LA singer/songwriter Rosy Nolan provides the primary take a look at her debut album ‘Primary Attraction’ with the storm-soaked, fiddle-driven single “Rising Up” – a burst of gothic nation charged with the urgency of political resistance.
Stream: “Rising Up” – Rosy Nolan
The rain comes onerous and quick, pooling within the streets and flooding the sky with its heavy grey haze.
You may nearly really feel the damp air clinging to your pores and skin, scent the sharpness of moist asphalt and redwood bark. In that form of climate, all the pieces slows down – apart from the ideas racing in your head. Rosy Nolan’s “Rising Up” channels that temper and that movement: A storm within the thoughts and the guts, the place political unrest and private reckoning churn collectively. It’s gothic nation at its best – a mixture of previous world and new, bluegrass and blues, with searing fiddle and mandolin dueling within the downpour, and Nolan’s voice chopping by the fray like a sign fireplace at nighttime.
The hooks are lacking from beneath the bar
The porcelain mug is cracked
My fingertips are sticky from breakfast
This shirt barely covers my again
I’m sitting up actual excessive on a barstool
Simply ready for somebody to name
Nick Cave bleeds out
by the ceiling audio system
Then drips down the cafe partitions
Atwood Journal is proud to be premiering “Rising Up,” Rosy Nolan’s first launch of 2025 and the lead single off her forthcoming debut album Primary Attraction (independently out October 17). Steeped in Americana roots, Western swing, honky tonk, and classic nation, Primary Attraction pays homage to the good American data of the Twenties–Nineteen Forties whereas baring Nolan’s personal coronary heart and historical past. “Rising Up” is among the file’s most politically charged tracks – written throughout the 2016 presidential election, but made newly pressing within the years since – pairing imagery of floodwaters, destruction, and Northern California’s winding coastal roads with the roaring fireplace of Nolan’s supply.
This tune is a pressure of nature in each sense: The fiddle work sears and the guitars pulse with urgency, with every upstroke hotter and heavier than the final. Above that rising tide, Nolan’s voice soars – clear, aching, charged with uncooked feeling, heartache, and defiance. Mild vocal harmonies within the refrain add further carry to an already hard-hitting hook, a rallying cry wrapped in melody:
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down each barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy, to destroy
It’s a vivid picture of overwhelm and erasure, the form of scene the place nature’s pressure mirrors the burden of social and political upheaval. Every line swells just like the waters she’s singing about, the melody lifting even because the phrases paint an image of collapse. By the point she repeats “to destroy,” it’s much less a cry of defeat than a declaration that, even stripped naked, she’s nonetheless right here – nonetheless singing.
That struggle for voice and visibility is rooted in place for Nolan, who traces “Rising Up” again to the winding roads and rain-soaked landscapes of her previous Northern California dwelling.
“I used to be considering loads about Mendocino County after I wrote this tune,” Nolan tells Atwood Journal. “How nobody in LA appeared to know tips on how to drive within the rain. I didn’t notice it was a NorCal superpower till I moved down right here. I spent a variety of time weaving up and down Freeway 1 after I was up north, hugging these turns as I pressed on the gasoline, flirting with the damaged yellow line. Dappled mild spilling by the redwood cover like some holy revelation. Cigarette in hand, hassle in thoughts, and me chasing the following mile marker on my approach to feeling superb.”
It’s a poetic snapshot that captures each the tune’s cinematic scope and its intimate core: The highway as a spot of meditation, escape, and reckoning. That drive turns into a metaphor for surviving turbulence – private, political, environmental – with grit and beauty.
I’m ignoring the paper on the counter
Can’t bear the information today
Shaking my head wherever I am going
At this nation in disarray
These Angelenos can’t deal with the rain
They sluggish to a crawl down the freeway
I’m from up north the place clouds muddle the sky
On dangerous roads we quicken our drive
Written within the tense days main as much as the 2016 election, “Rising Up” was born from a deep unease. Nolan remembers sitting in a Los Angeles café throughout a torrential rainstorm, listening to Nick Cave bleed by the audio system prefer it was dripping down the partitions. “It was clear Trump was going to win,” she says. “I used to be donating cash, telephone banking, going to protests and rallies. I used to be actually caught up in all of it.” The world was hit by a lot rain that the Los Angeles River threatened to flood; properties have been being sandbagged. “I felt overwhelmed by this deluge – each the rainfall and the political adversity – and silenced by the storm and the tense political local weather,” she remembers.
That sense of urgency surges by “Rising Up” from the primary measure to the final. It’s there in the way in which Julian McClannahan’s fiddle and Billy Lupton’s mandolin spar and entwine, within the regular gallop of the rhythm part, and within the fringe of Nolan’s voice when she sings, “The water is rising up and drowning the sound of my voice. It breaks down each barricade, leaves nothing left to destroy.”
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down ever barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy
Rosy Nolan has lengthy used her voice to struggle for girls’s rights, to foyer payments with the ACLU, and to protest injustice in her neighborhood.
On “Rising Up,” that activism intertwines together with her artistry. The result’s a tune that refuses to be quiet – a reminder that even within the heaviest rain, we will nonetheless converse, nonetheless stand, nonetheless push ahead.
With Primary Attraction due in October, “Rising Up” units a robust tone for what’s to return: An album of resilience and reckoning, pleasure and longing, all carried by a voice that may be tender as a candle’s flicker or fierce because the wind earlier than a storm.
Stream “Rising Up” completely on Atwood Journal, and let this one transfer by you just like the climate – sudden, unstoppable, and alive.
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down ever barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy, to destroy
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Stream: “Rising Up” – Rosy Nolan
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