Esther Rose is Easy to Find

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“Let the angels find me,” Esther Rose sings, with Alynda Segarra’s voice an octave beneath hers. “I don’t care if the whiskey drowns me in the poisoned air.” A pair of fiddles ache, a guitar crests. It’s a fitting capstone—and an admission, perhaps, that you cannot reconcile what you’ve already lost. A reckoning washes over Rose: She got out of dodge, leaving her city behind; her friends still there are making babies and raising them while she rambles in a rented van full of gear. “Fire surrounds me, from here to there, and the water’s rising everywhere. You know there’s no place safe to run, angels surround everyone.”

That was two years ago, in the middle of Rose’s fourth album, Safe to Run. She’s sober now, after having what she calls a “mental health crisis” near the conclusion of her cross-country tour in 2023. She considered quitting music then. “The way that I had been doing things no longer worked,” she tells me. “That feels like a very mid-30s moment, where you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna switch it up completely.’” In the acceleration of a rinse-and-repeat exposure—of no-end touring, writing, and recording—Rose began surrendering the wrong parts of herself, and booze became a crutch to make the discomforts of gigging livable. “I would drink to just be okay,” she confesses. “Touring, you have no privacy. You have no comfort. So you need something, right? When I took away drinking, things needed to be better.” She began ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and collected ideas for LP5, which she initially called The Therapy LP. “I put a huge focus on how I feel, what I want, and how I want to do what I want.”

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But Rose isn’t in stasis. In fact, she makes it known quickly that she still loves “getting feral and being out” but has standards now to keep her grounded. When we find a seat in the rooftop lounge of her Austin, Texas hotel, under a canopy of fake ferns and a subterranean whisper of guests waiting for rideshares, she says she’s glad to be having a real conversation with an adult. “I’ve just been approached by so many drunken frat boys, so this is a pleasure.” It’s South by Southwest week, but she’s stuck to the city’s outskirts, bringing her latex getup to a local line-dancing bar before returning to the road with Twain. “You can die from exposure,” she half-jokes.

After toiling as a fashion designer, the Detroit-born Rose moved to New Orleans in 2010 and changed her career to music. Recording 11 songs live to tape at Mashed Potato Records, she made her solo debut seven years later with This Time Last Night, a bones-and-all country gallop glued together by the very same fiddles and upright basses that serenaded Royal Street corners in the French Quarter. But Rose tells me she never identified with the city’s culture like some of her peers had (and still do). “I always wanted to leave,” she laughs. “A lot of people move there and work there, because they can just play their weeklies. They don’t have to tour. Being someone who tours and goes out is a bit of a different mindset.” She eventually left Louisiana for Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Being able to choose this life is very important. I was reckoning with, ‘Do I want this? And if I do, how do I want it to feel?’ And the answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘Okay, here’s what needs to happen.’”

But Rose’s fifth album, Want, remains entrenched in New Orleans. The Deslondes’ John James Tourville and Howe Pearson play pedal steel and percussion on it, and Video Age’s Ross Farbe—whom Rose has collaborated with on five projects now—produced the music and co-wrote “Tailspin” with her. Its closing track, “Want Pt. 2,” is a Mardi Gras song, which Rose had to write, she tells me, to “figure out what it’s like to put [ego] aside and just truly be there for someone else.” To get some space from a relationship nearing collapse, she took shelter at Casey Jane Reece-Kaigler’s house. She popped an ecstasy tablet and went to see her friend (and bandmate) Kunal Prakash’s Rolling Stones cover band, the Shitty Stones, play. “I was like, ‘I need to excavate my heart. What am I feeling?’ It was a process—take this drug, go to the show, figure it out,” she says. “They get to the classic, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ but, for whatever reason, in that moment, it really hit home. You know that moment when you’ve heard a song 10,000 times and you finally hear it? They’re repeating ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ and I’m like, ‘You can’t!’ It was a brain explosion kind of moment.” That’s when she named her album Want.

Want begins with its title track. “I want to live in the city and kiss everyone, I want to go to bed early, asleep in your spoon,” Rose sings. “I want to hear a pin drop in a sold-out room. I want a puppy, but I don’t want a mess.” Those lines came to her on a long drive alone, when she was returning home from a tour that’d taken it out of her. She sat behind the wheel then, over-caffeinated and humming the melody acapella. “Those songs that come removed from my guitar—lines like that are really special,” she says. “When you write poetry, you’re engaging with yourself, with your mind. You gotta make it interesting. It’s a game that you’re playing.” The lines soon escalated into a laundry list of wants—fantasies of partnership, a conversation with her mother, soul-deep beauty, healed trauma, make-up sex, baking in the sun, and to be “forever young” and “surviving real life.”

