Rags Rosenberg

Rags Rosenberg writes like a man who’s read the obituary of civilization and decided to sing anyway. With a weathered voice and a watchful eye, he channels the witness, the poet, and the man with a go-bag by the door. Raised in the shadow of the San Gabriel mountains in semi-rural Southern California, he started playing folk songs in high school and discovered that music was the vehicle for a nerdy introvert to obtain a small slice of social capital. He hasn’t stopped playing music since.

Rosenberg’s teenage television screen depicted the carpet bombing of Vietnamese villages, the police using fire hoses and dogs on civil rights demonstrators, and the live feed of JFK’s assassination. “The Times They Are a-Changin’” was in heavy rotation on the radio. Deeply troubled by these events and moved by Dylan’s response, Rosenberg started writing his own songs; here he discovered his passion for crafting images and narratives that could move others.

Rags was in college when the National Guard shot and killed two student protesters at Kent State. Disillusioned, he quit school, joined a rock band and went on the road. When the band broke up, he apprenticed as a carpenter, became a journeyman, and, with two kids to raise, construction became his life. But he never stopped picking up the guitar and putting pen to paper when he could.

His life took a turn when he lost his construction company and his house in Atlanta. Now divorced and a single parent, he gathered up what was left of his life and moved with his kids to Nashville, one of many pilgrims in search of a songwriting career. Sitting at the feet of the masters in the Bluebird Café, he learned how to write songs from the hit writers who had cracked the country radio code – writers like Craig Wiseman, Jeffrey Steele, Bobby Braddock.

But Rags wasn’t interested in becoming a trend writer, and in 2008 he moved to a small cabin in Joshua Tree and returned to the image-driven, poetic songwriting he loved. When asked about a song he penned in that era, “Smokey Joe’s,” he says, “Around 2010, I spent a week alone on a writing retreat at our old trailer high up in the hills overlooking Pioneertown, watching the sky catch fire and listening to the coyotes. It was late, maybe 3 or 4 a.m. I was listening to ‘Desolation Row’ on repeat when the idea of ‘Smokey Joe’s’ started to form. I felt it. That tug. Something was being beamed in. I picked up the guitar and had most of ‘Smokey Joe’s’ written by sunup. Then came an early version of ‘Song of the Bricoleur,’ then ‘The Code.’ It was like a dam had broken.” After 10 years in the desert, he produced his first album, Flower Time, a late bloomer’s anthem.

Now, 10 years later, comes Song of the Bricoleur, an album of forgotten soldiers and fading gods. Rags says, “I don’t think of myself as a topical songwriter, mostly because I’m not very good at it. I like to approach these problems from a more distant perspective. But when writing the new album, I felt compelled to address climate disaster. At first, I wasn’t going to put ‘Bullfrogs’ on the album because it didn’t offer any hope. But people I trust convinced me otherwise. Sometimes you just have to tell the truth that is yours, even if it fails to be as optimistic as you’d like.”

Asked about the title cut, “Song of the Bricoleur,” he says, “We’re perched on the edge of an historical moment where everything is about to transform, and we can’t yet see what’s on the other side. I like to think that ‘Song of the Bricoleur’ promotes the idea that, in uncertain times like these, when everything is up for grabs, ordinary people like us have a lot of agency if we choose to exercise it.”

Rooted in folk and Americana traditions, the songs draw from the uncertainty of modern life, the unraveling of old traditions and institutions, and the notion that maybe we can imagine a different, more humane future into existence.