Eileen Rose

“I really have turned into a bit of gypsy, by accident,” reflects Eileen Rose, whose fifth album, Luna Turista, recorded with her band The Holy Wreck, is released on 5 October 2009 on Floating World Records. Although recorded in her adopted home town of Nashville, Tennessee, these songs have travelled all over the world. They're songs of experience, tanned and weathered, distressed and distilled, rained and shone upon. The album title itself comes from a particular moment of silvery magic the band experienced in Italy in the Summer of 2009, as Rose recalls.

“We were opening for Joe Ely on the top of a mountain in this beautiful disused quarry. The promoter for the night said to me "tonight you will play on the moon". And that's exactly what if felt like. We played outdoors on this huge stage right next to a 30 storey cliff that had been carved out of the mountain. The sky was full of stars and there were about 1,500 people there. It was pretty magical. The cover of the album is a shot of me live on stage from that night.”

Luna Turista the follow up to Rose's acclaimed 2008 album, At Our Tables. Her previous recordings include 2005's Come The Storm, which Judy Collins personally offered to put out in the US after Rose had relocated to her home town of Boston in 2003, Long Shot Novena (2002), which features members of Del Amitri, legendary British punk band The Ruts and sometime Sex Pistol Glen Matlock, and 2000's Shine Like It Does, recorded with country-techno renegades Alabama 3 (who were responsible for the theme tune to The Sopranos) and co-produced with Jerry Boise.

Italy, London, Boston, Detroit, Berlin - Rose has come back and forth a long way. But now, she's settled with Nashville, “playing the honky tonk girl” as she puts it. “My playing and singing is improving greatly because everyone here is just so damn good. It’s like Disney for musicians and everyone is a member of the cast. The guy who delivers your pizza could be a world class bass player who has a gig that night with a songwriting legend. However, I would not recommend ordering pizza in Tennessee. Some things should remain on the East coast.”

True, and not just about the pizza. Luna Turista is Rose's most accomplished work to date. Her voice, which those who saw some of her earliest shows in London at the turn of the century will recall as a thing of rare beauty, has somehow found further range for improvement - golden, versatile, mature, swooping like a swallow from honey smooth to caustic. As for her band, their virtuosity, camaraderie, sympathy and played-in familiarity with the material they're working on is evident from the get-go, on album opener “Simple Touch Of The Hand”, which hits you like the swing doors of a saloon bar in mid-Hootenanny, plunging you immediately into the heady spirit of the holy wrecking crew. Rose's sidemen include The Legendary Rich Gilbert (Frank Black, Throwing Muses, Tanya Donelly) on guitar and pedal steel, Nate '86' Stalfa (Knock Down Society, Caitlin Cary) on drums, both good old punk rock boys. Add “spectacular fiddle player” Joshua Hedley, who also contributes vocals (“he's my Emmylou”, jokes Rose) and you have what amounts to a bristling, crackling ensemble effort rather than sterile session backing.

But even at its seemingly most kick-ass party time, there's a shiftless, emotional ambivalence about Luna Turista, a crucial streak of melancholy beneath the merriment. That's evident on “Sad Ride Home”, a song that reflects upon a string of personal losses Rose has sadly incurred these past few months, including the death of her brother and her father after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

“For the last two years of his life, my father ate and drank nothing as his esophagus had been destroyed by the cancer. We had to feed and medicate him, several times a day, through a tube in his stomach. Coming from a culture which celebrates food – we can’t have any kind of gathering without everyone walking in with a homemade dish of something – it was torture to watch my dad sit there, unable to eat, but still wanting to. And seeing him slip away, slowly, his mind going, his physical ability diminishing but my 80 year old mom changing his clothes, holding hands, singing him songs, with him every moment of every day right up until his last breath was more humbling than I can express.”

All of this, and more, Rose reflects upon, as if on a late night car journey, staring through windscreen wipers darkly. The stark arrangement and the detail of a bass line descending into a basement of grief enhance the transfixing sobriety of the song.

Elsewhere, on “Trouble From Tomorrow”, despite its cheerful gait, is riven with a sort of compulsive anxiety to which Rose admits to being prone – the curse of a creative imagination that can too well picture bad outcomes. The title comes from a phrase with which her sister chides her. “I do fret more than is necessary, about things that may or may nev