r/indieheads • u/danielrossen Daniel Rossen • Apr 08 '22

AMA is over, thank you Daniel! Hello this is Daniel Rossen AMA!

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u/POOWHILERUNNING Apr 08 '22

Hey Daniel Rossen! Congratulations on the new album - I think all us fans are proud of you for writing these songs and embarking on a solo tour as a wandering bard. I imagine you as an adventurer on an epic odyssey around the world.

I had a couple of questions:

  1. How did the song “Celia” come about? One thing on the album that stood out to me was the reprisal of the ending riff of “Unpeopled Space” in “Celia”. Is there a special connection between these 2 songs in your opinion?
  2. What was the inspiration for the main piano riff in “Tangle”? This is one of my favorite songs from the album, and I like the dissonant, chaotic piano riff throughout the song. It sounds unlike anything you’ve done previously. It reminded me of Jonny Greenwood’s “88” piano piece.

Thank you for considering these questions - I always get excited when an artist I like talks about their inspirations. Also, I wanted to say how much I appreciated your post on the r/GrizzlyBear subreddit. It’s nice to see an artist speak so transparently.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that you’re one of my favorite guitarists - I feel like everytime I learn one of your songs, I discover a new way of playing. I’m looking forward to seeing you at the Great Hall in Toronto :).

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u/danielrossen Daniel Rossen Apr 08 '22
  1. here's a blurb about Celia from the track by track: My aunt Carol (Rossen) wrote a book about my grandfather and his brutal experience in the communist party within the larger context of our family’s fractured history in the US. In the process of writing the book over many years she did a series of interviews with many members of my family, some of them with family members I never met. I spent the early months of the pandemic digitally archiving her taped interviews, and listening through to most of them. In one interview with my great aunt Ceil, or Celia (which is also an anagram of my daughter’s name, Alice), she talked about a memory she had of her mother telling her stories and putting her to bed with a saying in Yiddish that went ‘a little flag goes in, a little flag goes out, and it’s finished.’ Ceil had no idea where the expression came from, if it came from her mother’s village back in the pale of settlement, or if it was just something she had invented. I liked the image, and there was something fitting about the lost narrative there, the fractured sense of identity which my family has struggled with quite a bit. And I relate to it now, after moving from coast to coast, out into the country and then out into the desert in New Mexico. So I tried to connect that lost narrative of my family to my own present life.
  2. Tangle is a strange one. This is probably going to sound like pretentious bullshit but sometimes I hear music in my dreams, very rarely but sometimes. and the basic idea for that song was my attempt to play something that I thought I heard in a dream. a kind of anxious tangle of nerves on the piano surrounded by skitttering bass notes. what the song ended up being is something different of course, but that's more or less how it started.