BABY ROSE and BADBADNOTGOOD – Slow Burn – 12” EP – Clear Smoke Vinyl

12” EP – Limited Edition Clear Smoke Vinyl.

Less than a year after her album Through and Through, Baby Rose returns with Slow Burn, a collection of songs that explode her sonic palette from progressive R&B into a rawer, richer and more sprawling lens of American music. Here, Rose asserts herself as not only a once-in-tenlifetimes vocalist, but as a formidable songwriter connecting the dots where Muscle Shoals meets psych, psych meets jazz, jazz meets Americana, and the right players bring it all together. Produced by BADBADNOTGOOD, Rose and the band found an instant but seemingly endless well of inspiration; what started as an introduction became a day, became a song, became a night, became Slow Burn.

Baby Rose was already a powerful position player she can share the stage with Robert Glasper without breaking a sweat, or close an epic film like Creed III, for which she performed the closing credit song, with steely confidence. When Rose first met with BADBADNOTGOOD the idea was to say hello, get acquainted, see what a collaboration could, over time, potentially become. But the connection was instant, and together they put down lead single One Last Dance in just that first meeting. It was Roses first freestyle vocal, and it snapped crucial pieces of her vision into focus.

Ive known deep down there were new spaces and sounds that I could rise to, Rose explains. Ive always been into different sounds that bring in those rawer textures. And so while the speed of their collaboration thrilled and surprised Rose, the potential and the end results did not. We moved quickly, she says, and it really was a faucet. Once we got One Last Dance, it became clear everything was going to flow.

The songs on Slow Burn were inspired in part by Roses experiences driving between her familys home bases: the noise and chaos of DC and the quiet, Carolina countryside. Rose would crank music and let her mind drift, making room for the internal monologues and imagined dialogues you might not otherwise dare to hear. Theres a dreaminess in those moments, and they smolder on Slow Burn: memories lose their realities, feelings replace happenings. Slow Burns title track, for example, sets soft, ambling drums against Roses lyrical repetitions, as she traces those recollectionssome lives, some felt with patient, insistent desire.

The standout One Last Dance arrives disguised as a love song, but is actually an ode to a lost friendship, and an imagined dream of one more day like the old days. Reality blurs with feeling again, vocals layer into lullaby, and BADBADNOTGOODs bassist Chester Hansen brings that dreamlike quality to a sneaky, cautious but loving undertone. In fact most of the songs on Slow Burn have that stealthy, shadowed feel, like theyre arriving on tiptoe: intimate but a little dangerous, tender but a little mysterious.

As complete and compelling a work as this is, Slow Burn points to a bigger, higher ascent in Baby Roses future. I feel boundless, says Rose. Its one thing carrying the weight of the emotion Im going to bring as a vocalist and lyricist, but now I feel like Im the head on a body with all these players and artists and other limbs. Im in love with that process. When you have the right energy and the right synergy, she says, all thats left is to trust yourself.

Tracklist:

SIDE A:
1. On My Mind
2. Slow Burn
3. Caroline feat. Mereba

SIDE B:
4. Weekness
5. Its Alright
6. One Last Dance