Rave on, Esther Rose

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.