Music To Rock Your Soul: The Gasoline Lollipops' Clay Rose Gears Up For A New Album Release

Clay Rose is the frontman for Gasoline Lollipops, a band whose sounds take in Blues, Jazz, Folk, Rockabilly, and the more general catch-all Americana, and whose ideas are firmly concerned with the social, economic, and political questions which tune into the humanity of humankind. Whether it's on the small-scale of the suffering and hope a single human soul finds, or on the large scale of shaking up our perspective on economic inequalities, the Gasoline Lollipops want to reach you where you are. That mission took them to Dockside Studio in Louisiana to record their latest album out in September, All the Misery Money Can Buy, in search of the Southern sound traditions that came out of places like Muscle Shoals.

Clay Rose appeared recently on our Tower Instagram Live show, which you can still check out here, and he also joined Tower's PULSE! for a pretty deep dive into the philosophies behind his life and work, and what we can expect from All the Misery Money Can Buy, off which the title single and the single, "Get Up!" have already been released.

Hannah Means-Shannon: Congratulations on the new album coming up in September.

Clay Rose: It’s a strange time for it, but in terms of the content, I think it’s a politically poignant album, so in that sense I think we couldn’t have picked a better time. As far as trying to make profit off the album? Probably not. But as the title suggests, “All the Misery Money Can Buy”, it would be contradictory to get rich off this album.

HMS: Well, you certainly will have peoples’ ears with a title like that. Presumably the ideas on the album far predate our current experience.

CR: That’s true, which is part of the reason why we are experiencing what we are experiencing. Because it’s been the credo for American society for quite a while. It’s not the ones that make the money that get to buy the misery, you see, it’s the rest of us, while the 1% gets rich.

HMS: Oh, I see. It’s purchased and handed down. That title has an interesting duality to it.

CR: I think it goes the other way, too. When I’m looking for shining examples of mental health and happiness, I don’t look to Forbes’ 400.

HMS: In that case, if we’ve been lucky, we’ve seen a few shining examples in our lives, and they are usually the people who worked very hard and didn’t loom large in the public mind at all.

CR: Yes, and who dedicated their merit to humanity, but I think those are really the exceptions to the rule.

HMS: Is it fair to say that this album taps into the idea of the American Dream and interrogates where it is right now?

CR: Yes, absolutely. It pulls the veil back to see who’s really standing behind the curtain. I can only speak from personal experience, but I’ve been in the music business pretty much my whole life and have been striving for this seemingly attainable goal. We all live in a society where they say, “Welcome to the land of the free, and you can be anything you want to be as long as you are willing to work hard enough.”

After experimenting with that for the last 20 years, I’ve got to say that’s bullshit. Talent and hard work do not necessarily equal success. They use that story to motivate us to work ourselves to death. The whole system is greased with all the blood of the people who have died trying.

HMS: Experience certainly can be contradictory to everything we’ve ever been told. We may not even achieve the goals of our parents’ generation.

CR: They’ve obliterated the middle class. Occasionally someone does break from the lower class, and boy is that the story that gets heralded. So we can all think, “Fuck, maybe I’m not working hard enough.”

HMS: You mention your background in the music industry, but I think your mother was in music as well?

CR: Yes, she was a songwriter who moved from Texas to Nashville after Willie Nelson recorded one of her songs. She co-wrote the song, “Last Thing I Needed, The First Thing This Morning”, with Gary P. Nunn. Gary P Nunn was the guy who wrote the theme song for Austin City Limits. This song hit number one on the Country charts, so she moved to Nashville, to, in her mind, be a star. Because that’s the other thing: we think success is something that we arrive at, whereas it’s a constantly moving target.

Very few people ever fully arrive to where they can relax, but she didn’t know that. She thought the rest would be downhill from there. It didn’t turn out that way. She worked at a hospital for 25 years, got laid off months before she was supposed to collect her 401K, then was offered her same job back at 15 dollars an hour. So she basically lives off Social Security, but she actually co-wrote the title track to this album.

