When Boulder County singer-songwriter Kate Farmer was hit with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she thought it might be time to put her music-making days behind her. Then she got a visit from Clay Rose.
“I said, ‘If there was ever a time to start playing music, it’s now. This is what music is for,’” Rose recalls. “She was saying, ‘Nobody wants to hear about all this darkness and all this pain and all this fear.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, they do. That’s the juice. That’s where we all connect, on a really deep level.’ The next day she wrote probably my favorite song of hers.”
Rose knows a little something about songs. The Colorado native has crafted plenty of them, from country-punk anthems to tender acoustic ballads, since his band Gasoline Lollipops formed on the Front Range more than a decade ago. The industry veteran has a handle on the basic building blocks of the craft, but he says the good stuff often comes from painful personal experiences like Farmer’s.
“I think the real catharsis for me is finding songs within stored trauma. I feel this deep relief when the song that’s attached to that trauma comes out and I have a vessel to compartmentalize [it]. I can put it on a shelf and take it down and play that song when I need to feel that again or express that again,” he says. “That is the function of songwriting that I’m trying to give to young or novice songwriters, and I’ve seen it work. I’ve seen that idea land and I’ve seen people grab hold of it, and it’s amazing.”
Now, Rose is filling the Roots Music Project in Boulder each month with music fans eager to hear him discuss the craft of songwriting with established and up-and-coming local musicians alike — including Farmer, who joined Rose for a sold-out edition of the series earlier this year.
“I warn people beforehand that it’s not going to be a light conversation,” Rose says. “I’m going to probe deep, and if they’re not down with that, it’s probably not the best venue for them. … You have to mix in levity, and you have to be able to laugh at the darkness and realize that we’ve survived it, and that’s something to celebrate.”
The ‘weird’ old days
Roots Music Project founder Dave Kennedy sees plenty to celebrate as the monthly salon becomes an important fixture at his local music venue near Pearl and 47th streets — the perfect space, Rose thought, for such an intimate night of songs and storytelling.
“Clay reached out to us about hosting his songwriters series because he was seeking a room where he could connect with an attentive, open-minded audience,” Kennedy says. “The result is mesmerizing. Each performance has a packed house of fans on the edge of their seats, cheering, laughing, and sometimes teary-eyed.”
On top of its function as a platform for discussing songwriting with artists of all experience levels, Rose sees the series as a way to get back to his early days growing up in Boulder — back when it was weird here.
“Especially with the old timers like me, we discuss how Boulder used to be, and how there used to be a lot of venues for something like this,” he says. “It’s also [an opportunity] for me to talk a lot of trash about the music-industry mafia kinda taking over most of Colorado.”
But these reminiscences, performances and conversations on craft aren’t just for the audience’s benefit. According to Rose, they’re also opportunities to shine a spotlight on the people and music he cares about.
“The shows where we have been able to expose some of my friends to a large audience, it was always sort of the highlight of the night for me,” he says. “The [events] I feel are the most successful are the ones where people get to play a bigger room than they’re used to, and really get heard. It’s an excellent listening room and the audience is extremely respectful. You can hear a pin drop in there.”
ON THE BILL: Songwriter Series – Clay Rose of Gasoline Lollipops with Mike Clark. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 13, Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St., Suite V3A, Boulder. Tickets here.
Editor’s note: Reporter Adam Perry occasionally performs as a drummer with Clay Rose, and was a full-time member of the Gasoline Lollipops from 2015-2018.
