A Conversation with Josh Rouse

Puremusic: Hey, Josh, Frank Goodman.

Josh Rouse: Hey Frank. How you doing, man?

PM: All right, man. How you doing today?

JR: Good.

PM: Got a little time for me?

JR: Yeah, yeah.

PM: Where do I find you?

JR: I'm in Chicago.

PM: Ah. And who do you have with you?

JR: I got Mark and Hags and my girlfriend Paz.

PM: Beautiful.

JR: Yeah. So I've got a good little group. And then Strays Don't Sleep, another Nashville group, Matthew Ryan and Neilson Hubbard, they've been opening up the tour.

PM: Cool. And does your girlfriend play, or she's along for moral support?

JR: Well, she's helping out with all the touring stuff, and then she sings a song on the record, and she comes up and sings that with us.

PM: Oh, she's the one that sings on "The Man Who..."?

JR: Yeah.

PM: Oh, she's great.

JR: Yeah, yeah.

PM: Well, that's excellent.

JR: It works out good, yeah.

PM: So I really like the new record, man, Subtitulo, it's great.

JR: Oh, thanks man. Yeah, it's kind of got a little bit of your style on there, doesn't it?

PM: [laughs]

JR: I know you like those major seventh chords.

PM: That's right. I like that jazzy thing that you do so well, for sure.

JR: Yeah, I like that, it's just kind of free feeling. You know?

PM: Yeah, yeah.

JR: Those kind of chord progressions, they just take you to another place. Major seventh chords lower my blood pressure, I think.

[laughter]

PM: Yeah, and I find that if you group them with the minor nines, especially, there's a good balance there.

JR: Yeah.

PM: Not too happy, not too dark. The late Johnny Thunders once told my brother, "You got to have the beauty and the terror."

[laughter]

JR: Yeah.

PM: The name of your imprint label, Bedroom Classics; where does that come from?

JR: That's what I always called wherever my little home studio was, whether it was a four-track or a Protools, or whatever, wherever I was kind of setting that up, I always just called it the Bedroom Classics, because it was always done out of a bedroom.

PM: Oh, because I was trying to figure out is this like from the bedroom or for the bedroom, or what?

JR: In this case it means from the bedroom. That's where I was initially recording it. And then I just thought it was kind of a funny name, and I just decided to call the label that--

PM: Totally.

JR: --and have my own imprint there.

PM: I dig it.

JR: And then it's also the name of some kind of R&B compilations, I guess, kind of like Teddy Pendergrass type stuff.

PM: Oh, that's For the Bedroom.

JR: Lionel [Ritchie] put it out. It's called Bedroom Classics. Yeah, that's more kind of like sex music or something, even funnier. continue

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