HMS: I'm so sorry to hear what your mother went through. But that’s amazing that she worked on this album with you!

CR: She and I have been writing together a lot lately, and she and I are hoping to release a mother-son album soon.

HMS: That’s fabulous. I’m glad that she’s still writing, since if you can do it for personal reasons, that’s a victory.

CR: She’s pretty content with her life these days, living in the Ozark Mountains, and making art. She paints, and she sews, and she writes.

HMS: Very cool. What you were saying about this idea of success: we also buy into this idea that it’s conveyed on us from the outside. That someone is going to tell us that we’ve reached success.

CR: Absolutely. Our whole society is based on external validation. “Who am I in the eyes of society? And if they don’t know me, I must be nothing.” But turn on the top 40 radio and ask if you really want to be part of that club.

HMS: Did I see somewhere that you also make other types of art?

CR: No, but I have this other band called The Widow’s Bane, and it’s more like performance art. We all play men who have been killed by our wives, and then we are resurrected by the Devil, to play on his house ship called The Widow’s Bane. We play sea shanties and Irish drinking songs and the like, as 17^th century zombies.

HMS: That sounds absolutely amazing. That reminds me of what some Metal bands do in terms of narrative and costume but applied to Folk music.

CR: That’s a big reason why I started the band. I got really fascinated with sea shanties in college, realizing that they went all around the world, and were influenced by Asian, African, and South American music. I thought it would be really cool to have a band that could justify that many styles.

HMS: Is there an acting element, with lines between the songs?

CR: Oh, absolutely. My character is called Mortimer Leech, and he’s basically a 17^th century Donald Trump from London. He cares about nothing but money, and that’s basically why his wife murdered him. There’s a Colbert Report aspect there, where I get speak to the other side by satire, and the audience seems to really love it.

HMS: It sounds very cathartic for you, as well.

CR: Living in Boulder, Colorado, there’s a certain part of me that want to scream these things at these “hippies” since it’s easy to be liberal where there is no diversity at all. Everyone here is rich and white. I get really frustrated living here, so I get to be Mortimer Leach on stage, saying, “Why don’t we just kill all the poor?” and everyone nervously laughs.

HMS: How often do you get to perform in that role?

CR: I used to do it a lot more. I got sober 4 ½ years ago and I try to do it less because me and Mortimer have a dangerous relationship, historically. There was a time when that band was playing so much, and I was intoxicated so much, that the lines started to get really blurry. I’m trying to find my true self again. But we got commissioned by a company in Denver to write a Halloween Season ballet for them.

So I wrote one for them based on a song of ours, “Old Bayou” which takes place outside of New Orleans, with a lot of voodoo, and a shape-shifting alligator. It was a huge endeavor; it took me a year and a half to write it. They were hoping to do a reprise of that this Halloween, but I don’t know if it will happen with COVID.

Through that, they discovered Gasonline Lollipops, and that same ballet company hired Gaspops to write them a Valentine’s Day production, and that was put on last Valentine’s Day. That was a love story, but it was a Western. So, I’ve written two ballets now. I always wanted to write Rock Operas, but this has been close enough to scratch it off the bucket list.

HMS: That’s so great. That sort of thing feels like a cultural achievement, I’m sure, and though it’s an outside nod of achievement, that feels pretty justified in allowing it!

CR: Yes, just being recognized by a whole different society. We live in dingey Rock clubs, so to be recognized by high society is hugely validating.

HMS: And it’s such an old art form, too.

CR: What’s so cool about it, too, is that they are being rebels, by inviting us onto their stage and risking all that. So in that, they are Punk Rock. They are the Punk Rockers of ballet, so I felt in comfortable company with them.

HMS: NICE. What is the origin story for Gaspops, and how did it all come together for you?

CR: That all started with the name, and it’s weird how many things in this band start with the name and build backwards, like our last album Soul Mine. Right after I got sober, I started writing that album, and asked “How do I take this dark, shameful, chapter of my life and turn it into something of value?” The image of hands squeezing coal into a diamond on the album cover led to the title song.

