The haunted country ‘n’ gothic of Rose Paradise’s death-fixated, life-affirming Over The Hill LP

Words by Jason Lee; Cover photo by Sofia Ziman

Ignore the title of Rose Paradise’s LP Over The Hill at yr own peril cuz it’s one of those double-word score type titles that helps unlock the contents within, with two distinct, equally applicable meanings, the first being quite literal as in Rose making her way “over the hill” and across the mountainous terrain abutting the coastal town of Stinson Beach, California (pop: 366) from which R.P. hails, located about an hour north of the San Francisco, about which Rose has the following to say…

This album was inspired a lot by where I grew up. It’s about leaving and coming back and what I’ve learned. That’s why I called it Over the Hill, because I grew up in a really tiny town, and there’s a mountain I have to drive over in order to get to a gas station or any chain store [where] I had to take the 30 minute journey over the winding roads of Mount Tamalpais which we call going “over the hill.” It’s a larger meaning for me because I went all the way to New York which was like going over a big f*cking mountain too.

…with the secondary meaning of “over the hill” referring of course to growing old and irredeemably old at that, not that we’d know anything about that (heck, The Deli only just turned 20!) with songs making both overt and more subtle allusions to the Big Sleep—not every song but enough of ‘em to notice—alongside related themes like facing major life changes (summer’s end is a recurring image) and nature’s natural tendency towards entropy with no small assist by humankind (see: climate change)…

“Let the light in […] New York City will be cold again
The seasons changed / but they’re drunk and they’re disoriented
I lay awake, thinking /it’s too far gone now to ever mend”

…with recurring nature-based imagery of Rose getting pulled down to the ground like a felled flower like on the climate-change decrying “Weight of the World” quoted above, or “Follow Your Heart” (let it take you all the way down) or “To The Moon” with Rose seeking a partner who’ll lift her up to the heavens while being cool with getting pulled down into her “deep blue sea,” with nature itself all but indifferent to our fates seeing as we’re all just future fertilizer as far as its concerned tho’ this lack of concern provides a certain level of comfort in its own right as Rose observes on “Coyote on the Road”…

“Coyote on the road
You ran out in front of me
Swerved and nearly hit the tree […]
How’d you get so unafraid?
Where’d you learn your tricks and trades?
Won’t you teach me all your ways?”

@roseprrr
Coyote On The Road off of my debut album out 4/8 🐺 #debutalbum #newmusic #americana #folkmusic
♬ original sound – rose paradise

…with the recurring theme first appearing not more than 20 seconds into the record on the opener “Tangerine” with Rose singing, “I’m losing it all to the game of time / I know every curve on this winding road / over the hill and I’m heading home” (Q: Do tangerines symbolize death or is that just oranges? They’re both “bitter fruits” after all.) soon reflecting on how “the cliff’s gonna have to come down” given that “everything will erode away” so why not move to NYC even if just for school but not before spitting out the tangerine’s seeds which if planted could keep Rose rooted in place…

…with the song’s lopsided rhythms giving shape to this sense of dislocation w/the couple extra beats tacked on to the start of each new rhythmic cycle with single measures in 6/4 time alternating with pairs of 4/4 for all you musos out there as the texture morphs from a lone guitar to layers of mandolin, banjo, and glissing steel guitar with Rose lamenting how “when I’m alone / I think and I cry / about growing old / about dying” over a lonely mandolin her voice airy and fluttering like a songbird one moment and then more forceful and throaty the next before flipping more rapidly between the two in a kind of slow-motion yodel on the lines, “I’ll hold on for as long as I can / nothing good ever goes to plan”…

…to which we say “indeed” even if such sentiments are bit surprising coming from a young woman still in her early 20s who seldom dresses in black and thus we can’t help but wonder if Ms. Paradise—despite having a moniker that sound like she should be a character on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse which btw happens to be her real name seeing as she grew up in Hippieville after all—may be a covert goth given that the lyrics quoted bear a certain resemblance to Robert Smith’s opening lines for The Cure’s “In Bet ween Days” (yesterday I got so old / I felt like I could die / yesterday I got so old / it made me want to cry) recorded when he was all of 26 years old likewise singing the lyric over vigorously strummed guitar…

…and truly what’s more truly goth than seeing seemingly able-bodied youth not only drawn to their own mortality like a moth to the flames of hell but vitalized by it with ritualistic black celebrations of our ultimate fate coming via music ranging from slate grey lamentations to blood-splattered howls of rage whether in the form of the sleek, seductive dub-meets-postpunk of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” or the pulsing synths and satiric black humor of Alien Sex Fiend’s highly danceable “Dead and Buried” or in the piercing existential dread of the Cure’s “One Hundred Years” or anything off Pornography really…