Rose writes for herself and for the people she loves. “That’s why I finish stuff,” she elaborates, “so I can share it. I’m like, ‘This will make them laugh,’ or ‘I can finally express this burning desire that I’ve been unable to express in intimacy.’ You have to be able to use your words apart from songwriting. I’ve been trying to learn.” I’ve spoken with enough musicians who claim to not be very good at communicating outside of their art, though, I tell Rose. “The songs don’t work! They never work,” she laughs. “They never get your person back.” It’s momentous, I say, and good for figuring out your own shit. Maybe someone along the way will latch onto your ideas, too. “There’s a response,” Rose contends, “and then you have to show up on your actions and actually act on what you’re saying.”

After moving to Santa Fe, Rose started a group called Notes App—a close circle of friends who write poems on their phones and pass them around. “When I found out that there wasn’t a songwriting community to just plug into, I really struggled with that,” she says. “So I started hosting an open mic poetry night, because I did realize everybody’s writing poems. They’re just not writing songs. And I need to be around other writers. And sharing! And hearing! I need to hear from other people, not just do my own thing. It’s so boring.” Notes App has since gone underground, but their weekly hangouts helped Rose stay accountable with her work, especially the ideas that became Want. I ask, “Do you think you’re a better writer because you have that community?” “It’s inspiring,” she replies, “and a great way for me to share. It’s a great way to finish, is what it is. I will finish the song because we have Notes App on Friday and I gotta share it.”

Though Rose has been playing a few of her new songs live since 2022, Want was first teased in January 2024, when she included the song “Ketamine” on an EP of Safe to Run remixes that featured the Deslondes, the Lostines, and Bella White. “Ketamine” is her ode to a “deep clean,” the therapeutic restoration that helped her love completely again. “It’ll all make sense someday,” she admits, in the blow-out of a hallelujah-hued guitar riff. The song recalibrates before celebrating, making it a good dawn to her fifth collaboration with Ross Farbe, who also co-fronts the band Video Age. He and Rose speak telepathically and “make decisions with glances.” “I know that the band just loved the way that we could lead everything so efficiently to get the best results,” she says. “Ross is someone who thinks of music like it’s wild—that it’s natural and he is the gardener of it and he just needs to help it grow.” Rose and Farbe are musical soulmates, and I gesture that to her. She smiles. “He knows your best take, he knows what the songs mean.”

IN EARLY MAY 2024, Rose packed up her van and drove to Nashville to make Want at the Bomb Shelter. On the way, she stopped in New Orleans to play a set at the city’s annual Jazz Fest. She brought a ton of dress-up clothes with her—which she calls her “magic bag of over-the-top outfits,” like a lacy nightgown and an assortment of leather pieces. Today in Austin, she’s wearing an executive’s blazer, big-rimmed glasses, and slight but sophisticated gold jewelry. She calls it “Fortune 500.” “When I put on a certain look, I like how it makes me feel,” she says. “It might make me feel a little different, like going blonde: You get a new perspective.” For the 10 days she spent in the studio, Rose wore new outfit combinations and embodied the sanguine energy that led her and her band into the bright, grungy, plucky, and loud, unfurled directions of Want, in songs that are wild and wise—a career-best pocket of miracles.

From This Time Last Night through Safe to Run, Rose recorded her music “on a shoestring” in her friends’ houses in New Orleans. And she loved doing that, because she’s never been somebody with a big budget to spend. It’s a DIY esthetic, her proclivity for making music cheap and capturing a live sound. But even the rough drafts felt different this time. Want demanded something widescreen. “I think I needed indie rock to carry these really intense songs,” she says. “I needed the performance to be as intense as I was feeling inside.” When Rose sent a rough draft of “Ketamine” to Prakash, he picked up on the song’s grunge chords immediately and began demoing it. “I didn’t know how huge it was gonna get until we were doing it,” she admits. “It all felt like the right direction. Country music, it’s my home. I’ll keep returning to it and just traveling farther and farther out, but I’m in my clown era.”

Rose’s arc has come a long way since This Time Last Night, though she says that her debut feels more relevant to her than ever. “It’s this 10-year stretch where I can count time and see my life and what I fucking did with it. And some of the vocal takes on ‘Wanton Way of Loving,’ those were so raw, and that rawness remains.” I’d argue that her delivery is as raw now. You can hear it in “The Clown,” when she sings about “cruising through the floorboards” in her room and talking to God while guitars lull in a minor key. You can hear it in her sober anthem “Had To,” as cowboy chords saunter into pop bombast. In those moments, the twenty-something Michigander is alive and in motion, her words tactile and familiar. “I know what I’m singing about and you do, too,” she says. “That’s what remains in, hopefully, every song that you ever hear that I put out.”

