There’s a lot happening on Roselit Bone’s new album. Or, rather, there was a lot going on when the Portland-based eight-piece fronted by Charlotte McCaslin were writing it. A masterclass in gothic country-rock (think Patti Smith fronting Murder by Death), Ofrenda reflects on everything that’s happened on both a personal and universal level since the release of the band’s 2019 third full-length Crisis Actor—McCaslin’s divorce, her gender transition, deaths in her family, and the start of a new romance, all of which took place in the midst of a pandemic, as police violence against Black Lives Matter protestors took over her city and climate change caused huge wildfires that literally changed the color of the sky.
But there’s also history here, too—references to, and songs about, the more distant past that still has a place in our present. The nature of the music gives the album a mildly apocalyptic feel (if there’s even such a thing as a mild apocalypse) but also infuses its songs with a tinge of optimism and hope, of renewal and regeneration. “Ofrenda,” after all, is the offering that Mexican families place in their home altars during the country’s Día de los Muertos, where people remember the dead with joyful celebration rather than melancholy mourning. This album is the musical embodiment of that attitude—a wonderful reminder that there’s always light to be found in the dark, however overwhelmingly pitch-black that darkness may be. This record, as McCaslin, explains, searches for that light throughout.
With the album out today via Get Loud Records, we asked McCaslin to detail each of its 10 tracks—stream along and read through her commentary below, and grab a copy here.
1. “Your Gun”
The lyrics are partly about the despair I would feel returning home after any time spent on tour, knowing life would always be worse than when I left. Being on the road with this band has always been physically and emotionally grueling, but it was until recently my only form of escape. After the shows there was always some nightmare to wake up to or crime scene to clean up, and I’m not quite sure how, or to what extent, I survived.
I directed and shot the video myself. I wanted to capture the live energy of the band, the seriousness of the subject matter, and some of the grime of Portland while driving home the more fun visuals of John [Vale] playing the saxophone and the band stomping and clapping around him.
2. “The Sea in Silhouette”
We recorded most of “The Sea In Silhouette” during sessions for our last album, Crisis Actor. John sat at an old organ, and I went into a separate room full of guitars, and we recorded six layers of the two of us playing the most tasteless noise we could muster. Something about the song didn’t sit right with me at the time, so we shelved it. During the Ofrenda sessions a few years later I re-recorded my vocal and was immediately a lot happier with it. I like how slinky and seething it is. I sound pissed and the noise reminds me of “Sister Ray,” my favorite Velvet Underground song. The song lashes out at nothing in particular, but reflects a lot of pressures I feel daily, like climate anxiety, transphobia, and collapse awareness.
3. “Vassal or Vagabond”
A song about war, and political subjugation. Another one recorded and scrapped from the Crisis Actor sessions until I re-recorded the vocals. I originally sang the low harmony, but hated it after I transitioned, and would later move my vocal an octave higher. I still thought the song needed a low, “masculine” voice to convey the mocking, crazed derision of someone who’s about to commit a war crime, so I invited King Dude to do the harmony. I think the resulting vocals sound strained and ominous and convey the inner tension of the character. The arrangements were inspired mostly by some of the more ghostly sounding Mexican folk artists like Chavela Vargas, Trio Los Panchos, and Lydia Mendoza.
4. “The Tower”
Another song about war, this time written from the perspective of someone who’s fleeing it and has to do things to survive that will haunt them for the rest of their life. The line “We ran for our lives as the angels took power” suggests that the narrator knows they’ll not be the one writing the history of the moment. I’m not sure where this stuff comes from for me, but I have a lot of vivid dreams about war, and its imagery appears in a lot of my songs. The spirit of war hides in every aspect of American life—in the eyes of returning soldiers, in the origins of the products we buy or the food we eat or the fuel we consume, and I think the horrors we’ve exported to other countries are returning to us in a big way.
The fingerpicked guitar arrangement on this song is one I’m very proud of—I spent many of my early years practicing delta blues and ragtime guitar and I think this song showcases those skills, but adapted to a harmonic minor key that doesn’t appear much in American folk music.
5. “Veladoras”
Originally recorded in my living room for a compilation CD benefiting Tohono O’odham land defenders, I later added drums and bass for the final record. The lyrics were written during the George Floyd protests in Portland. The first verse is about police in Orange County kicking over the prayer candles of someone they had murdered and refusing to clean up the blood in the street in order to send a message to the family of the victim. The second verse is about a woman in Portland who pleaded with the police, from inside her own home, to stop tear gassing her neighborhood because her newborn baby was choking.
6. “Truth or Consequences”
An homage to one of my favorite towns in New Mexico. [The city of] Truth or Consequences was named after a game show, has a failed recreational spaceport, and has several adorable hot spring hotels. We’ve played there a few times over the years, right in the middle of a tour when we were all bruised, cut up, and emotionally drained. The hot springs and hospitality there always seem to restore us.
7. “The Clowns”
“The Clowns” is on its surface about the Hartford circus fire, when a Ringling Brothers big top burned down and a lot of people died inside. The band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” to signal there was an emergency, and a lot of the patrons died because they thought the frantic behavior of the clowns was all part of the show.
8. “Crying in the USA”
“Crying in the USA’’ is a patriotic anthem, or commercial jingle, for a country that doesn’t seem to want to exist anymore. I wrote it at the height of the pandemic when music seemed like it was gone forever. Protests had just ended in Portland, and many people I knew had spent the summer getting tear gassed every night or laid up with fear watching the collapse unfold on their phones. It often seemed like there was nothing to do but sleep or cry. I was listening to a lot of dancey ’80s and ’90s country music at the time, wanting so badly to inhabit that world, knowing deep down that it never existed outside the songs themselves and that I wouldn’t have been allowed to live there even if it did.
I also directed this music video. Faith [Grossnicklaus] and I found some red bodysuits at a thrift store and we built the look of the video around those, just filming the discomfort of everyone slapping their own asses in front of a hay bale. The lyrics are dumb, the video is dumb. It will probably be the hit.
9. “Ain’t No Right Way to Feel”
I wrote this song right before the end of an 18-year relationship, which coincided with the recording of Ofrenda. Things had been over romantically for years and I had fallen into a caretaker role as my partner’s mental health and substance abuse spiraled. I knew I had to leave the situation if I were to stay alive but the guilt about what would happen to them kept me from pursuing anything like happiness. “Ain’t No Right Way to Feel” started life as a catchy song title, and I set out to write a Springsteen-esque pop-rock ballad to accompany it—but I failed and made a song that’s almost too painful to perform.
10. “Ofrenda”
“Ofrenda” is a song about accepting the acceptance of death. I began writing it after a long winter in which a handful of suicides and overdoses in my extended circle had impacted most of my friends. Some people very close to me had been talking about also ending their own lives at the time, and I was constantly under pressure to help them stay alive. I would go on to lose several family members and friends over the next few years, and grief would knock me down for weeks or months at a time. But I noticed that, for some brief little moments, the pressure would give way and I would suddenly feel OK. I would then be flooded with pangs of guilt for surviving, for not suffering alongside the dead. “Ofrenda,” the song and album, are an attempt to come to terms with my place as a living thing in a dying world.