…as Rose likewise spans expansively across sub-styles of country/folk/Americana in the span of a handful of songs like how Over The Hill’s mid-section hops from the meditative melancholia of “Year of the Dog” to the two-stepping, boot-scootin’ bounce of “Let Your Heart Lead” with its yeeeeeehah! vocal intro, warm fuzzy harmonies, instrumental call-and-response and chiming glockenspiel complete with a literal “breakdown” section guaranteed to clear the dance floor; to the ethereal waltz-time, slow-burning, whisper-to-a-scream hymn of “Unlearn” which brings to mind multiple sweethearts of the alt-country-and-folk rodeo like Lucinda Williams, Lucy Dacas, Kacey Musgraves, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Emma Ruth Rundle, Weyes Blood, Marissa Nadler and Chelsea Wolfe (the latter two directly incorporating goth and black metal and dream pop into the picture) let’s hear it for stoner country too…

…whereas more traditional death-rattled country songs tend to sound, well, more funeral in tone, performed largely by artists who’ve already reached a certain age with iconic examples including George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (spoiler alert: cuz he’s dead!), Reba McEntire’s “If I Had Only Known” (that eight members of her touring band were about to die in a horrifying plane crash) to Johnny Cash’s latter-day, Rick Rubin-assisted sepulchral cover versions of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and Will Oldham’s “I See A Darkness” among others, with Hank Williams being somewhat of an outlier in C&W history in singing about death as a young man, before expiring at age 29 tho’ supposedly he was akin to “old man” by that time due to all the hard livin’ and heartbreak resulting in grief-stricken classics like “Angel of Death” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”…

…so maybe there’s something to be said for the whole gothic-country nexus, despite their many differences, as two genres both often stereotyped as being fixated on death and suffering given country music’s historical roots in stories of hardship and loss reflecting it’s working-class, rural roots, not to mention their shared love for big hair and OTT fashion sense, oft confronting misfortune with a surprisingly playful touch like on “Grey” where Rose confronts a wayward suitor by inserting a little micro-yodel into the line “you play around with your words,” stretching a single syllable into about twenty in the middle “around,” thus linking her wannabe lover’s playing around with words (i.e. fibbing) with her own wordplay and melisma (point to Rose!)…

…with morbid-minded art and music of whatever stripe lending urgency to the flickering candle of life and we gotta say Over The Hill is the most life-affirming, death-fixated album we’re heard in a while, challenged only by The Cure’s (yes, again!) recent comeback LP (first in 16 years) the devastatingly bleak yet oddly consoling Songs of a Lost World, the rare masterwork by a band of old goths so maybe it’s a country record after all…

…or heck you can push all the death stuff to the side if you wanna cuz the LP is such a lavish, vivid listening experience on a sonic level where from song to song you’ll feel like a surfer waiting for the “Set Wave” to sweep you away with its rich tapestry of fastidious arrangements arranged with as many striking peaks and valleys as Stinson Beach, Cali-for-nigh-yah…

…built from the elemental sounds of wood, wire and skin scraped, plucked and struck by the band of crack musicians assembled by Rose Paradise who seem to have developed a shared hivemind seeing as these tracks were mostly recorded live in the studio with Rose’s voice acting as the golden thread holding it all together as she alternately coos and coaxes, whispers and moans, warbles and yelps, breaks and flutters, chides and confides and consoles and heck sometimes she just plain ol’ sings too so better watch out Bette Midler cuz there’s a New Rose in town…

…and one that echoes the Old Weird America of bohemian polymath Harry Smith and his 1950s 6-LP compilation The Anthology of American Music which forever altered the direction of the nation’s music (with lotsa murder ballads and songs about death besides!) where often as not it’s the very notion of “knowing” that’s the biggest potential threat of all at least on a metaphysical level (no awareness of mortality equals no problemo just like that ol’ coyote!) with Rose addressing the very nature knowing and knowledge on tracks like the aforementioned “Unlearn” with the narrator drawn in by a charismatic Christ-like figure until learning that there’s certain things she’s wished she hadn’t learned about said charismatic figure and then two songs later on “Now That You Know” the tables are turned with Rose admitting in the opening lines, “He knows too much, might just have to kill him” so you see that shiz gets pretty metaphysical at times just like with Harry Smith with his briefcase full of old shellac 78rpm records for the 1920s and ’30s containing the twisted DNA of our nation’s history and its equally twisted relationship to mortality which even a century later is still bearing fruit in the form of symbolically loaded tangerines and trips over the hill to face the chains in store…