In addition to his recording efforts, Rouse continued to play live music, touring with other artists such as David Gray, Aimee Mann, Sun Volt, and Golden Smog.
![josh rouse dressed up like nebraska josh rouse dressed up like nebraska](https://s1.ticketm.net/dam/a/19e/a931fbc5-6344-4c97-b781-96cd8100019e_1417971_CUSTOM.jpg)
I usually think about it afterward and try to make the process as true as possible." Gilbertson in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "I don't really think about it too much," he told Jon M. Rouse's second solo effort, the 2000 album Home, showcased his songwriting process, which involves little more than sitting down with his guitar and a tape recorder and simply letting the music flow. The work was somewhat experimental, with Rouse setting Wagner's lyrics to music, and singing them through a telephone. This led to their collaboration on an album, Chester, released in 1999.
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Not long after the release of Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Rouse made friends with Kurt Wagner, the leader of the country music band Lambchop. As he later remarked on the Rykodisc website, "As soon as I quit caring, a deal popped up." Most importantly, the album allowed Rouse to quit his day job as a hotel valet parking attendant and devote all his time to writing and playing music. The album's success surprised Rouse, who cared little for commercial achievement and only wanted to make the best music he could. Dressed Up Like Nebraska was released to critical acclaim in 1998. The home recordings impressed scouts at the Rykodisc label enough to give Rouse to a contract for an album for the label's Slow River imprint. Their work featured songs Rouse composed, accompanied by his guitar playing and easy-going vocals, drums, and Henry's cello. In the spirit of his high school band, the two began to record in Henry's home studio, just for the fun of playing music. The move paid off in Nashville, Rouse met David Henry, a recording engineer and cellist who had worked with such notables as the Cowboy Junkies and Vic Chesnutt. There's a really cool live-music scene, a lot of good bands and some really good songwriters." But those people (commercial country artists) don't play there. As he later told Sophie Best in of the Melbourne, Australia's Age, "Everyone outside of Nashville thinks of the industry of country music. He finally settled in the Nashville area in 1996 because it was a place he felt he could develop musically there were clubs in which he could perform and meet other musicians. Although the band played only in the basement of one of its member's houses, the experience gave Rouse a taste of what was to come.Īfter graduating from high school, Rouse went to Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee, but he soon moved on again, living for a time in Arizona, and then South Dakota. In high school he formed a punk rock band with some friends this is when Rouse began to write his own songs.
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Music was his passion from the beginning his uncle taught him how to play the guitar, and in junior high he played trombone and violin.
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Growing up, Rouse loved the music of the Smiths, the Cure, R.E.M., and similar 1980s bands he also enjoyed 1970s artists like Fleetwood Mac and Carole King. "It really shaped me as a person," he told Kieran Grand in the Toronto Sun."There's an openness to the sound that I think I got from moving to, say, a big city in California to a Wyoming town of five or six hundred." Moving around a lot as a kid influenced the direction Rouse's music would take when he reached adulthood. Searching for some stability, Rouse went to live with his father, a military man, when he was in his teens, moving first to Georgia, and then to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border.
![josh rouse dressed up like nebraska josh rouse dressed up like nebraska](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFAtkYwW4AE3kBZ.jpg)
![josh rouse dressed up like nebraska josh rouse dressed up like nebraska](http://img2-ak.lst.fm/i/u/7e6d0a6bfbb14b4a9694c9b74f15aabd.png)
Nevertheless, starting with his 1998 debut release, Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Rouse and his music have captured the imagination of audiences both in the United States and abroad.īorn in 1972 in Nebraska, Rouse grew up with his mother and stepfather, a construction worker who took jobs all over the American West, including points in California, Utah, and Wyoming, uprooting the family in the process. "I don't really hear any country in it at all," he told Lauren McMenemy in Australia's Advertiser. He considers his music not so much alternative country as straightforward singing and good old-fashioned songwriting. Josh Rouse is at the forefront of a movement some critics call "alternative country," a label that Rouse himself disputes. Addresses: Record company-Rykodisc, 2 Main St., Gloucester, MA 01930. Education: Attended Austin Peay University in Clarksville, TN.