Etienne de Rocher
Reviewed by Joel Selvin, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Few new artists get the luxury of spending years making their first record. Perhaps more would if they could come out with an album as good as this one. It is a poised, confident CD, the work of someone who has already mastered his craft, not someone just starting out. Every tiny sound on the exquisite album is perfectly embedded in the carefully crafted music. It's a sound that is spare and open, yet dense and intricate at the same time. Think Nick Drake produced by Peter Gabriel.
"I walk the line between complete abstraction, dreaminess and stark reality," de Rocher says in the living room of the tidy West Berkeley duplex he shares with his wife and 2-month old son. A vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy sits on his turntable -- the large collection of old albums belongs to his wife, he says -- and a bouquet of lilies on the coffee table scents the room.
De Rocher grew up in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where his parents were both French professors. His mother was French and his father a Michigan-raised Francophile, which is where he came by the name. He resents people suggesting it might be something he made up for the stage; he suffered too much grief over the name growing up in the South. He came to UC Berkeley in 1987 as a Physics honors student.
"Berkeley blew my mind," he says, "all the cool music, all the freaky culture. I lasted three semesters. I changed majors from physics to philosophy to art. I rolled downhill from the hard sciences."
A four-track demo he recorded in the basement of the Oakland apartment building where he worked as custodian wound up in the hands of producer Glen Ballard, a record-industry heavyweight responsible for, among other successes, the multiplatinum debut of Alanis Morrisette. De Rocher almost signed with Capitol Records, but backed out at the last minute. "I got creeped out by the whole thing," he says. "They gave me an offer and I just didn't jump at it. I wanted to produce my own records, do my own thing."
He started back in the basement. This time he was joined by producer Dan Prothero, founder of San Francisco-based Fog City Records. "I'd been approached by several producers," de Rocher says. "I worked very hard on what my stuff sounded like, the vibe. They all wanted to do their thing on my music. Dan liked what I'd done and wanted to work with that."
Says Prothero, "We wanted to scratch at something different. At the same time, we wanted something very honest and those two things can be very difficult to reconcile. We needed to hone in on something that was unique and yet be true to the person."
Having lived through the golden era of hip-hop and watched independent rock turn all "cute and niched out," de Rocher wonders what the world will make of his record. "My music is nostalgic, sentimental and sort of baroque," he says. "It's not a clean, modern sound that's increasingly empty to me. I hear a lot of empty new music. Indie rock exists for what it's not. What people like about it is what it's not. It's not this, it's not that."
"Everything I care about and wanted to do is in that record. Any sound we've been chasing down is there. I know that's what you fall in love with -- the record. It speaks for itself. A record can be sexy, loud, dangerous, weird. It's all that you need to know. You don't need to see the video. You don't need to read the book. You don't need to become an expert in the band. That's what I love about records -- it's so visceral. All this beauty and terror in the air. How can you beat something like that?"
Quantity:
Meditation # C.O.B.
Juniper Rose
The Lizard Song
Providence
Six Feet
Big Black Wall
There’s Real And There’s Moonshine
Bama Bino Goodbye
You Became A Knife
Come Twilight
Everybody Thinks You’re A Smash
Goodnight
Cerebro (acoustic)
The Lizard Song (acoustic)
Everybody Thinks You’re A Smash (acoustic)
Produced and recorded by Dan Prothero
“the work of someone who has
already mastered his craft”
Etienne de Rocher was recorded by Dan Prothero in studios, basements, and ostrich farms all over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Personnel: Todd Roper (drums), Todd Sickafoose (bass), Marika Hughes (cello), Alan Lin (violin), Dan Morris (percussion on tracks 1 & 10), Etienne de Rocher (vocals, guitar, everything else)
“Etienne crafts songs that rustle with bittersweet echoes of the past without becoming pastiches. Though his earlier work tilted toward R&B, his latest is moodier, more psychedelic, and difficult to categorize.”
Prairie Sun recoding studio (and ostrich farm)
Quantity:
“Genuine genius. Crosses lines from early Dylan to a softer, more refined Elliott Smith, with a voice that melts one’s cynicism and leads into a dreamy wonderland.”
“it’s easy to get behind his grooves and allow yourself to enter his gently broken-in world... like an unpretentious Tom Petty or Gram Parsons’ long-lost son”
