Rosali’s Vibrant, Sobering Vulnerability

Rosali Middleman’s new album, Bite Down, is canonically not a break-up album. “I was single for seven years while writing it,” the North Carolina-based musician tells me over Zoom. “The cohesiveness is me connecting to myself on a whole new level. I’ve been sober, I’ve been single—it’s that ‘getting right with yourself’ perspective, where it’s very much from a perspective with distance.” Her last album, 2021’s No Medium, was very much an “in your feelings” project, but without as much clarity as you’ll hear when tapping into Bite Down. “There’s a maturity to where I’m at now and much more clarity and distance from those feelings,” Rosali continues. “I can be direct, and I’ve examined things from all their angles. That’s where I’m at.”

That much is true. Lead single “Rewind,” though it elicits flickers of some standstill romantic dissolution, is not informed by heartbreak at all. The “I’ll rewind for you” lyric was actually inspired by Rosali’s dog. “I was walking with her, and I just started singing it to her,” she says. “She was a really challenging puppy, but I liked the idea of ‘Well, I’d still rewind for you. This is all still worth it.’” From there, the song transformed into a broader take on having no regrets and being open and willing to still love and interact with the past. When she wrote “My Kind,” Rosali was thinking about her old band Long Hots and Philadelphia and “the connections you have in life.”

After spending more than a decade in Philadelphia, the pandemic hit and Rosali bounced around briefly—decamping to her native state of Michigan for a moment before retreating to the rural outskirts of Durham, North Carolina. She took time off from making art for a while, only to return with an album where it’s clear that, miraculously, every note is major and not a second is wasted. When talking about 2020 and 2021, Rosali is careful with her words—using “turmoil” before correcting herself and saying “upheaval.” It’s the same kind of nuance and composure that leaks into her lyricism, too. Everything is deliberate, expressive and, while the world was locked inside and unsure of what phase would come next, Rosali, like the rest of us, was facing a similar existential uncertainty, questioning what she might say that is not only universal but connects with people—all without doing it heavy-handedly and placing importance on being intentional.

“When I moved to North Carolina and felt settled,” she says, “I think, because of the hiatus that I had taken—not even intentionally, but just how life was working out then—I had a melt of melodies pouring out. I hadn’t been writing, but I’d been playing a lot of guitar, just as my own meditation for personal sanity. So, I was feeling much more fluid and open to the musicality side of [the songwriting process]. I was writing a lot of melodies and there was a gap in writing lyrics. I was feeling really stuck on that part, and then there was a feeling of ‘God, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say anymore.’” Eventually, Rosali found her voice again, and it’s one that, even during any uptick in volume, remains a grounded, cosmic constant. Dan Bejar said it best in the Bite Down press materials: Her music is about inner-searching that is “hellbent on rollicking.”

Now three years removed from the apex of the pandemic, Rosali’s day-to-day life near Durham is spent largely in isolation, scaling the woods near her home with her husky—a real 180 from her previous life neighboring busyness for most of her 20s and 30s. The distractions have lessened; the way she writes songs is different and, because she’s not living with bandmates anymore, the question of “Oh, is that just getting older?” tends to crop up more than usual. But Rosali being in North Carolina and releasing one of the best albums of 2024 so far makes total sense.

If you look at the crop of records made by artists in the Tar Heel State over the last 16 months, the results are pretty vibrant: Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, Indigo De Souza’s All of This Will End, Fust’s Genevieve, Truth Club’s Running From the Chase and the Mountain Goats’ Jenny from Thebeslo all came out in 2023, and we now have a strong understanding that cities like Durham and Raleigh and especially Asheville are becoming the new mecca of rock ‘n’ roll this century. You can add Bite Down to that laundry list of coastal gems, and I know many folks will be cranking it loud on patios all summer. “The rock music of Philly was a big influence on me,” Rosali says. “But, I feel like the music scene here, it’s all over the place, as far as what people are doing—but it’s really supportive and cross-genre. That’s partly why I moved here. I think having a music community still around you while you can live in a remote area is really important.”

After writing most of No Medium in a South Carolina farmhouse at the conclusion of a tour with J Mascis, Rosali went to Omaha to record the album with David Nance’s Mowed Sound band. She’d toured with them, and they all became good friends, but she still didn’t know them very well. “It was like summer camp, this condensed, intense, intimate two weeks in a van,” she says. “When I went [to Omaha], we hadn’t really played music together. So, I was trying to explain and reveal who I was as an artist and [we were] figuring it out together.” It was a change that arrived like a total 180 from when she made her previous album, Trouble Anyway, in 2018—because she was still living with her Long Hots bandmate Eva Killinger in Philadelphia, and her spiritual imprint on Trouble Anyway was massive. “She’s one of the top people I trust, she’ll tell it to you straight and she’s got impeccable taste in music—so having a day-to-day reflection was really important to me,” Rosali explains.

