song: Saint Rose
artist: Julian Lage
album: Squint (2021)
writer: Julian Lage

electric guitar: Julian Lage
double bass: Jorge Roeder
(drums: Dave King)

This is a complete transcription of the original tune “Saint Rose”. This song is a double ode: As Julian Lage explained, “This is a song dedicated to the town I grew up in, Santa Rosa, California”. And, on Julian Lage’s Instragram (17th March 2021), he wrote: “This song is an ode to my favorite singer-songwriter songs”. This is a wonderfully groovy tune, which The New Yorker (7th June 2021) described as sounding like “Zen surf music”. Enjoy!

“ One of the pass I use to compose is really to shine a light on the cadence of how people that I admire speak. (…) When you have people coming at you through the screen, you want to respond, you want to interface with it. A lot of the music on this recording – I would say, honestly, 90% of it – was based on me … turning on videos of James Baldwin speaking, Angela Davis speaking, Nikki Giovanni, people who are mesmerising as writers, speakers, human beings, and have a message that is so profoundly important. And sitting there with the guitar, feeling, sincerely, so humbled by it, and saying, “How I could accompany this in an abstract way?”, (…) “I’m gonna play music that supports the temperament, and the temperament is loving, and it’s concerned, and it’s activated.” (…) So, a lot of the music started as sketches that were improvisations played to these films. Being kind of the nerd that I am about this stuff, I would then record all of that, take it, and just say, “I love from minute 3 to 6”… Even one of the songs on the record called Saint Rose,… that was all an improvised piece, and then I just refined it, slightly. ”
– Julian Lage (Blue Note Records interview, 11th June 2021)

Also, check out this wonderful clip where Julian Lage and Jorge Roeder explain the intention behind this composition: