Esther Rose

Esther Rose was on a long solo drive when she started writing the opening title track of Want, her stunning fifth album. At first, the words seemed almost like a joke, something to keep herself amused as the miles passed. “I want a puppy, but I don’t want a mess. I want to know where I’m going without GPS,” she sang from behind the wheel. Soon, the idea snowballed into a list of desires that spanned existential, spiritual, and mundane; romantic to platonic to familial; at once wildly ambitious yet piercingly relatable; all set to a catchy melody that blends her pop instincts with country storytelling and the raw immediacy of a basement punk show. In other words, she was on her way to another classic Esther Rose song.

This precise blend has made the Santa Fe-based artist one of her generation’s most beloved songwriters: someone whose live shows are known to conclude in mass tears and group hugs. Still, something was different this time. “For me, these songs felt like revelations,” she explains, comparing the 11-song record to a memoir, alive with kinetic storytelling and personal insight. In its newly direct and stirringly nuanced writing, you’ll hear about rock bottom encounters, shifting relationships with substances, evolving perspectives on adult partnership, and, as evidenced by those early lines in “Want,” a few jokes along the way. Vivid and bracing, Want places you in the passenger seat while each of these feelings arrive.

To match the multi-dimensional tone of the writing, Rose has made the most adventurous, hardest-hitting record of her career. Working with producer Ross Farbe and recording live-to-tape in Nashville’s Bomb Shelter, she travels as far as she’s been from the stripped-down classic country of celebrated early work like 2017’s This Time Last Night and 2019’s You Made It This Far. Following the wide-open serenity of 2023’s momentous Safe to Run, she now leans toward confrontational arrangements full of distortion and full-band spontaneity, never sacrificing a classicist’s gift for melody that makes each song instantly memorable.

“Making this album was the most beautiful experience of my life,” Rose explains, describing the euphoria of sharing these intimate stories among trusted collaborators like guitarist Kunal Prakash, drummer Howe Pearson, bassist Gina Leslie, and pedal steel player John James Tourville. She also enlisted friends like singer-songwriter Dean Johnson (who duets in the stunning “Scars”) and New Orleans rock band Video Age (who she co-wrote “tailspin” with) to flesh out her vision. Ranging from stark solo performances to grungy blowouts, the album maintains a steady focus while never staying too long in one place. (Like David Bowie, Rose would arrive at the studio in carefully chosen outfits to set the tone for each session, guiding her bandmates to follow the mood.)

To reach this level of confidence, Rose had to recalibrate her entire relationship with music. When she concluded the tour for Safe to Run, she considered quitting altogether, feeling exhausted and depleted, seeing no way to continue at her relentless pace. But after quitting drinking and finding new momentum in therapy, she devoted herself to the new material, letting ideas flow without worrying about the final product. She considered making an electro-pop album; a self-titled acoustic record. Eventually, she began categorizing her disparate ideas under the working title The Therapy LP.

“There are things that I have tiptoed around in my writing—and in my life—that I wasn’t ready to look at,” she reflects, “and now I’m going for it.” The results are breakthroughs like “Had To” and “Rescue You” that tether her tightly structured melodies to narratives that bring distressing subject matter down to earth. And where her love songs in the past often found universal resonance in simple questions about heartbreak, these ones explore complex subjects like accountability and true connection: “Baby, I’ve got scars that you cannot see/Love them for what they gave to me,” she sings boldly in “Scars.”

This level of vulnerability is new from Esther Rose—a vow to be known more fully by her audience, herself, and the people in her life. “Each time I write a new album, I go a little deeper,” she says. “For me, it’s been very challenging to stay… I’m always packing the Subaru in my mind.” And while she can still craft a road song like nobody else—“Two days on the highway, solo drive/Today is the greatest day of my life,” she sings in “tailspin”—she now searches for stability, even when that means confronting internal chaos. The album’s closing song, titled “Want Pt. 2,” returns Rose to her old hometown of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, watching a Rolling Stones cover band in a bar she frequented back in the day. She’s teary-eyed, surrounded by loved ones, finding new profundity in a shaky rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” As she reflects on the scene—even interpolating some of the Stones’ lyrics and melodic cues—her friends provide celebratory backing vocals as the band thrashes away. It’s a fitting finale for the strongest, widest-reaching album of her career—a moment when the past, present, and future collide, a panorama of emotions, the kind of party you never want to leave.