Touring together with Destroyer in the spring of 2022 marked a change for Rosali and Mowed Sound. “That tour was really formative for us,” Rosali says. “I think maybe a week or 10 days into it, we had this show and we all looked at each other like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re a band now.’ It’s not just ‘We’re playing these songs and we’re figuring this out.’ We had that moment on stage where we were all just really dialed into each other and listening, and it was so exciting.”

When the ensemble hit the studio in Omaha to make Bite Down months later, their chemistry was noticeably tighter, their instrumental sprawls had grown spacious yet organic and refined. Trust was in play more than ever, and they recorded most of the album live, sitting in a circle together and workshopping every song and gauging every vibe. “We had spent so much time together and really become family and, knowing more and knowing each other’s sensibilities and where we were gonna go with things and listening more to the ideas that everyone had, I really was much more open to that for this record,” Rosali continues. “I had the melodies, I had the changes, I had the vague sense of ‘Yeah, this is what I want it to be,’ but we really went into [Bite Down] as a band.”

Rosali and Mowed Sound spent three weeks making Bite Down, scaling upwards from the 10 days it took to make all of No Medium. These days, she’s pretty happy knowing that Nance’s crew are no longer her backing band—that they’re all in a band together, and the songs they make have become living time capsules of their time shared. “We’ve become a solid unit,” she proclaims. “When we play these songs live, I’m just excited to see where they go each night.” Rosali grew up surrounded by a family of musicians, singing and jamming with them. Now, that kind of pedigree has become crucial to her identity as an artist, and it’s something that she was able to find in Long Hots and now in Mowed Sound. “[When I was in Long Hots], I would always joke, ‘Yeah, we’re a jam band,’ because we would just really extend and listen to each other, and that’s the exciting part of playing rock and roll,” she says. “Walking that line, you’re on an edge—are you gonna fall into chaos? Is it wild enough? Are you reining in a song, or is it just gonna go off the rails? I try to push it to the edge a little bit, as a live band, and I feel like the Nance guys—the Omaha crew—are a perfect band for that. [Bite Down] is a band record, we did it in a way where everybody’s opinions held equal weight.”

Six years ago, Trouble Anyway was recorded with an all-star pastiche of musicians, including Mary Lattimore, Paul Sukeena, the War on Drugs’ Charlie Hall, Purling Hiss’ Mike Polizze, Writhing Squares’ Dan Provenzano and Black Twig Pickers’ Nathan Bowles. The formula for assembly with that record was simple: Do the rhythm section and then build the songs out from there; some harp elements here, a guitar solo there. For Bite Down, it was a matter of Rosali and Mowed Sound—Nance, Kevin Donahue, Dereck Higgins, James (Jim) Schroeder, Megan Siebe, Skye Junginger, Pearl LoveJoy-Boyd and Sam Lipsett—capturing whatever emotions they were sharing in the room together. It’s the first time Rosali has ever recorded two albums in a row with the same people under her own name; she likens the final product to the softer side of the Velvet Underground—gentle tracking still rough around the edges. You can hear that parallel vibrantly on songs like “On Tonight” and “May It Be on Offer,” the latter of which was the only track on the album that came out of Rosali like “a prayer or a divine situation.” And a track like album closer “Change Is in the Form” was written back during the Trouble Anyway days, but Rosali never recorded it. “I couldn’t figure it out, and I think it’s because [Mowed Sound] needed to play it,” she says.

Everything for Bite Down, aside from a few vocal, percussion and guitar overdubs, was done organically. For the title track, the band played it repetitively for 13 minutes before settling into the groove and filling out the tape. During the tracking for “Hills on Fire,” Schroeder played his chords over and over again while the rest of Mowed Sound listened for shifts and waited for him to make sense of his own phrasing, which ended up being monolithic, Crazy Horse-ian and moody—and in tandem with Rosali’s generous, aching refrains (“If I wounded you, I can be hellish and awful, too”). Hearing Schroeder’s solo unravel on the final take, you can only imagine what it might have felt like to witness it happening in real time in Omaha.

Rosali and the crew sat in a circle while recording “Hills on Fire,” and she sang scratch vocals while every other player noodled around on their parts and rode the line of chaos she often questions whether or not to fall into. “We’re running through the chords, Jim’s going off on his guitar parts for a minute-and-a-half and then we all look at each other and it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start the song now,’” Rosali says. “It’s a lot of communication, it’s a lot of listening. And sometimes I’m even like, ‘Oh, can we use the scratch vocals?’” Bite Down, in spirit and in execution, is akin to a live session you might find on YouTube, or how Rosali and Mowed Sound might play a gig. Though Bite Down is very much a “band-in-a-room” record, somehow these 10 songs transcend even that.

