A few songs into her sophomore album You Made It This Far, country singer Esther Rose flashes back to her high school days in Columbiaville, Michigan. In her memory, she hears her mother’s coffee machine, wakes her sister, and scrapes the ice off the car. When they finally get out the door, she proudly lists the artists on the mixtape soundtracking the drive: “Against Me!, Julie Ruin, Minor Threat,” Rose sings. “I light up my last cigarette.” You can picture the scene—the angsty teens, the snowy road, the humdrum day ahead. All the while, a lazy pedal steel yawns and a shuffling beat pushes them forward, in no particular hurry.
The listless young characters in “Five Minute Drive” aren’t far from the ones Rose sings about on the rest of the album, emotionally speaking. But a lot has changed. For one thing, much of the present-tense action takes place in New Orleans, the city Rose has called home for the last 10 years. She addresses it most directly in “Lower 9 Valentine,” a simple love song named after the working-class neighborhood where she recorded the album with her small band. You get the sense that Rose’s setting is as important to her as the company she keeps: “Every day’s a holiday when we’re walking on the levee,” she sings. With a hopeful pull in her voice, she makes you want to join in on the celebration.
As a writer, Rose draws inspiration from the classic country songbook, artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Her preferred delivery is a sing-songy cadence that can package punchlines and hard truths with a cozy, cosmic wink. She’s also noted the influence of traditional blues music—as much the songwriting as the recordings themselves, with their crackle and sonic imperfections. In subtler ways than her 2017 debut This Time Last Night—a stark, stirring album recorded directly to two-track tape—this music incorporates the atmosphere around her. Peaceful, with ample room to breathe, these are songs that could change with each performance, on any night, in different weather.
You can also hear the influence of those old punk mixtapes from high school. For as traditional as her songs come across, you wouldn’t mistake them for throwbacks, and her lyrics can hit with an urgency embedded in the mind of anyone who’s shouted back lyrics in a sweaty, crowded basement at a formative age. (“I hope you change your mind,” goes a particularly cathartic chorus, “Oooh/Try!”). She’s often accompanied by lap steel and fiddle—two instruments that closely approximate the twang of her voice—and the arrangements fill the blanks between her words. In the exquisite “Only Loving You,” her band switches abruptly between its moody refrain and upbeat chorus. It’s an aural jump-cut that makes the music feel darker than her lovesick words would suggest.
Rose focuses her songwriting on self-discovery and how the passing of time shifts her understanding of people. In “Always Changing,” she notices a couple kissing in the park and wonders what their lives are like once they get back home and it’s just the two of them. She puts her own relationships under the microscope in “Sex and Magic,” noting the similarities between the performances in the title, how cheap and fake and desperate each can seem once it turns into routine. The sloppy pedal steel solo adds a kind of slapstick comedy, but Rose’s writing is earnest and direct; when she holds eye contact, it’s like there’s no one else in the room.
The album’s best song is also its sparest. The solo acoustic “Don’t Blame It on the Moon” was written just before the album was finished, and it’s the closest Rose has come to writing her own standard. Outside a bar in the late hours of the night, she lets us in on a series of climactic exchanges between two people in love, at the end of their ropes. Each verse is more hopeless than the last, and both parties sound exhausted and hardened to their own bad habits. “Don’t blame it on the moon/It’ll all be over soon,” Rose sings softly, then ends the song on a resounding major chord. Because soon the sun will be up, and it will be time to get moving again.
