Rosie Diamond: A Rhinestone Cowgirl, With A Heart Of Gold
In the incandescent dust of a settling decade, we see an image reflect off the gold of a mirage. A looming slope of a dreary hillside painted with cactus and dredged up rocks from ancient glacial movement. Small and severed like your bangs when you cut them with the kitchen scissors at 5, the sepia sky sneaks a glance behind the figure clad in white. A pistol draws away from her gaze.
‘I met him through a friend at a party. He came and lived with me for a month all the way from Toronto while we made the album.’
I see the relationship between Rosie Diamond and her producer as if looking through the window of a baby blue sedan on a road trip. This figure, Rosie herself, the subject of the type of thinking you only do on road trips with sunflower seeds clinging to the inside of my coffee cup from 7/11. The whip of the wind when I roll down the window exhausted by the pressure of the air conditioner. And then, like a tiger living inside your glove box, a cacophony of sound erupts from the dashboard and feeds me her murky, mercurial music.
‘The time we spent together- the vulnerability of living with someone I hardly knew- really shaped the album.’
Maybe I pick up a sandalwood scented hitchhiker once I’m out of Parliaments. They pile their acoustic guitar into the back seat along with every other part of them. The first thing I would think to ask would be “where is the guitar’s case?” This would prompt an extravagant explorative conversation on the music of Lou Reed, Tommy, and the Shondells, and Arcade Fire. In a lull, I would roll the window down again and pull the aux able into “Crimson and Clover,” and we would sing it loud and without regard for the song’s life anywhere else.
Rosie Diamond’s debut album Daisy was produced primarily in her apartment alongside that stranger, producer Matthew Tomasai.
‘It was this vulnerability that curated the process of an emotional provocation.’
Growing up in Massachusetts, Rosie went to the sort of underground shows where I would still find dust from the place in my socks months later. It was here that her influences of Pink Floyd and Johnny Cash came to life as a Virgilian muse guiding her back home to 'make music alone.’
’I just plugged a microphone into my 2001 Macbook.’
Deep into the night, on my prophetic road trip, I would pull over to fill up the gas. And when I paid inside and bought cigarettes, I would catch the image of this hitchhiker taking the small irrelevant things and pilling them into their pockets. We would drive on together this time in the silence I imagine hearing between shaved parts of layered graphite.
“I am bipolar schizophrenic.” Diamond says as a footnote in her interview.
‘I was larger unmedicated in my early life and this led to a chaotic treatment of myself and my outlook.’
The car crashes on my road trip. The hitchhiker stealing a devastating pull on the emergency brake and sending the bustling engine of us over the edge of the highway. This was employed as a vehicle of tone and stops to shatter of a severity of explanation.
‘This relationship with my bipolar schizophrenia led my motifs on Daisy.’
So, here we are: in Rosie Diamond’s apartment listening to the ceiling fan rub circular wind across guitars, and pianos in the corners, on the floor, and against the walls. We see her hazel eyes encircled with applied darkness: a mimetic war paint as a uniform of unity with the depths of mental illness. She stands in Eureka, Utah: on invitation from ghosts and the determined desire to experience the unknown. A photo bursts apart the frame of chipped paint on the doorway of someone’s home years before she walked there with them. A brief disintegration of this desire occurs in her and she is captured, soul and all, in a holy exposure of light and intention.
“I want the music on Daisy to tell a story.”
I’m laying in the all-consuming all feeling pit of glass, blood, and simmering heat of my car crash and the voice I hear is the chamber reverberations on at the start of “Into the Woods.” A comparison to Chelsea Wolfe would be too easy- so would it to talk about the first album of Lets Eat Grandma and their recording venue of a deserted WW2 bunker. But here we are.
‘Tie me to a tree and leave me be.’
A wondering footfall of a guitar melody guides the Grimm Fairy Tale mood as a percussion shape crawls from hibernation in the background. Foggy patience builds with the pace of the song guided by a textured voice like the light through stained glass in an abandoned church. The piece (I struggle to call it a song as not much is sung as it more merely exists in the ecosystem of instrumentation) tells the story of a wayward traveler led to an end by the cryptic wood. I hear the banshee snarls of “One of These Days” echoing off trees and a crystalline pond. Once you get here, however, you are ensnared in the ancient accumulation of moss. Yet still, the chant of the following footsteps in the guitar find you and we spend our final moments perplexed by what the Jabberwocky said to Alice. Or what the dolls on the Japanese Island of suicide see.
Then there is “Juvenile.” A purgatorial piece for me as I make my transition from death by car-crashed-by-a-crazy-hitch-hiker to wherever. A Coco Rosie-Esque attention is spent to the guitar. It creates a fill of slenderly uncomfortable noise I remember in my life as a metal wind-up car spinning on its side unable to move properly. This dissonance comes hand in hand with the head bobbing dance of the melodic guitar. Rosie’s voice feeds the song sunlight with such guiding words as:
“You’re pretty on the outside but you’re, insides are dull and grey.”
In the burgeoning bitterness of my post-life is the major scale and the minor lift in “Mapple Hill” “We used to hold hands…and you left without me.” A splitting morphemic pleasure of music played in my childhood halo me. James Taylor playing guitar for a stripped-down set with Enya. Lou Reed giving up the front of the stage so Patti Smith can join him at the keyboard. I hear this song as an answer to “For Kenneth,” the opening track. I position my death inside my car crash inside the road trip metaphor here to envelope this point.
The story Rosie Diamond tells on this emblematic album is one of answering the pressures of a decade with an aesthetic attention to the soft, harmed parts of us. Her Instagram, @rosie.diamonds, is worth note: I found this positioning of her vulnerability and open-wound declarative images passionately powerful. It presents a rhizomic layer to her album: a girl who learns to play dusty Johnny Cash punk alone on her bed grows up to live with her vulnerable ghosts as roommates and lives happily ever after each song they made together ends.
Find her album on Spotify, visit her Instagram and gleam the surreal ceramic color palette for yourself. Find how you can listen to the vulnerable notes and spaces of attention and find how that informs your own self.
