The new album from Boulder alt-country rock band Gasoline Lollipops began as a ballet, of all things. Frontman Clay Rose often lends his musical talents to the Denver contemporary dance company Wonderbound.
That ballet, “Sam and Delilah,” places the Biblical story of human duality and the age-old conflict between man and woman in 1970s Texas. The material gave Rose something of a blank canvas to work with and meant processing a lot of raw emotions for the songwriter.
The resulting album is "Kill the Architect," released earlier this summer.
“It was causing me to look at parts of myself that perhaps I never wanted to look at before,” said Rose. “It's uncomfortable, my own toxic masculinity. Also looking at my own feminine side and seeing in what ways I've suppressed this, and in what ways I've seen this as a liability. That comes from growing up in rural Tennessee. I had long hair and I painted my fingernails and I wore eyeliner. I was a punk rocker. At some point, I started stuffing all that and I changed. So writing that ballet, it was scary and uncomfortable, but it also helped me rediscover parts of myself that had been amputated for a long time, as well as a lot of rage that I had buried and thought was dead and gone, and it was not. It was therapeutic. It was terrifying. And the end result are the songs on 'Kill the Architect'.”
The album’s title refers to Rose’s mission of breaking the molds and social constructs that divide modern-day America, particularly what he sees as a toxic imbalance of the masculine and the feminine.
“We are all humans, and we all have everything in us,” said Rose. “We got killer and prey and man and woman and creator and destroyer in all of us. And so to divide those things up and say, ‘You get to be this collection of things and you get to be this collection of things and never the tween shall meet,’ is completely unnatural. So kill that architect.”
This concept of architects and artificial barriers also resonates with Clay Rose musically. He reflected on a period when fans and critics segregated the rockers from the folkers in Denver’s music scene, distancing Gasoline Lollipops from the peers they’d come up with, including Gregory Alan Isakov, Nathaniel Rateliff, and The Lumineers.
“We were just a bunch of kids and we'd throw shows together all the time at the Hi-Dive and Skylark. We were just playing all those holes in the wall. And then pop, pop, pop! They all just start going off like Roman candles, and I'm sitting there going, ‘My train should be coming any minute.’ But it's a different thing. They all have a sound, and it's pretty consistent, so as their sound kind of became the popular national sound, there was sort of this division in Denver. I never set out to have a genre or a sound. I remember the first time I even considered the fact that I might be playing country music was when Westword awarded us the Best Country Band in Colorado. I remember doing an interview and somebody's like, ‘So how does it feel to be the best country band?’ I'm like, ‘Well, first I got to get my head around the fact that I'm a country band. I didn't even know that until I read this headline!’”
Over the course of six albums, Gasoline Lollipops have made music beyond category. You might describe the band as genre-fluid.
“You listen to this record, this is what I do,” said Rose. “I'm all over the place. I play all the music that I grew up with that's steeped in me: the honky tonk and outlaw country from my mom, the psychedelic rock and folk singers from my dad, and the punk rock from my sister. That's all me. I come by it all naturally, and I can't neglect one for the other. So my Achilles heel is that we can't be pegged. We can't play a folk fest because we're too rock and roll, we can't play a rock fest because we're too country, and we can't play a country fest because we're too folk. We're adrift!”
Gasoline Lollipops will celebrate with an album release party for ‘Kill the Architect’ at Boulder’s Fox Theatre on Friday, September 5.
