WHILE SHE WENT TO NASHVILLE to record this album and the release show will be at the Sunset Tavern in Seattle, Alessandra Rose has been feeling like she’d like to connect more with her immediate community here in Kitsap.
“And not always hop over the sound for Seattle’s embrace,” she wrote to Smokestack earlier this month.
You might have seen her earlier this summer at the Wayzgoose Festival, or at the Kitsap County Fair, or on the Bremerton boardwalk for the inaugural Taste Of Kitsap Festival. She also played the Tracyton Movie House with the Dusty 45s and The Charleston with Austin Lucas last December. Outside of town, she played the VIP Lounge at the Thing Festival in Port Townsend and main stages at Bite Of Seattle and Chomp! at Marymoor Park.
While much of her musical journey up to this point has taken place outside of this town, Alessandra still remembers her first show in Kitsap, opening for Rocky Votolato in the early 2000s.
“I was 17, and a girl, and it was just me opening for him,” she thinks back. “I don’t even think there was a second band that night, but I remember still being able to fit though a crack and be supported. I literally made my dad rent me a U-haul to get my grandmother’s upright piano out of our house, and I brought it to the venue. So, you know, thinking back, I’m like, ‘Damn Kitsap, you just always have showed up in such beautiful ways.”
Alessandra is a South Kitsap grad. She grew up here from the time she was 10 years old. In the years leading up to her early 20’s, she joined Seattle band The Kindness Kind which would go on to be featured in SPIN and on KEXP, playing Bumbershoot and doing the thing in the Seattle Indie scene.
Then the band broke up.
In 2012, she put out her debut solo album ‘You Are Gold.’ Three months later, she learned that she was pregnant with her first child. That put her music career on hold–in a good way. Her music channels went quiet for the decade that followed but now she is coming back around in a big way.
Her new album ‘Rodeomothh’ is an anagram for ‘motherhood,’ and inspired by her journey of becoming a mother. The whole thing was set into motion after a heart-to-heart with Duff McKagan backstage after the Neptune Theater’s Centennial Celebration in November of 2021. After hearing Alessandra perform, he wanted to know everything about her and ended up offering up his studio and anything she needed to make this record happen.
Then the second wave of covid hit.
The world shot down again. Then, McKagan went off on tour. Fuck. But Alessandra wouldn’t let that stop her. Instead she flew to Nashville to record with Grammy-winning producers Mitch Dane and Vance Powell. When she got there and started laying down tracks, the studio musicians were pumped, she said, saying ‘This album doesn’t sound like it’s from Nashville! … What do they put in the water up there?’ // BILLMAN
ALESSANDRA ROSE ‘RODEOMOTHH’ is out Oct. 20 w/ a release show Oct. 19 at the Sunset Tavern, Seattle. Tickets, music and more at alessandrarose.com
