Or so he thought.
“I didn’t think I had anything to do, but I walked into my back office and realized that I always have something to do,” he says via phone from his Austin home. Shakey Graves performs at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16, at the Agora Theatre.
The singer-songwriter’s current tour supports Movie of the Week, a recording with a particularly unique back story for Rose-Garcia, who launched his career as a one-man indie rock/folk band way back in 2007. For this album, Rose-Garcia began writing songs for a film. When the soundtrack didn’t pan out, he gathered the tunes together for an album. In addition, he had spent a few years building an AI-powered website that allows fans to create one-of-a-kind versions of the album, drawing from hundreds of alternate takes.
“During COVID, I wound up working on a soundtrack for a friend’s movie, but I wound up overdoing it and making a bunch of stuff,” he explains. “I was very excited by the project and took it upon myself to spice it up. My overall approach was writing to a visual medium. I had put this band together, and I had a certain melody or certain themes for characters. Some character themes will get lighter or darker as the character changes. That’s how we built the whole thing.”
Rose-Garcia says he and his bandmates would record ten-hour sessions at his drummer Matt Pence’s studio. The group recorded A-sides with as much detail to production as the B-sides.
“In going back over the material, there was stuff we would never even remember doing,” says Rose-Garcia. “At the end, it came down to this decision about what makes a song good enough to release. For me, I like weird odds and ends and all sorts of stuff. I’ll doublethink it too and think it’s not good enough for an album, but one day, I will put it out. I just needed to get the first batch out.”
One standout, “Ready or Not,” a melancholy tune with woozy guitars and rattling percussion, features beautiful vocal harmonies with indie artist Sierra Farrell. One of the last songs recorded for the album, the tune came to fruition when Rose-Garcia retreated to the mountains of New Mexico after a show at a Red Rocks in Colorado. He intended the trip to be a songwriting sabbatical.
“I drove our truck [from Colorado] back to Texas and did the slow route through New Mexico,” he explains, adding that he stopped outside of Santa Fe for a spell. “I started writing music in Santa Fe when I was in my teens. I did a decompression and went back to basics. I tried to track down a cassette four-track. I found a guitar, and I stayed at this house on a mountain. It was not as easy or mystical as I thought. I thought I would write a whole other secret album. I spent so much time trying to track down this fucking tape machine that I met the other half of Santa Fe.”
One of his bandmates, Cameron Neal, came through because he was driving to his home in Nashville.
“We wrote [‘Ready or Not’] on the mountain and then went back into the tour, and a few weeks into the tour, everything got shut down,” says Rose-Garcia. “Some of us got sick. We quarantined, and we had all been together, so we went back to Matt’s studio, which was outside of town. If we were altogether, we thought we could go back to the studio. We kept working on the album, and we had recorded ‘Ready or Not.’”
Rose-Garcia says he imagined “Ready or Not” would be a full-on duet like the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers ’70s tune “Islands in the Stream.”
“We had toured with Sierra and thought it would be amazing to do it with her,” says Rose-Garcia. “But she was super in-demand and busy. Right as I started to edit the song, I got a random text from her. She was coming to Austin for 48 hours. I was like, ‘Oh shit, do you want to record a song?’ She said yes and magically appeared, and I showed her the song, and we recorded it in two hours. She’s the real thing. We just had fun.”
As excited as Rose-Garcia is about his new material, he says his live show will feature a mix of stuff from his entire career.
“If I go see a band, no matter how much I am into their new album, I probably don’t want to hear all the new stuff,” he says. “I can’t pull a Thom Yorke. We mix the new material in and play about a third of the new material. And I still play both solo and perform with the band.”
In addition, Rose-Garcia says he continues to sift through the outtakes the Movie of the Week recording sessions and find gems.
“There is another half of this stuff,” he says. “My goal is to close the gap between albums. We’ve built so much music that the new release will be out pretty soon, and I want to continuously put stuff out instead of just sitting on it.”
This article appears in Oct 11-25, 2023.
