Description:
Head of Roses by Flock of Dimes, released 02 April 2021
1. 2 Heads
2. Price of Blue
3. Two
4. Hard Way
5. Walking
6. Lightning
7. One More Hour
8. No Question
9. Awake for the Sunrise
10. Head of Roses
On her second full-length record, Head of Roses, Jenn Wasner follows a winding thread of intuition into the unknown and into healing, led by gut feelings and the near-spiritual experience of visceral songwriting.
The result is a combination of Wasnerâs ability to embrace new levels of vulnerability, honesty and openness, with the self-assuredness that comes with a decade-plus career as a songwriter, producer, m
Head of Roses by Flock of Dimes, released 02 April 2021
1. 2 Heads
2. Price of Blue
3. Two
4. Hard Way
5. Walking
6. Lightning
7. One More Hour
8. No Question
9. Awake for the Sunrise
10. Head of Roses
On her second full-length record, Head of Roses, Jenn Wasner follows a winding thread of intuition into the unknown and into healing, led by gut feelings and the near-spiritual experience of visceral songwriting.
The result is a combination of Wasnerâs ability to embrace new levels of vulnerability, honesty and openness, with the self-assuredness that comes with a decade-plus career as a songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and prolific collaborator.
Simply put, Head of Roses is a record about heartbreak, but from a dualistic perspective. Itâs about the experience of having oneâs heart broken and breaking someone elseâs heart at the same time. But beyond that, itâs about having to reconcile the experience of oneâs own pain with the understanding that itâs impossible to go through life without being the source of great pain for someone else.
âPart of the journey for me has been learning to take responsibility for the parts of things that are mine, even when Iâm in a lot of pain through some behavior or action of someone else. If Iâm expecting to be forgiven for the things Iâve done and the choices Iâve made and the mistakes that Iâve made, it would be incredibly cowardly and hypocritical to not also do the work thatâs required to forgive others the pain they caused me.â
Showcasing the depth of Wasnerâs songwriting capabilities and the complexity of her vision, Head of Roses calls upon her singular ability to create a fully-formed sonic universe via genre-bending amalgamation of songs and her poetic and gut punch lyrics. Itâs the soundtrack of Wasner letting go â of control, of heartbreak, and of hiding who she is: âI think Iâve finally reached a point in my career where I feel comfortable enough with myself and what I do, that Iâm able to relax into a certain simplicity or straight forwardness that I wasnât comfortable with before.â Head of Roses puts Wasnerâs seismically powerful voice front and center. Those vocals help thread it all together -- itâs a textured musicality, quilted together by intentionality and intuition.
Wasnerâs sophomore LP as Flock of Dimes was mostly written during the isolation of early Covid-19 quarantine and fresh heartbreak. Some songs, like the title track, came to Wasner wholly-formed, like fever dreams. Aside from album opener â2 Heads,â which Wasner had been saving for this purpose since she wrote it in 2015, Head of Roses was born from just a few months at her North Carolina home, during a feverish period of productivity spanning from last March through June.
On her 2016 debut album If You See Me, Say Yes, Wasner controlled every element of the production, meticulously crafting her solo debut to be a definitive statement of ability and artistry. Despite having succeeded in assuring herself of her own capabilities as a musician and producer, she felt drained by the demands of working in creative isolation. Instead, for Head of Roses, she felt drawn to a looser, more collaborative processâand reached out to friend and co-producer Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso) to help her understand what this new process could look like. Recorded with a small group of collaborators in quarantine at Bettyâs in North Carolina, Head of Roses captures Wasnerâs vision and expands upon it, with input from Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Matt McCaughan (Bon Iver/Lambchop), and Adam Schatz (Landlady).
Sanborn and Wasner assembled Head of Roses in the same way youâd put together a mixtape, painstakingly and carefully melding disparate parts into a whole, transcending genre to weave a story of heartache and healing together. Thereâs the undulating âTwo,â a tapestry of strange whirring machinery, buried saxophone swimming to the surface, âWeâre all just wearing bodies like a costume âtil we die.â Or âHard Way,â hypnotic and trudging forward beneath the slight distortion of Wasnerâs lilting melodies -- âCouldnât call it off / couldnât make it last / so I took the hard wayâ -- recorded in one fell swoop during an afternoon at Bettyâs. Other tracks, like âLightning,â are grounded in sparseness, the warmth of clean electric guitar -- âWhen you dressed me in / a different skin / I forgot who I am / I watched it happen / But I canât understand.â âNo Questionâ feels somehow celestial, born from the chasm between organic and electronic textures, and âAwake for the Sunriseâ is a pure and straightforward country ballad, written at 6:30am after a sleepless night. Closer âHead of Roses,â a slow-burn, is the fitting thesis of the record, including its imagery: a garden absolutely overrun, blooming all over the place, the thorns of the thing fully inseparable from the flowers themselves.
And in the same way a homemade, painstakingly-crafted mixtape plays out, with the makerâs fingerprints left all over its songs â so goes Head of Roses. Carefully curated and culled from the depths of Wasnerâs heartbreak and healing, itâs deeply, intensely personal.
But just as we change ourselves by embracing the pain of loss and uncertainty, so too are the purpose of these songs changed through the act of creating them. Having succeeded in healing the person who made them, they now exist for those who find them in their own moments of need. Always in motion, the original spirit of creation has already flown from this placeâbut itâs left behind a blueprint, a tool for you, to lean on, too.
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