Jane Rose is a whirlwind, or rather a pink tumbleweed as we’ll shortly discover. Not only has she just released her latest album with the Deadends, but she’s also getting ready to head out on the road. “We’ve got that UK tour coming up in October and [I’ve just been] trying to get the band ready for that. I’ve missed it. I really miss coming out there last year. So yeah, big time excited!”

‘Didn’t Know The Devil’, Rose’s fourth full length album, was released back in April, only a couple of months ago. “I feel pretty great about it. It’s a fun album. It’s a little bit different. We had so much fun recording it, and it seems to be doing pretty well. It seems like there’s a lot of people that are really enjoying the album. So I mean, that makes me happy!

We recorded at this little studio not too far from our house called The Rock House. It’s Kevin McKendree’s studio, and he’s not too unfamiliar with this type of music. He’s toured with Setzer, with the Brian Setzer Orchestra. He’s also recorded for Buddy Guy. But yeah, he’s been a touring musician, knows the music, knows the style. So we just recorded everything, like all of the instrument tracks one day, so ten songs in about ten hours. And then we went back the next day and I loaded the vocals and a little bit of backups and the saxophone and a little extra things like that. Within a month, it was ready to go. It was in the CD process, you know, doing all the digital distribution and everything. I wanted to have an album to take to Viva, a new album, and just the schedules worked out so that we had no time to get there any sooner.  I mean, I was even writing songs the weekend before we were playing brand new songs that I had just written the night before the studio. It turned out great. It turned out wonderful. That little bit of pressure is apparently what we needed to do, bringing out some of these songs we haven’t, I hadn’t even written. Sometimes I need that pressure. 

[Viva] is a bit of a whirlwind. So the first year compared to this year that we played are both very different. The first year we played, we were playing the Car Show, so we had to be there to do like a sound check. And then we also, you know, filled in and did a few other little things too, so it was like we were running around, getting ready to play or playing more than we were just hanging out the first year. Then the second year that we played, it was a little bit more hangout time, which was really nice because it was less running around, getting ready, ‘kay, I need to do X, Y, Z to make sure I don’t blow my voice, blah, blah, blah.’ You know, we got to play Bienville room, so it was nice to be able to play inside. Playing the Car Show was amazing, but it was also nice to play that night or that evening, you know, inside too.

It was nice because we sold a lot of [albums]. We sold over forty copies …no…almost sixty copies! I took a hundred and only brought forty back. That was within two shows. So that’s pretty good. I’m glad it made me happy because it was a pre-release there. It wasn’t even available online yet. So I wanted to have something special for the Viva crowd to be like, oh, we got this, especially coming from other countries and stuff. Save on shipping if they want to buy an actual CD.”

Of the tracks on ‘Didn’t Know The Devil’, ‘Petty Betty’ stands out for it’s sheer sass, calling out the rockabilly pretenders. “It’s not really one specific person,” Rose reveals. “It’s more or less a crowd of specific people. It’s like the Brian Setzer song, ‘Really Rockabilly.’ “He pissed in his pants, he’s too drunk to care, 1956 underwear.” So it’s kind of about the people that just suck the fun out of it, you know, and it’s like, not everybody can live a rockabilly life. Some people can just live it on the weekends. Some get their dresses for hundreds of dollars. Some pay twenty bucks on Amazon and that’s okay. They’re having fun like everybody else. You’re not better because your dress is vintage, whatever. You know what I mean? So it’s kind of that inspiration. That’s why I threw that line in there. ‘Slow your roll’. We’re not having a contest on who’s the ‘rockabilliest’. We’re just here having a good time. It’s just about fun. It worries me that the people, the periodists that do that crap are going to swivel the scene into nothing with all of their bullcrap because anybody new coming into the scene would be very put off by it. I know I would be.”  

At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got ‘Spaghetti Jane’, which all started from a video idea. “So, Steve Schaffner, our full-time guitarist, I told him about this idea that I had for a music video that I have yet to find a way to make happen with my limited budget. But it was just basically about a pink tumbleweed that just kind of rolls around like in ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’ where the tomato rolls around and eats people, that’s the tumbleweed. It rolls around and it just devours people and every person devours, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it’s just pink giant tumbleweed of hair basically, until it finally gets to me and then it just boops my toe and I put it in my hair, you know. I’m like, ‘I want to be cool’. Anyways, so I was like, I need a song for this. We need some sort of song and he just like had this western little melody that he had written and, I mean, that’s 100% him right there – other than my ridiculous music video that I want to make someday – with the western tunes. I’m [thought], this is fun. Something different.” 

‘Tuff Teddy Boy’ takes its inspiration for her fans in the UK, as Rose notes. “All of the songs on the album were written by me except for Voodoo Workin’ of course and then the instrumental was written by Steve. I’ve written songs about rockabilly guys and hot rod daddies and stuff and I’m like, [we need a] little something out there for my Ted friends, you know, especially my European and mostly English audience. I need to have a nod to them as well.  I don’t always get to decide what I’m gonna write about. It just kind of is what’s there in my head and floating around. Some of these songs have been around for a long time, like, ‘Tuff Teddy Boy’. That song is probably three or four years old: just haven’t had time to do anything with it. Unlike Wild, which I wrote the night before, we recorded. We kind of had a rhythm for it, but I didn’t like it. I’m listening to our little phone recordings at rehearsal and I’m like, every time I hear it I go, I don’t like it. So we were upstairs, Wayne and I were upstairs”, she’s talking about her husband and drummer, Wayne Harper, “ And I said, play that moody tom thing that you’ve been messing around with, and he did it. Then I just stuck my guitar on tremolo and changed the whole music and melody of the song, kept the lyrics, but changed everything else. And I was like, ‘okay, I like this. This is different. I like this’.

We’ll get to hear ‘Didn’t Know the Devil’ in the UK very soon as Rose is shortly heading out on tour. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to that. And we’re bringing the whole band. So my regular bass player is coming over, Shane. Steve is not up for that long of a plane ride. He just don’t like it. So Aaron, he’s the guitar player we had with us at Viva, is gonna be coming with us to England. He’s what I call my number two because if Steve can’t make a show, Aaron’s there. And yeah, he’s a great musician. He’s a great singer, so that I can take a bit of a vocal break, especially playing back to back shows like that kind of need that little bit of a break.” Not only that, but she’s hitting up the Welsh Rockabilly Fair for the first time: “it’ll be my first official festival, like a bigger Rockabilly festival. We’re playing Sunday evening, hope everybody stays out. I don’t know how weekenders over here and weekenders over there. I don’t know how much they differ. Oh yeah, I’m looking forward to that though. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.” 

For now, the Ameripolitan-winning vocalist and Gretsch slinger is taking each day as it comes. “Pretty much all of life, take it as it comes. You can plan some things, but you can also plan for things to not go as you want them to be. So you gotta roll with it. Just gotta roll. Roll with it or get rolled over.” We can’t wait to hear how she rolls with it in only a few short months.

Kate Allvey

Pick up your copy of ‘Didn’t Know the Devil’ from Jane Rose and the Deadends’ Bandcamp here