Musician’s Taste: Shakey Graves on Solid Ground
By Stratton Lawrence
Home life for Alejandro Rose-Garcia looks a little different than a few years ago. He’s now a husband and the father of a two-year-old daughter, a metamorphosis that’s audible on Fondness, Etc., his new album, out May 15.
“I can’t help but feeling that the better days have left me behind,” he sings in the first verse of the opening track, “Don’t Change a Thing.” But he shakes off doubt in the chorus, singing, “Dip it all in wax/Lock it up and throw away the key.”
“My crack marketing team does a good job of making my hobo-ness stand out, but the truth is, at a certain age, I always did want to ride off into the sunset a little bit,” says Rose-Garcia, on the phone with Southern Flavor in north Texas, en route to the first dates of an extended spring and summer tour. “I’m very much a family and community person,” he continues. “The reason I’ve stayed in Austin (his hometown) so long is entirely due to the people—I can’t get access to that anywhere else, and it’s unbeatable.”
Rose-Garcia built his career as a one-man band, playing a kickdrum built into a suitcase, before the song, “Dearly Departed” launched him to Americana ubiquity in 2014. Until recently, he’s spent more time on the road than at home. And although homelife is cozy, he’s still writing lyrics like, “You say that it’s forever/Always and forever/When the love is new” (“When the Love Is New”) and “Who broke your heart?/I did it on my own/…Now it’s just me and me now” (“On My Own”).
“I always pull from various time periods for songs, but the majority of these (Fondness, Etc.) were written in this window of either impending child or already-arrived child,” Rose-Garcia explains. Two years in, he’s settled into the new lifestyle. When his daughter recently got sick, cancelling a spring break road trip, they coveted the opportunity to stay at home together for a week. “We got to hide in our house,” he says. “It was a good exercise in switching midstream—just chill and hangout.”
As he sets out on a summer supporting Fondness, Etc., he’s conscious of the two lives he lives. “All of the sudden, I get to go to bed and wake up when I want to, but she (his wife) is white knuckling it in the driver’s seat the entire time I’m gone,” Rose-Garcia confesses. “I don’t want to run away from all of that. I’ve definitely felt the call of the wild in a pretty distinct way, but that transformed into years of touring. I’m not going to say I got it out of my system, but I definitely got to do it more than the average bear.”
“Always being on vacation” but also always “having to dance for my food a little bit” kept Rose-Garcia free but responsible, he theorizes. “(Being a parent) has been a big identity change, but it’s been very palatable and sweet.”
Rose-Garcia grew up in an artistic home—his mother is a theater director—and his first career in acting included a role in season 2 of Friday Night Lights. He dreamed of being an artist and illustrator before music caught on. So, he brings that same creative inclination to home life, including cooking. He recalls a moment in his culinary awareness when he found himself retrieving his car near a farmer’s market after an especially late night. “I basically got dropped off like a zombie, and I wandered in there and this guy had fresh rabbits from his farm. Then the next vendor had root vegetables, and I was like, ‘This is what the rabbit would eat.’” He went home and prepared a de-glazed baked rabbit, an experience that inspired a growing tradition of Sunday roasts with his family.
“You get to start cooking at the front half of the day, let it slowly roast, and at the end of the day you get to enjoy it,” he says. “Cooking is a potentially meditative process, like music or drawing.”
Another step in his food awareness came in Charleston, as guests of Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent at Xiao Bao Biscuit (he credits Shovels & Rope as mentors, supporting him early in his career). “I thought I was going to eat biscuits, or chicken and waffles, in Charleston, and instead, it’s like this Asian place in a gas station, and it gave me my first glimpse of how nuts Charleston is about food,” he recalls. “It’s a place like New York City where I’m worried that I’m going to waste one of my meals on something that’s not the best possible thing—I want to optimize it somehow. I get this guilt that I’ve eaten the wrong delicious thing.”
Amidst change, the closing lines of Fondness, Etc.—“It’s a tall mountain, but well worth the climb”—seem to speak to Rose-Garcia’s late-30s mindset.
“I’m grateful that my strange life up until now has prepared me for uncertainty being the rule of thumb, you know? It’s invigorating. Things are probably going to change a few more times in big drastic ways I can’t even imagine yet, and that’s what it’s all about,” he says.
And after mastering the all-day roast, he’s ready for even more sedentary time to tackle his next culinary goal: marinades.
“I’m still not there in my maturity level where I can say, ‘Two days from now, I’m going to make this delicious thing.’ It’s too much planning for me to marinate effectively,” Rose-Garcia admits. “I need to upgrade my life to have a garage fridge. I’ll have really made it to suburban fatherhood when I have a second fridge with marinades and a bunch of old Michelob Lights.”