Dan Myers
Meghan Rose is at a crossroads. The 29-year-old singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/studio geek has been trying to make a go of it as a full-time musician since late 2013. The artistic part of it is going great. She’s cranked out and recorded a ton of high-quality original material. She and her bands — currently Meghan Rose & the Bones, Damsel Trash and Little Red Wolf — have won a bunch of awards and attracted a healthy local following that flocks to their live shows. She’s picked up advanced knob-twiddling skills and has studio space in which to deploy them.
But the money part hasn’t clicked. She’s burned through most of the dough she squirreled away working long hours at Epic for six years. And while the live shows are well attended, and she gets other music-related gigs on the side — engineering, session work, etc. — the whole amalgamation of musical activities hasn’t quite congealed into a commercially viable enterprise. So she’s got some decisions to make: Full-time music in poverty or a lucrative consulting job with music on the side? Madison or New York?
At the moment, it looks like consulting and New York are winning.
“I need a job, a real one, which sucks,” Rose says. “It’s the smart thing for me to do, to take advantage of this skill set I have. But it feels like a defeat.”
The sense of defeat has more to do with mission than with money. When Rose quit Epic, it was not because she hated the work; she actually enjoyed it and excelled in her role. But Rose is driven to make music. Her work is intensely personal. She sings about relationships, interpersonal power struggles, death and dark places, and salvation. Underpinning all of it is a defiant feminism that seeks to “take rock music by the balls and put a vagina right next to it.”
“Everything I write about is in some way related to feminism and unlearning all the restrictions that have subconsciously seeped into my brain saying I can’t do it or I shouldn’t do it or I shouldn’t want it,” she says.
Rose wants to spread that message to the next generation of rockers. Girls Rock Camp, an annual weeklong program for girls ages 8 to 18 taught by some of Madison’s best female musicians, has given her a platform from which to do that. Rose describes a powerful recent experience with one of her Girls Rock Camp students, a smart high-schooler going through a period of self-discovery and reexamination of the societal norms that make her feel like a freak.
“She really connected with my music, and she’s writing her own material now.... That’s the real reason why I want to be a writer and a performer and scream on stage and take no prisoners and write honest, provocative lyrics — because a kid can listen to it and be inspired and relate and feel like it’s going to be okay.”
Rose grew up in La Crescent, Minn., on the banks of the Mississippi opposite La Crosse. A music fiend from the start, she started studying classical piano at age 4 and got her first guitar at 16. She came to Madison for college and ended up joining a short-lived ska band called Skaput!
A series of other bands followed — Strange Talking Animals, A Catapult Western, and Turbo Loogie, through which Rose connected with many of the musicians who remain her chief collaborators. She joined forces with three of those frequent collaborators — Emily Mills, Laura Detert and Kelly Maxwell — to form Little Red Wolf, which made its performing debut in 2009 and was picked as Best New Local Band by Isthmus readers that year.
By that time, Rose had graduated from UW and was working 70 hours a week for Epic. She spent virtually all of her non-work time playing and writing music. Somewhere she managed to find the time to feed her lifelong theater jones by co-writing and music directing Z-Town, a zombie musical that premiered at the Bartell Theatre in 2011 and played at the New York Fringe Festival the following year.
It was another costume affair — a one-off Halloween tribute show at the High Noon Saloon in 2012 — that changed everything for Rose. That year, members of Little Red Wolf impersonated Hole, with Rose as Courtney Love. She immersed herself fully in the role, undertaking voluminous research into Love’s music and psyche. It was a transformative experience. Once bashful on stage, Rose learned to how to scream and cut loose as a performer.
While it hasn’t translated into financial success, Rose’s career has soared locally since she threw herself into music full-time. This past February she released a solo album, In Your Bones, recorded over 10 days in the Ontario studio of Neko Case’s producer, Darryl Neudorf. The album shows clear hints of the two women Rose most often cites as influences, Love and Fiona Apple. Rose was all over this year’s Madison Area Music Awards winner list. She was named Female Vocalist of the Year and Bassist of the Year for her work with the currently dormant I Saw the Creature. Damsel Trash, her punk duo with drummer Emily Mills, took both Song of the Year and Album of the Year honors in the Hard Rock/Punk category.
What impresses Mills, one of Rose’s closest friends and most frequent musical partners, is not so much the awards and adulation as the sheer determination and commitment Rose applies to her music.
“I’m so impressed at her ability to work as hard as she does at it,” says Mills. “She’s a creative storm.”
Now it looks like this creative storm might be tracking away from Madison toward New York in the spring, along with boyfriend and I Saw the Creature bandmate Jake Ripp-Dieter. But not before we get to see more performances out of Damsel Trash and Rose’s solo vehicle Meghan Rose & the Bones, not to mention another Halloween turn at High Noon, this time fronting a Fleetwood Mac tribute band.
And if New York doesn’t work out?
“I’ll come back, and hopefully I’ll have learned something,” Rose says. And, she says, she might pour her energies into helping Girls Rock Camp grow and support more future rock stars. “I want to be a fearless role model who goes after the big fish so more women can believe they can do it too.”
