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Rouse didn’t set out make a record about the place he lived for most of the last decade. Which makes it either ironic or fitting, and maybe both, that his new album dwells in and on that past, starting with its title. He grimaces at the headline someone put on his new set of publicity materials - “Rouse has run away from home” - but doesn’t deny that he’s made a deliberate break with his recent past. Especially for a guy emerging from a divorce and looking to put some miles between himself and a city where he felt a little too familiar. “I had a couple friends that were buying houses there, and the idea of it sounded really neat,” he continues. He’s wearing a gray sweater and matching corduroys, and his cropped, chopped hair makes him look considerably younger than the 33 he will turn this year. “I had toured there last year and I really liked it a lot,” he says, in an interview during a short stopover in New York after a holiday visit with his parents in the Midwest. He enrolled in Spanish classes five days a week, and found a Spanish girlfriend. Last fall, he moved to Altea, a small town in the east of Spain. Middle American he may be, but Rouse is, for the moment living far, far away. The first place the easy pigeonholing of Rouse falters is in the simple matter of geography.
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But it makes its own set of assumptions about the music, and the people who make it and listen to it, and those assumptions don’t necessarily reflect reality either. And it makes me wonder if the present moment really lends itself to affable affluent Americans contemplating their latest heartbreak over one more set of tasteful arrangements and four-chord melodies. It makes even my favorite middle American music seem…too middle American. The songs are great, but it’s more than that: The music, the way it hopscotches genres, continents and decades, feels immediate, engaged and global.
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My favorite album of 2004 wasn’t really an album at all it was a mix by a British/Sri Lankan rapper and an American DJ that incorporated everything from crunk to the Bangles to Brazilian ghetto funk. But I love other music too, and increasingly it’s that other music - hip-hop and electronic music, but also the expanding world of digital reconfigurations (mash-ups and mixtapes and DJ sets), with its appetite for new sounds and its capacity for weaving together cultures and languages and past and present - that rings bells. I like a lot of this music, and I love some of it. As in, folk-rock or indie-rock or alt-country or any of the other permutations of nice, smart, tuneful songs by nice, smart, tuneful writers, played on guitars and pianos and basses and drums, lovingly produced with nods to Brian Wilson or Owen Bradley or George Martin or Jerry Wexler or Berry Gordy or whatever the favored reference point happens to be. Not “this” as in Josh Rouse, per se, or Nashville, his well-crafted new album, but “this” as in agreeably melancholy middle American sensitive singer-songwriter music. On my way to interview Josh Rouse, with his songs murmuring in my iPod, I wondered how best to ask the question that was really bothering me: Does this still matter?