The same thing happened with All the Misery Money Can Buy, when I thought of that line, I thought, “That’s good enough for an album title.” This is the first time I’ve written with anyone else, and my mom started sending me texts, and I started sharing them with the band. I started talking about the idea, and the concepts of the album, that I wanted it to be a dialog with the working class, and ideally, a dialog that crossed the blue-red line.

HMS: Oh, yes, you have mentioned that you had a lot of Southern audience members who like your sound, but don’t necessarily get your lyrics, but you wanted to clarify that you’re all together in this respect.

CR: Exactly, and that unity, is what I wanted to emphasize. Because otherwise, that lack of unity is the Achilles’ heel of the working class, not realizing that we all have the same plight and the same master. I wanted to inspire a late 60s, early 70s Muscle Shoals sound, since I feel like that’s a sweet spot of music history and this beautiful marriage between Soul Music, largely Black, and Southern Rock, like The Allman Brothers. I feel like the music of that time was so unifying, so it was really important to me that we record in a Southern studio. We finally settled on Dockside Studio in Louisiana.

HMS: Awesome! I’ve spoken to several musicians who recorded there recently.

CR: It is heaven, and many of our heroes have recorded there. For sound, my guitar player, Don Amory, is a huge music buff, and he helped me write some of the music for it, since he understood the Muscle Shoals stuff better than I did. Then it gradually turned into the whole band recording, and my mom got involved. One of my oldest friends from childhood, Max Davey, also wrote some music and lyrics. The sound is definitely very different from anything that we’ve ever done.

Our keyboardist, Scott Coulter, who is amazing, graduated from Jazz school, and our Bass player, Brad Morse, graduated from Music School in Classical, and our drummer graduated from Music School in Jazz.

HMS: You’ve got some serious musical chops there! I did notice that, looking around online. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a highly educated line-up.

CR: Yes, everyone in the band has a college degree in Music except me. I don’t know shit. My Dad was a truck driver and a hobo, and he had an old beater acoustic guitar, which he showed me three chords on when I was 15. I followed closely in his footsteps, jamming with street musicians.

HMS: What gave you the confidence to become a songwriter rather than a performer of existing music?

CR: It was that the music that I liked listening to was really hard core in songwriting craft. Leonard Cohen has always been my number one teacher, Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, Tracy Chapman, all of them. I don’t think I ever had the confidence to write a song, but I didn’t know any better. I would listen to these amazing songwriters and they would inspire these ideas. I didn’t know you could describe an emotion as a landscape, as a geographical place, but I heard Leonard Cohen do that. These were already feelings that lived in me, but he called them snow, and ivy, and moonlight. It was like a dreamscape which he would describe it with things, with nouns.

HMS: Thank you so much for saying that because occasionally I’ve brought up the use of places in Folk music to convey emotions, and sometimes people have had a reaction like it didn’t quite make sense to them. I thought it was one of the more obvious things about Folk music.

CR: That’s why I really don’t like song school. They come at from such a two-dimensional place. That’s just not how I see a song. I see it as ethereal, where a physical place can be an emotion, and for me that’s more effective than just talking about emotions.

HMS: Maybe I’ve just been lucky that my family are from the Smoky Mountains and I’ve had those ideas around me, the idea that when you sing about a place, you are singing about feelings. If I had been from somewhere else, maybe I wouldn’t have come across that.

CR: I don’t think it’s about where you’re from, I feel like it’s almost like a gene. Tom Waits has that. Tom Waits never writes about feelings, but that’s all he’s writing about, when he’s writing about textures, and time of day.

HMS: I wanted to ask you about some of the imagery on Soul Mine and the new album. You do use some traditional images and ideas to convey mood: the Devil, Heaven, Hell, those kinds of things. Are they religious or more folklore-based, as a kind of American folklore that people will respond to? Now that I know that you write drama, I can totally see that, though…

CR: It comes pretty naturally. I was never raised in Christianity, but my dad was a Tibetan Buddhist, and once you study Buddhism, there are so many parallels to Catholicism. Instead of Hell, they said “bad karma”. Instead of original sin, it’s karma that you need to cleanse. The inherent guilt that you’re born with is similar, with an unattainable Heaven/Enlightenment. It’s understood that you’re in this for thousands of lifetimes before you can consider freedom.