On “Scars,” Rose duets with Dean Johnson, the Seattle-based folkster whose 2023 debut, Nothing For Me, Please, is still my favorite album of this decade. She met Johnson in June 2018, when he was making that record in the front room of her boyfriend’s house. “We were breaking up and listening through the walls to Dean’s devastating heartbreak songs,” she says. A secret link to his album circulated for five years, even landing in my inbox in 2022 thanks to one of Johnson’s friends (and Rose’s New Orleans neighbors), Chris Acker. By then, the songs— “Faraway Skies,” “Annabelle Goodbye” “True Love”—had been listened to thousands of times, Johnson’s lullaby tenor marveled at and taken everywhere. “We were all sharing it,” Rose confesses, “because it was great and we needed it.”

When Rose landed her first-ever headline tour in July 2022, she asked Johnson to open the shows. One morning in a hotel, she wrote “Scars.” “I asked to borrow his guitar,” she says. “He was the first person to listen to it in the van. He had one suggestion for word choice that really helped, and then we performed it a few times on that tour.” “When did you know he needed to be on Want?” I ask Rose. “It had to be him,” she insists. “I was thinking about him when we recorded the song. I was like, ‘Let’s give her this “Faraway Skies,” ease-into-it snare feel.’” Together, she and Johnson sing “Baby, I’ve got scars that you cannot see, love them for what they gave to me” just as they had sung “If I wait for a quiet night, with a swollen moon, would you take me back, babe?” two years ago. If Rose and her friends needed Nothing For Me, Please all that time ago, then let the rest of us need “Scars” all the same now.

The Esther Rose I’m sitting with now is different than the Esther Rose I watched perform to 20 people in an East Austin bar two years ago. Her mannerisms are contagious, her tone more reflective—even in mid-tour exhaustion. She agrees, sinking into the booth pillows behind her and recalling the tracking of “Rescue You” at the Bomb Shelter, when her sobriety allowed her to be totally present: “I remember that feeling when we were closing in on the end of the song. It’s a perfect fucking take, I’m so in the music. Then you finish, and there’s that click when the tape machine stops. Those moments, I would go outside so happy I wanted to puke—or, not even happy but really feeling like something is moving through me all the way.”

What stirred within her then, Rose says, was knowing that she had just expressed something that people were going to relate to. That’s her life’s work, after all—channeling life, turning a feeling into a fascination—and Want is a record that could have only been made with the perspective she gained after hitting rock bottom so many times. She’s bowled over with gratitude. “I’m a woman, I’m facing the end of my thirties. I’ve been doing this for 10 years. This is hard-earned knowledge and insight. I was slow, I’m stubborn. It was painful but, in some ways, I feel like I’m gathering up my childhood experiences, my teens, my twenties, my thirties, and I’m bringing everybody along with me on this one.”

I arrived at Rose’s music during lockdown and fell hard for her libretto. Her singing is spiritual and lived-in, familiar as all get-out yet capable of surprising you sideways. I return to “Songs Remain” always, just to live in the “I’m glad it was you who broke my heart, ‘cause it had to be you who broke my heart” chorus again. She’s a tell-it-like-it-is kind of writer, someone who wraps her vulnerabilities around herself tight until it becomes armor. “I’m so open with it that it’s protective,” she says. “I don’t hold anything back. And I couldn’t! I wanted to tell my story so that I could be a complete person with a past, a present, and a future.” On Want, Rose finds clarity in “Scars” and “Rescue You,” singing about the strangeness of intimacy and becoming a guardian angel to her “fallen queens,” girls who’ve been abused, humiliated, stalked, and scared. She gets confrontational and sentimental; grace is vivid, honesty is bracing, trauma is met where it is. If Safe to Run was a picture of Rose going back 15 years, to when she was 23 and “searching for three chords and the truth,” then Want is her welcoming that part of herself back into the present.

In music, a “getting sober” record is a real thing, and Want has become that for Rose. There was a saying in my house growing up: “You don’t need it, you want it.” I hold that close, as I stumble over words I still carefully choose 20 years later. “Want” can be full of ego and self-reliance, yet it can also hold agency. That word is significant now, culturally, Rose acknowledges. “If you think of Babygirl, or if you’ve read [Miranda July’s] All Fours—it’s women expressing desire, reckoning with shame, actually expressing needs that are controversial as hell. This is the moment we’re in. I call it the ‘Want Era.’” To her, we’ve reached a point where it’s not only necessary to be clear about what you crave, but being so direct about it might just save your life. Jason Isbell once said that getting sober was a “conscious effort to be as grateful as possible.” Want proves, to my ears, that Esther Rose is getting there, too.

Listen to Esther Rose’s new album Want below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Esther Rose is Easy to Find

The Santa Fe singer-songwriter spoke with Paste about her new album Want, which you can exclusively stream a day early below.