The last time I saw Esther Rose was in the spring, when she and I met up at an Austin hotel to talk shop. She was mid-rollout for her fifth album, playing a couple of gigs in Texas before getting back out on the road with Twain. The plan was to keep a low profile—our rooftop couch, under a garland of fake plants and a talkative nearby street, did the trick. It’s good to be in Esther’s company again now, her edible-induced smile offering nice respite from the surrounding dim of an unusual Los Angeles rainstorm. It’s because she sets up towers in every place she goes, even just briefly, whether it’s Detroit, New Orleans, Nashville, or now Santa Fe. Her transmissions are generous and contagious always, and her songs are even more so. And thank goodness for the rest of us—considering that, after she finished touring Safe to Run in 2023, Esther had a mental health crisis and wanted to quit music. She quit drinking and made her best record, Want, instead.
She’s got two new songs out today, “That’s My DJ” and “Heather.” They were written a long time ago, but when exactly is anyone’s guess. Hers is “2023, about when Safe to Run comes out.” There was an effort to put both of them on Want; Esther’s A&R man, New West’s George Fontaine, was advocating for “That’s My DJ” to close the album, but she couldn’t end it anywhere but “Want Pt. 2,” with the couplet “Your heart will keep breaking / Until it stays open” echoing. “That’s My DJ” and “Heather,” she says, are “two songs that just seem to live on their own.” Both tunes detail her not-so-new-anymore life in Santa Fe and the community she keeps there—souvenirs from a period in her life, when she was beginning to write about someplace not named New Orleans, Louisiana.
“Heather” was written for a barkeep at the El Rey Court, a century-old motor inn with a mezcal joint inside it. When she wasn’t on the road, Esther would hop behind the bar and pitch in. After she quit drinking, Esther got offered a booking manager position there. “The service industry is my comfort zone for making money, so I booked the performance room for two years,” she says, before revealing that she recently decided to give the “full-time musician” thing the old college try, for the first time in her life. “I’m giving myself one year,” she laughs. “I made my GM shake my hand and be like, ‘If I come back from my job, do not hire me.’ It’s so easy to just make money doing anything other than believing in yourself, so I’m really going for it.” She hasn’t picked up a gig yet, floating in-between a few passion projects with her newfound availability. “20% of my day I am writing my Substack, writing more songs, collaborating with random people. Like, how did I ever fit all that in?”
Esther tells me that Heather is her muse—a “beautiful light in my life, and our friendship has deepened a lot since I wrote the song”—and that Tyler Childers’ Country Squire dared her to write better about the places and the people she meets. The run-on sentence, character-study of “Heather” may contrast with the internal and investigative storytelling on Want, and its fireside singalong tone really opens up in the second verse, when Esther strums a chord or two lent to her by Christian Lee Hutson, but, in typical Esther Rose fashion, these two singles are bold, joyous fonts untamed. “That’s My DJ” especially breaks new ground for Esther, as she gets musically indulgent for the first time ever, abandoning the radio constraints of a 3-minute song for this 6-minute, expansive, wide-open-frontier build. To get there, Esther asked her band—Gina Leslie, Kunal Prakash, and the Deslondes’ Howe Pearson—to “jam indefinitely.” “That’s My DJ” ain’t a techno song with flashing lights, but when Esther lets out a line like “hey, hey, help is on the way,” there’s not an ego in sight, just good, needed living.
While doing overdubs with her partner-in-crime Ross Farbe, Esther unearthed a voice memo she’d recorded in the bombardment of South by Southwest in 2023, outside New West’s showcase. “I got into making field recordings as a way to deal with my introverted tendencies,” she explains. “I want to hide and protect myself when things are overwhelming, so I use voice memos as a way to start listening to soundscapes, as opposed to trying to retreat from them.” As she was walking down Sixth Street, a woman approached Esther and started a spontaneous dialogue with her, which she found to be hilarious. When she and her team started bouncing down the singles, she grabbed the recording, made a strange and sentimental outro out of it, and wound up with her own version of Bright Eyes’ “The Big Picture.” To her, the whim was such a success that she’s now, albeit half-jokingly, contemplating making a 30-minute ambient mixtape next.
“That’s My DJ” is a tribute to Esther’s new “raver girl” era. She’s taking MDMA, dancing like a freak, and finally getting to “really see what’s going on” now that she’s off the hard stuff. “I did all kinds of stuff in my wild ass youth, but alcohol was a gauzy haze that made it harder to remember how potent a moment is,” she says. “Or, maybe it made it harder for me to actually be in the moment that was happening.” You can tap into “That’s My DJ” and hear Esther doing better, because she wears her clarity well. And her good friend—a friend of Paste, her “Scars” duet partner, and one of the best songwriters with a pulse—Dean Johnson told her the same thing. “He was like, ‘Your songs just sound really content,’” Esther remembers. “And I was like, ‘Damn it! I gotta bring in some of the old, disgruntled Esther. There is something really fucking satisfied in that song.”
But the satisfaction didn’t come easy, nor did her ability to access it. As she was just starting to find truth and perspective in Santa Fe, Esther and her partner were in and out of the city’s hospital, supporting friends recovering from fluke injuries or grieving through sudden family deaths. The noise persisted for six months, as phone contacts’ locations kept showing up at a familiar, worrisome stop, forcing Esther to unlearn what she’d experienced living in New Orleans: knowing transient people but sometimes losing them, because they’d lost their support systems, had to get back to where they came from, or otherwise. “It was a learning curve for me, understanding how to be in community and what to do—which is, you go to the hospital and you bring food and that’s it,” she elaborates. “We were there a lot and, somehow, those hospital gatherings felt like we could access the joy and connection that we had been making on the dance floor months before. It just happens now, whenever we get together. It’s really beautiful.”
Esther Rose and Dean Johnson are going on tour together, getting cozy in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina in December. Catch those full dates, and listen to “That’s My DJ” and “Heather,” below.
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Esther Rose & Dean Johnson’s upcoming co-headline tour dates:
12/5 – Austin, TX @ 29th St. Ballroom
12/6 – Dallas, TX @ The Kessler Theater
12/7 – Houston, TX @ Heights Theater
12/9 – New Orleans, LA @ Chickie Wah Wah
12/10 – Birmingham, AL @ Woodlawn Theatre
12/11 – Atlanta, GA @ Center Stage Vinyl
12/12 – Durham, NC @ The Pinhook (early show)
12/13 – Asheville, NC @ AyurPrana Listening Room
12/14 – Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre
Esther Rose’s upcoming full band tour dates:
3/1 – San Francisco, CA @ Kilowatt (Noise Pop Festival)
3/3 – Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
3/4 – Bellingham, WA @ The Shakedown
3/5 – Portland, OR @ The Showdown
3/7 – Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst Atrium
3/8 – Los Angeles, CA @ Gold-Diggers
3/10 – San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar
3/11 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge
3/13 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
3/14 – Santa Fe, NM @ The Marigold Room
6/21 – Greenfield, MA @ Green River Festival
Watch Esther Rose’s Paste Session from 2023:
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