Then, growing up in the South with every girl I ever dated making me go to Church, and my struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, the question was, “Well, Fuck, if this isn’t bad karma, what is it? Because I don’t want to be doing this, and I can’t stop. I’m clearly hurting everyone that I love.” That’s where I pick up that language of evil and the Devil, because it’s vocabulary everyone can relate to. It’s the most readily available language, even if it wasn’t the language I would use to myself.

[Recording at Dockside Studio]

HMS: I had noticed that it wasn’t very specific theology, and more of a broad sweep, and that makes sense to dramatize things.

CR: Yes, and to talk about something that I see as the human condition. In my own mind, I’d use something more scientific, like animal brain vs. consciousness, or ego vs. spirit. That we have a higher self, and a lower, base self, which I hope is something we’re evolving from, but it’s still here. The big struggle is between who we were and who we are becoming. But I don’t think it’s thousands of lifetimes away, I really don’t. I think it’s right here, right now, and it comes with awareness and choice.

HMS: I picked up a little bit of that sense of possible hope for development in the title song for Soul Mine. That there is a development process that might be happening.

CR: Yes, a development that also requires the darkness and suffering for the development to happen. It’s the impetus for change. We would never change if we were comfortable.

HMS: The word “uncomfortable” has been coming up a lot talking with musicians about the time we’re going through. It sounds like there might be some possible good to come out of it.

CR: I think that’s the greatest blessing to come out of all of this, how uncomfortable everyone is.

HMS: I also wanted to mention that you seem to have tried out every kind of digital platform to reach audiences lately, and you actually did a drive-in already?

CR: Yes, we did a drive-in in Fort Collins, and that may be how we release each album. People can come in their cars, and stand outside their cars with lawn chairs, or dance around. The music is coming through their stereo. Everyone has their own volume control. The drive-in backs up against the neighborhood, so it’s a totally silent stage. It’s a crazy experience. The benefit is that the screen behind us acts as a megatron and there’s a film crew there filming us, projecting it in real time.

HMS: That’s interesting, since previously only big stadium concerts got that kind of technology. So, while performing, all your music is going into a digital format, almost like being in the studio, and there’s no projection of music outward?

CR: Right, and there are no stage monitors. It’s all in-ear monitors. There are not even any amps on stage. We have amp simulators.

HMS: That’s so wild! What prevented that from being alien to you? Was that like being in a studio?

CR: It absolutely felt alien. It was horrible! But I’m glad we did it as a trial run before our album release. [Laughs] The band talked about this recently, and decided that when it comes down to it, this concert is not for us, it’s for our fans. It’s not about us having great sound up there, or mentally masturbating on stage. So we’ll just bite the bullet and do this.

HMS: That’s admirable. Are video or audio from that captured for the band to keep and use?

CR: Yes, we can keep the video from it. I don’t know that we’d want to keep the audio. Everyone who was there said the sound was really great coming out of the stereo, but we’re audiophiles, so I doubt we’d want to keep that sound.

HMS: Our Tower Records motto is “No Music, No Life” and “Know Music, Know Life”. Which of those seems to apply to your life?

CR: I would go with the positive version of that, and like we were talking about Leonard Cohen, how to describe the indescribable. There are all these feelings that humans have, probably from the time of birth, and I think, at least for me, the first time I had those feelings reflected back to me, was through listening to music.

The first song I remember hearing was Rodney Crowell, played by my Aunt in her house in Arkansas, called “Shame on the Moon”. I was two years old, and I remember crawling over to the stereo, putting my head on the speaker, and closing my eyes. And feeling so held, so engulfed, and as we were saying earlier, validated. It rocked my soul. That was the first time that I knew music, and that was the first time that I knew music knew me.

HMS: Thank you. That is such a powerful story.