in the sound of familiar carols, while the lounge-noir “Letters In The Mailbox” finds him meditating on the acute loneliness that comes with spending Christmas on your own, and the jazzy “New York Holiday” calls to mind ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ as it waltzes through a winter wonderland in the Big Apple.
The rollicking “Sleigh Brother Bill” waxes nostalgic for childhood days of downhill sledding, and the breezy “Easy Man” lights up at the prospect of a white Christmas. “Hanging out with the in-laws / they’re really not so bad…The forecast calls for snow / I’m happy as a clam,” Rouse sings on the lighthearted track, which he co-wrote with another longtime collaborator, Daniel Tashian, who recently took home a pair of GRAMMY Awards for his work helming Kacey Musgraves’ ‘Golden Hour.’
Hailed by NPR as “one of contemporary music’s most engaging singer-songwriters,” Rouse first emerged in 1998 with ‘Dressed Up Like Nebraska,’ a stunning debut that Billboard proclaimed to be a “dark horse gem.” Over the next twenty years, Rouse would go on to release eleven more critically acclaimed albums, honing in on a warm, ruminative sound that fused elements of vintage folk, rock, and pop with modern insight and observation. Q called his breakout release, ‘1972,’ “the most intimate record of the year,” while Rolling Stone dubbed his follow-up, ‘Nashville,’ “a landmark album,” and EW described 2013’s ‘The Happiness Waltz’ as “a big contender for Rouse’s best work.” In 2014, Rouse won a Goya Award (the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar) for his song “Do You Really Want To Be In Love,” and in 2015, he returned with ‘The Embers of Time,’ an album which landed him yet more critical praise alongside tour dates with legendary songwriter Nick Lowe.
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