Angelica Rockne’s debut album, Queen of San Antonio is out October 27th and, recently, Noisey premiered “Married By Elvis” calling it a song “about the passing of time and battered expectations and, the more you let it sink in, the more devastating it becomes.”
Maybe we’re all too defeated with the dreary assumption that regional sounds and city scenes are a thing of the past — a world before the internet bred makers and thinkers into islands. But America is still a place, rock & roll still rules, and there’s history and story pulsing through our voices and songs whether we believe it or not.
I first heard Angelica Rockne and her band a few years back in a basement bar in San Francisco. The tunes, her voice, the band, and Blake Severn’s guitar playing really knocked me out — I remember thinking, well holy hell, this sounds like California. Not a verbed-out surfs-up California, not San Francisco, nor Los Angeles, but everywhere else, all the smalls towns and dark bars, desolate people and dirt roads, the mountains or the forest or the desert, the places we drive through, the rural west, where Bakersfield isn’t just a place, but a sound, a history, an ethos — it’s country music without the tropes, cosmic but still emotional, live and raw but well-played.