The album features some of the best singing Rosali has ever done, too. On “Rewind,” she’s singing with her full chest; on “My Kind,” she’s belting like we’ve never heard before (and she even did a scream track that you can subtly hear in the background of the album version). Much of the record, though, features her aching through calm, steadfast, full-bodied tempos. “I do feel like the quality of my voice and having those deliveries is part of what I do and part of my sound,” she says. “It’s comforting, this desire to bring that emotion to the words into this, the songs and the storytelling—because a big part of what I’m trying to do is connect with people and connect on an emotional level. That’s why I sing like that, and that’s something that I have tried to really embrace about the natural quality of my voice and develop that as my strength as a musician.”

When revisiting Bite Down, I can’t help but return to “Rewind” first. Rosali has always juggled ballads and jams on her projects, but there’s such a profound balance happening this time around—and “Rewind,” alongside “Is It Too Late” and “My Kind,” really showcase just how wide a range of places the album goes. “You put out the bangers, which is one method that people follow,” Rosali says. “Like, okay, just put out the hits or the rock songs. I wanted to show more of the spectrum that the record exists in. I feel like [Bite Down] has a lot of joy in it, [‘Rewind’] being the most joyful. “Rewind,” however, almost didn’t get picked to be the lead single, largely because Rosali feared that the “I love you and I know you love me, too” line was “dumb,” on account of how vulnerable the song gets.

“I don’t actually think it is [dumb],” she says in hindsight, “but I was feeling vulnerable about it and I was going back and forth. Everybody around me, Dave especially, was just like, ‘This song is great, this is the lead single.’ Merge [Records] felt the same way, so having those people that you trust around and reassuring you, saying ‘You’re being nervous about this because it is vulnerable but, rest assured, it sounds great,’ that’s why we ended up going with it—it’s the one that affected a lot of people. I had friends I played it for and they’re like, ‘The song made me cry.’”

After the Destroyer tour, Rosali knew that Bite Down was going to be released by Merge, so she set a date to record and cleared her calendar of any and all distractions. “I was talking to my phone, taking walks with my dog, just letting things spill out—because I found myself being really stuck with judging my words, judging things,” she says. “I just had to break free of that and then, from there, I excavated the good stuff and what I was really trying to get at.” In the past, her writing style was a lot more deliberate, and she would set aside time to sit down and crank out the sketch of a track. This time, Bite Down was much more stream-of-consciousness that then, in the studio, got tidied up by the whole band. “Some words didn’t come out until we were in the studio and I was like, ‘I have to finish this song,’” Rosali admits. “I’d be back in bed after a recording session and be like, ‘Okay, this came to me’ and then I’d change lyrics when we were in the room.”

When making No Medium, Rosali found inspiration in harmonographs and she even lifted the title from Jane Eyre. The talisman she was following this time around, however, was Joan Halifax’s The Fruitful Darkness, a Buddhist perspective on life. “I gave the book away to someone else who might need it, but it’s this idea of communing with spirit through talking to animals,” Rosali says. “I have a song that didn’t make it on the record, but maybe it’ll make it on a future one, where I’d walk down to the river and see this heron every day and I started just being like ‘Hey, what’s up heron? What’s the news?,’ trying to communicate with entities that exist outside of our daily perception, trying to open myself up to that. That is a big component of it. Talking and trying and communing, but actively and trying to listen to get these messages, downloads.”

And you can hear that tranquility in the songs. On “Slow Pain,” there’s a line that stopped me in my tracks, when Rosali belts out, “Have you seen my grief? Hold it so I don’t spill out.” Likewise, the “it’s on with a long rust, pinch myself and all your luck to arrive where you are” lines on “My Kind” are alchemized and rid of forlornness. Bite Down, at its freewheeling core, is nuanced, accessible and poetic. In just 10 songs, Rosali has made her own language. How often does anyone get to revel in such boldness?

While it may seem like Bite Down had the unfortunate destiny of coming out on the same day as about four other marquee indie records, Rosali’s album cut through the noise despite the cluster of truly good tunes hitting streaming all at once. It’s a testament to the strength of these songs, which are almost paradoxical—as they sound like a garage band rehearsal but were fashioned together through elaborate, methodical chemistry and a fine-tuned keen sense of in-the-moment awareness. Ben Salmon, who reviewed the album for us last week, said it best: “Bite Down is packed wall to wall with tunes that are unsettled but unhurried, generous with melody, wandering but never lost, and reliably steady despite the never-ending twists and turns of an earthly existence.”

Bite Down brandishes the looseness of a record like Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Zuma but flutters inescapably with radiant, whip-smart phrasings that are timeless and powerful. “Rewind,” specifically, is one of the balmiest songs in recent memory (thanks to Destroyer keyboardist Ted Bois’ kind piano stylings) yet can’t help but swell into a circuit-breaking climax, while “My Kind” beams with an unkempt firepower of trenchant guitars before inversely nose-diving into Tusk-style vocalizations from Rosali as she surfs across a biting but beautiful “How am I gonna live without you?” By the record’s end, neither her nor the listener have a concrete answer—but it’s clear that, when you reclaim your voice, decamp to Omaha, Nebraska and pair it with the vibrancy of a band like Mowed Sound, the question immediately becomes: “How did I ever survive before you?”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.