Asheville’s Alexa Rose has announced a new album ‘Atmosphere’ to be released October 31 on First City Artists. Once praised by NPR as “the soul child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton,” Rose returns with a stunning collection dwelling between the shimmering falsetto of Alison Krauss and the supernatural tone of Adrianne Lenker. The album lyrically attending to the symbiosis of joy and grief, terror and hope, heaviness and lightness in our daily lives.
Alexa Rose recorded her new album at Betty’s, a studio created by Sylvan Esso nestled in the North Carolina woods. Shortly after the session, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, washing away lives and landscapes in the hometowns of half the band. The storm’s wake, eerie and desolate and decisive, cast a new light upon the record. “I related to the music in a different way,” says Rose. “I had just moved into a new place after losing access to my house, and felt a little tossed around the way everyone did. The experience deepened my love for my home and my belief in the resilience of the land and communities in Appalachia.” Rose spent the harsh winter to follow revisiting her songs and re-recording in her cabin outside Asheville, replacing studio shimmer with intimate sparsity, a deliberate bareness to better express her feeling at the time. “Stripping the songs down felt truer: nothing to hide behind anymore, but believing the roots are strong enough to hold.”