Playing with KNIVES — Polaris Rose

First off, thank you so much to everyone who has made it out to our last few shows. From our acoustic performance at Hotel Cafe to two nights at the Virgil… we really had a great time meeting new faces and playing music we love. :) Special Thanks to ROVE and ALL SCENE EYE for inviting us out.

AND. We’ve been working for the last year on a new record… quietly obsessing over the right tone and song choices. The album is part 3 of our 6-album story and it’s called ‘Knives Among the Orchids’.

A bit about the writing… while we were completing work on ‘Ocean Blue, Velvet Skies’, we knew that we wanted to take the sound in a more aggressive direction… without losing the ‘prettiness’ or the dynamics. So I started writing a new record… thinking all the while about desert landscapes and the fate of the American Dream.

This is the original album design (since scrapped for something more befitting of the final album)…

The first two songs I wrote were ’SodaJerk’ and ‘Stars & Stripes’. The second Maddie heard them, she put her foot down (as she does often) and said: “We are putting these on ‘Ocean Blue, Velvet Skies’.” I resisted, claiming that they conceptually belonged on our ‘desert record’. But Maddie got her way. And I’m happy she did.

As the writing continued, Maddie really wanted to bring a bit more of a dirty blues vibe to it. So we kind of did… although I’m not sure you’d be thinking ‘blues’ if you heard it. But it’s there. Faint remnants of ye old 12-bar. So, we reshaped the record together and dreamt up new artwork.

Just yesterday, we completed drums with Kiel Feher at his studio: the Spirit Lodge. For those who don’t know, Kiel is the drummer for Polaris Rose who doesn’t pose for the band photos but plays a killer kit. He is an amazing musician, with an vast instinctual understanding of what a song needs.

You can watch a video of us recording a song called ‘Goodnight Daylight’.

3 songs from ‘Knives Among the Orchids’ were actually completed months ago. John Spiker mixed and mastered for us. We’ve been floating them to different people in different places and we’ve been really thrilled with the response. Even better, we’ve been playing a couple of the songs live… and the response there has been pretty enthusiastic. :)

‘Knives Among the Orchids’ is 9-songs… and we think it’s our best work. We think you’ll agree. You’ll probably hear the first single in January. We’ve got a lot of work to do from now till then. We have 4 songs that need vocals to be tracked. We have at least one music video to shoot. We’ve got the art already. And we’ve already begun booking shows for the spring.

A video posted by Polaris Rose (@polaris_rose) on Nov 3, 2016 at 9:12pm PDT