Sell my truck, sell my soul
Hell, I’ll bleed if you need me to
I’ll be your getaway driver, your lover, your fighter
You can bet on me being here
being there for you
Some things sound like your favorite pair of 501s, feel like the sun in the trees or the wind in your hair. You don’t even think about them, you just close your eyes and sink down into the cozy goodness. Rod + Rose is just like that. Earthy, ethereal, grounded, girly, manly.
Take a rock & roll princess, who earned her first record deal at 15 and has had songs cut by Faith Hill, Lady A and a #1 for Eric Paslay, as well as Jon Bon Jovi raving about her, “She's an old soul in the voice of a beautiful young lady. She speaks of a life lived.” Add a certified country star/songwriter with more than a fistful of #1s, including the genre-defining “If You’re Going Through Hell,” “Watching You,” “These Are My People,” “Take A Backroad” and “Cleaning This Gun.”
Dash of love, twist of life, stir a bit – and you emerge with a reluctant songwriter/back-up singer wrapped like honeysuckle around a split rail strong force of blue-collar steadfastness. Unlikely, and yet, it’s in the strange combinations – two completely different solo artists still actively pursuing their solo careers, who make vastly different music for audiences that might not overlap – where the best magic happens.
Whether the dobro burning across a finger-picked guitar on “Figure Out You,” the whispery minimalism that breaks to staccato “Anyway,” or the back-and-forth he sings/she sings backroads stroll of “Being Here, Being There,” Rod + Rose is an introduction to one of those love stories that plays like a Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey movie. But it’s also the merging of two artistic forces – one a little bit country, the other a little rock & roll – where the differences make the whole even more interesting.
Laughing, Rose Falcon admits she asked Rodney Atkins for a picture to make some other guy jealous. “It was the Throwdown Tour,” she explains. “And he was on the back of a trailer, getting his motorcycle out of it. I walked up with my friend Carly, and asked...”
“She had the prettiest smile,” Atkins remembers. “So, of course I said ‘Yes.’ Then I didn’t really see her around the tour for a few weeks, so I couldn’t talk to her, or get to know her.”
End of the tour, everyone was walking to the final party, but someone at the bar decided to charge a cover. Atkins wasn’t having it; Falcon decided to walk back to the bus compound with him. Atkins marvels, “And we finally got to talk...”
“And we talked about books,” Falcon interjects.
“And it was awesome,” Atkins continues. “She left a note for me, with a Joyce Meyer book, with her phone number. I had her number. I called her immediately.”
The almost teen pop idol and as she says of Atkins’ country – “ they’re not just #1s, they’re massive #1s” – stardom couldn’t have come from further apart. Both laugh about Atkins going on tour to Denmark almost immediately. He admits, “All I did was look for places with WiFi, so I could call her.”
Falcon, who was coming off a bad break-up, knew, but was hesitant. She’d moved home to sort out her heart. Atkins, who’d had his own issues with love, had never been so sure in his life. When he went to the Falcons’ home the first time, he didn’t wear a ball cap, came in a plain white T – and was overwhelmed by the hurricane of loud Italian family love, food and question.
“Her Dad, has such humility that you’d never know what he’s done,” Atkins says. “He keeps all his plaques and awards in one small room. It’s crazy to realize he has written songs for legends like Bon Jovi, Cher, and Stevie Nicks.”
Trying to impress the dark-haired gypsy spirit – “ Honestly, I’d never seen anything like her, and I just wanted to know more” – he would invite her to write, invite her to sing on the Opry, in the studio. Falcon grimaces, “I kept telling him, I don’t want anything from you. Please, don’t.”
Still, a trip to New York City to do a tv show solidified a way the pair could share music. If Falcon had decided to eschew the spotlight and focus on writing, singing with Atkins allowed them to be together. “Once I met her, I suddenly wanted to be where she was,” he says. “No matter what I have or don’t have, it doesn’t matter. If she’s there, that’s all I want. She does that to me.” (The pair wed in 2013.)
Falcon wasn’t so sure. She admits, “I was kind of done (with being a performer). I figured, ‘I’m gonna write my songs, raise my kids, support my husband.’ If that meant going on the road with him, that was fine, because music hurt so much.”
With patience, Atkins kept dropping crumbs, pulling her into writing songs, having her sing with him. There was never a masterplan; but music people aren’t like the rest of us. Love is part of their music, music becomes part of their love.
Different writing styles, musical roots somehow led to Rod + Rose, an EP that shows how much opposites can complement and inspire the other. Atkins shakes his head, “I’m the ground, the earth and dirt and Rose is the weather, the sunsets and the blue skies and the rain that makes everything grow…always changing and always interesting.”
“We’re very different in how we write, too,” Falcon continues. “Rodney is a very slow, very thoughtful writer. I’m a more impulsive, go with your heart writer. I’m not the kind of writer who thinks about every small thing.”
It’s not without its challenges, but it’s also given the pair new ways of approaching their craft. For Atkins, with the big-time country career, the pressure wasn’t about his past achievements. As he explains, “Every song I wrote with Rose had to be the most incredible song of all time. Finally she said, ‘Let’s just finish something, even if it’s not great’.”
Trouble was the songs were pretty great. “Fine By Me,” with its giddy upbeat and table saw guitar, measures the urgency of love as being far more intoxicating than anywhere they might be, while “Figure Out You” explores the mystery and wonder of what real love contains. “Being Here, Being There” suggests that no matter how bad, each has the other’s back.
“I think I pull things out of him,” Falcon says.
“And I keep her moving down the field.” Atkins chimes in.
But really what the pair have done is created a collection of songs that show a real-life couple figuring out what love means in a world that can undermine and dismantle one’s faith in happily ever after. With Falcon having lost her mother growing up and Atkins being moved from adopted family to adopted family, both understood that primary hurt – and connected in a way that transcended the sort of pain that is so difficult to transform.
“Rose is tougher than life and kinder than love,” Atkins offers. “She makes me feel worthwhile, because even though I’d had accolades and success, I didn’t really know what love was... She’s the driving force and the difference that shows abundance isn’t having stuff, but having this kind of love”
“He redeemed me in so many ways,” Falcon continues. “He makes me feel protected, love, respected and lifted up. We’re not really show biz, check me out kind of people. We love music more than being in front of an audience. To me, love is knowing everything there is to know about someone, forgiving them and loving them just as they are.
“I was so tormented by (love) in the past. Even though short relationships provide good songs, I knew there was more to it. When I met Rodney, everything just sort of fell into place.”
“Put Me Back Together,” co-written by critically-acclaimed singer/songwriter Caitlyn Smith, speaks to that reality. Beyond the healing truth of the lyric, the song’s almost weightless small town sense of being frozen in time sets the stage for the truth of unlikely partners often being the ones who change everything.
“Rose came to me with that song quite a while ago,” Atkins says. “I just loved it. It’s different but feels so personal…it’s the rare kind of song that you hear it and think ‘I don’t know this song, but it sure knows me’.”
“When I hear something indie, the kind of song I wish I had written or would love to sing, I often send it to Rodney thinking it may be a possibility for his next record” Falcon explains. “It turns out it was really for us, but I didn’t know that then.” Atkins adds, “It was so easy to sing. That song is us, and it’s the epitome of what love is.”