Band of the Week: The Rosewood Thieves

“For some reason, my ear just doesn’t accept anything from 1975 on,” he explains over the phone from his day job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I never think that I’m doing that kind of music, but because old music is literally all I listen to, it’s obvious that that’s what I’m going to sound like when I write a song.”

To take this retro sentiment up a notch, Jordan and his band retreated last winter to a crumbling farmhouse in upstate New York - with no television, telephone or Internet - to write their first record. The end result was the debut EP, From the Decker House, named after their erstwhile home.

The songs on the release betray a hint of angst from the five weeks the band spent with limited contact to the outside world. On “Cold in the Country,” Jordan sings against the backdrop of mopey electric piano and feather-light acoustic strums: “It’s cold in the country, there’s leaves on the ground/ All the streets are empty, there’s nobody in town.”

“It was cold up there, our heater didn’t really work,” he concedes of the band's recording location. “And our phone didn’t work, so nobody could reach us and we were kind of losing our minds. You can really hear that in these songs.”

Not that the Rosewood Thieves can’t rock out. “Doctor” features wailing electric guitar licks and rollicking drums coupled with apocalyptic imagery. One verse claims that “Last night I felt the earth quake/ I was just about to go to bed/ I woke up the next morning/ And I thought that I was dead/ I looked outside my window and everything was gone/ No fishes in my river, no chickens in my barn…” Jordan wrote the song while most of the band had gone back to New York City, leaving him and one other band member alone in the Decker House.

“The place seemed like at one time it could’ve been a good working farm, and then it looked like just as we showed up, all hell broke loose,” he says. “So I was just imagining what it would’ve been like the day before, when it was in working order, and then looking out my window and seeing how it is now.”

The band is busy writing songs for its full-length, which will be fleshed out in an abandoned venue in Woodstock, N.Y. and recorded at Levon Helm’s studio. While optimistic about the future, Jordan is not letting it weigh heavily on his mind. “I’m not too concerned with selling a ton of records,” he says. “It’d be nice if this one, twenty years from now, was just thought of by someone as a nice discovery.”