Artist of the Week: Anni Rossi

Photo by Jim Newberry

Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Album: Rockwell
For Fans of: Andrew Bird, Laura Veirs, Ben Sollee

On her new album and sometimes during live shows, Anni Rossi covers a song that tends to stump even the most dedicated audiophiles. As she plucks the first few bars of the Ace of Base hit "Living in Danger" on her viola, “I might see a few people get big smiles on their faces, but most of them don’t have a clue.” Rossi says. “If I tell them after the show, I can see them going through the lyrics in their head, trying to remember what the original sounded like.”

The 23-year-old's warbly vocals, playful arrangements and delightfully obscure lyrics lend themselves equally well to playful pop and pensive soul searching. She’s been classically trained on the viola since the age of 3, but now prefers to pluck the strings just as often as she drags a bow across them. As an artist, these contradictions make her surprisingly hard to peg.

Rossi’s musical journey began when she moved from her native Minnesota to Los Angeles after high school to study composition at the California Institute of Arts. She met a lot of like-minded young musicians and decided to move to Chicago a year later to pursue music full-time; there, she joined alt-noisy L.A. artist Carla Bozulich's touring band and toured the U.S. and Europe before returning home to focus on her solo career. After playing small venues and slowly building a following, Rossi signed with 4AD and released the Afton EP in 2008 before recording her debut album Rockwell (out now) in a single day.

Was the abbreviated timeline about ambition or a budget? “A little bit of both,” she admits. “I’ve been playing so many of the songs on the album for so long that there weren’t a lot of kinks to work out. I wanted to capture on the record the feeling of just standing in a room with me while I play. I wanted it to sound good, but I didn’t want it to sound over-produced.”

Rossi added percussion this time around to fill in what she saw as the missing element to her songs. The result is an intimate and heartfelt record, with an unintended geographical theme. “A lot of these songs are a reflection of moving a lot- living in three cities in four years,” she said. Rockwell is named after the street she now calls home, though she's been touring since March, alternating dates with Noah and the Whale, Ben Sollee and Camera Obscura. And Rossi isn’t taking any of it for granted. “I have really struggled over the past few years,” she says. “Things have been a little hairy up ‘til now, so to be on tour is so exciting.”

Listen to "Wheelpusher" from Anni Rossi's Rockwell: