Some songs are just so all-around drop-dead gorgeous — in the heartfelt poignancy of their vocals, the gently mournful exquisiteness of their melodies and the poetic specificity of their lyrics — that you stop everything the first time you hear them. And then you want to seek them out again and again.
Sean Rowe’s “Gas Station Rose,” from his latest album New Lore, is like that. A Folk/Americana troubadour, he’s been carefully, judiciously introducing Pop and Rock elements into his songs for a while, and on this one he’s found his perfect mix.
His acoustic guitar offers the sparest introduction, allowing for short dramatic moments of silence, before Rowe’s resonantly low, gravely voice begins the first couplet, expressing both melancholy and tenderness: “We can’t have a garden while we’re still on the road/There’s only room on the dash for a gas station rose.”
And just like that, he’s got you, unraveling a tale of two people living on the road and driving through a Nebraska that’s “flat as a sheet” as they both pursue and escape something.
It’s a reasonably short song, not quite four minutes, yet its arrangement incorporates a symphonic sweep as first piano and then strings enter on the chorus. It commands the senses as fully as some movies.
When Rowe was in town in 2013 (read CityBeat’s feature story on him here), he was transitioning from a life as a devoted naturalist — he once spent 24 days in the wilderness alone — to a full-time performing songwriter on the taste-making Anti- label. He had a new, highly praised album out then, The Salesman and the Shark.
Since then, Rowe has put out two further albums and an EP while broadening his sonic palette, toured the world and kept what may be the most sumptuous beard in showbiz. He’s a treasure.
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This article appears in May 10-17, 2017.