California songstress Angelica Rockne will release her second album The Rose Society in May 2023. Rockne came to Loose’s attention with her startling debut Queen Of San Antonio. Released back in 2017 the album led to LA Weekly heralding her as Best Country Singer of 2019. Closer to home, Rockne has already come to the attention of Uncut Magazine who made her debut album one of their Americana Albums of The Month and have just featured the opening track of her new album on Volume 6 of their iconic and influential Sounds Of The New West series of covermount CDs. 

Now, Sitting amongst the orchards of Corralitos, California, Angelica Rockne reflects on the recent past. Her forthcoming album, The Rose Society, has been in a process of distillation for five years now. “It sounds like a lifetime, but really it’s been equally ephemeral as it has been eternal.” The album was self-produced, with Oz Fritz at the helm. Rockne called upon longtime collaborators Jason Cirimele on guitar and bass, Cody Rhodes on drums and percussion, and a new friend, Patrick McGee, on piano and organ. The band referenced everything from Ethiopian jazz to Stravinsky, back to folk standards and iconic rock like Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon. The arrangements have a fluidity to them, the music lives comfortably within the spaciousness - on top of a desert mesa or pastoral lands untarnished by man. They recorded in a small studio in Nevada City, California in June, 2021. Rockne continued to sculpt the material for eight more months before developing a strategy for string arrangements with Scott McDowell, Graham Patzner, and Lewis Patzner at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco. 

Rockne’s debut, Queen of San Antonio, was immediately labeled “cosmic country.” It served as an ode to a town, a group of ride-or-die friends, and the 1970’s lifestyle they were living. After moving every few years as a child and young adult, she explored the then-revelatory concept of sticking around. The Rose Society drops the confines of cosmic country, the arrangements are wholeheartedly devoted to the song. “Age of the Voyeur” opens the album, as piano and acoustic guitar mimic each other and Rockne begins, “I miss you when you were a mystery.” Her voice is striking in its willingness to be exposed, naked, yet there is a strength that comes through that almost feels learned, like how we learn to navigate chaos. Nevertheless, what is underlying and constant throughout is an exquisite tenderness. Rockne alludes to her time in Southern California, “Before the city, the angels were free, to serenade the illusory.”  “In 2019 everything came to a head,” Rockne recalls. “I had just moved to LA from Oakland and I was intoxicated by the city.” She played all the local haunts in Echo Park and Silverlake with a revolving band of players. “My interests were suddenly hedonistic, until it all felt too fake. What I was once so allured by began to repel me.” Within a short eight months Rockne felt implored to walk away. “This record illustrates a polarity, disillusionment on the one hand, fulfillment on the other”. In “White Cadillac”, two lovers try to understand how to survive, stay sane, and remain free. The title track, “Rose Society,” begins with all instruments reinforcing one melodic line. For a moment, one might be fooled by this song's simplicity, until we arrive at the chorus and 1970’s choir-like vocals backing Rockne as she belts out “Pray for the light that we could never shine.” It soon becomes evident how multilayered the album truly is. Rockne pays homage to the parts of ourselves that were never seen or could never fully come into the light. “The Night Dreams of You” is Rockne at her most vulnerable, “When I make love, like it could be the last time, all love prevails”. Her tone is triumphant within a record steeped in melancholy. Backed by a quartet, guitar and piano, all with intimate refrain as they respond to Rockne’s subtle cues. “The love that prevails here is boundaryless,” Rockne illuminates. “It’s a love that cannot be tamed or muted; a love that exists without being attached to an entity, but that is omnipresent.” There is a visceral sense that confirms this, yet it doesn’t end there. 

“I fell in love with someone, only we were oceans apart. We were limited to our voices and poetry, and it ignited me.” Meanwhile Rockne was scheduled to go on tour supporting Mariee Siou. From Santa Fe to Upstate NY, they played in unconventional settings, each show held with intention and reverence. It wasn’t long before Rockne’s existence had shifted entirely. “It’s like my life is always beckoning me forth to meet certain soul requirements, sometimes at an accelerated speed.” Within a matter of months and a round trip to the Far East, Rockne and her fiance were preparing to welcome their first child into the world. Perhaps that’s why mortality and “the birth and death portals” are so experiential in this new work. “In 2020 I gave birth to my daughter at home in the middle of a nearby wildfire. The trust it required was innate, deep within my bones.” In Rockne’s The Rose Society, we witness how an arduous journey for many can be made easeful through entrusting oneself to the universe.  “It took a few trips through the underworld, and cutting through the illusory to arrive at a more ripened version of true love and freedom.”