During her twenty-five years on Earth as what she calls a "rock kid," there have been great passions in Anna Rose's life, and then there has been music. "More than anything, I have always straight-up just totally and truthfully loved it," she says. Always, she has known she would perform and record as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist-pianist who would release an album such as Nomad, her full-length debut, which she co-produced with Billy Sullivan. Five songs from Nomad comprised her sensational 2009 'Anna Rose' EP which received rave reviews.
And always Anna Rose has been a little nuts about guitars. She started playing at age 5, after an older cousin brought one along to a holiday family gift exchange. "I just picked it up," Anna Rose says. "My cousin taught me a G-chord. At the time I was taking piano lessons -- my parents had started me at some ridiculously young age. I remember the overlap of the two instruments for a while -- I play piano now, I've kinda returned to it. But the guitar, yeah, I just loved it. From the beginning, I was a guitarhead."
After early years of teaching herself, Anna Rose began to study with Arlen Roth, the celebrated guitarist who has performed with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and illustrious others, and who wrote the book 'Masters of the Telecaster'. Anna Rose calls him "the best living guitarist on the face of the planet," pointing out that he encouraged her to listen to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy.
For Anna Rose and her younger sister, it was a packed, productive, happy life in a family that Anna Rose calls "a Disney version of the Osbournes." Anna Rose's mother used to dance ballet and her father is Alan Menken, the celebrated and widely influential pianist and theater and film composer. She danced -- once herself choreographing Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" -- and played sports and rode a lot of horses and cleaned a lot of barns. She fully appreciated and learned copiously from her father's work.
Throughout everything -- from as a tiny kid belting out a song to a Barbra Streisand record played on the radio, to having her first songs analyzed by a family friend who ran the Yale School of Music, to withstanding classroom jibes after her father told a TV interviewer she listened to Ten Inch Nails -- nothing Anna Rose pursued mattered more to her than the Doors. In a coincidence not ignored by Anna Rose, Bruce Botnick, who produced not only the well-remembered '60s Los Angeles band Love but also The Doors themselves, served as executive producer of Nomad.
On Nomad, songs like the guitar-rich "Picture" and the atmospheric ballad "Wilshire Blvd" proceed with an elegant ruggedness that comes from Anna Rose's life-long attraction to rock and roll from the halcyon days of '60s and '70s southern California, and she sings them with an effortless-sounding soprano gravity. "I love that Mulholland Drive, rock-songwriter, star-tripped, holed-up-in-a-house-drinking-gin-and-smoking-weed-writing-songs thing," she says. "I think that's why I moved to California when I was 18, and the place will always be that to me, even though it wasn't that for me. I remember driving up on Mulholland Drive, for example, one night after I'd played one of my gigs in L.A. I was with Billy Sullivan. It was like I had found a place in the music world."
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