The place where Josh Rouse went a few years ago is called Spain. The American from Nebraska has recorded a few records there at regular intervals since “El Turista” (2010), and “Going Places” was also created there. While the studios were closed and he couldn’t play with musicians, he wrote new pieces in his apartment. And when he was able to meet other musicians again, he took his songs and played them live, so to speak, in a rented bar with his band.
Short stories without earthiness
If it weren’t so absurd, one would have to write about the Mediterranean, the spontaneous and the upbeat that has characterized Josh Rouse’s songs since his first album, “Dressed Up Like Nebraska” in 1998. Unlike his Nebraska compatriot Conor Oberst, there was nothing neurotic, nothing iconoclastic in his songs, which owe to the songwriting of the ’60s and ’70s, the bossa nova, Paul Simon, Bill Withers and John Sebastian. One record is called “1972”. Rouse moved to Nashville and wrote lambchop with Kurt Wagner, and his next album was called Nashville, without being a Nashville country record at all.
While Wagner mumbles comfortably and menacingly, Josh Rouse has his head in the clouds. Rouse poked fun at his status as an American émigré when he titled one record, his last, The Holiday Sounds Of Josh Rouse. “Going Places” is designed with a light hand around jingle, jangle and fairground melodies, organ and juicy guitars (and sometimes a slide guitar, a few horns). Vignettes like “City Dog”, “Henry Miller’s Flat” and “The Lonely Postman” are short stories without earthiness, and the melancholy of “Hollow Moon”, “She’s In LA” and “Indian Summer” is also a so-called beautiful one.
Like a vacationer in espadrilles
He is perhaps most comparable to another American songwriter who fled to Spain: Jackson Browne. But while Browne is back in California, Rouse actually plays his mesmerizing pop songs like a vacationer in espadrilles. And he mischievously quotes the classics. Applied to American literature, Josh Rouse is more Stewart O’Nan than Cormac McCarthy.
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