|
 It’s
not a bad time to be Missy Roback.
The disc has been doing well “from all
angles,” Roback, 40, says over the line
from the San Francisco home she shares with
her husband of ten years, the former Rain Parade
bassist and Viva Saturn frontman Steven Roback
(who also contributed guitars and produced the
record).
“I’ve been doing best in the Midwest
and the southern seaboard,” she says with
a bemused laugh. On the phone, Roback’s
voice has the same whispery softness and carefully
considered enunciation that makes her 11-song
disc the reassuring and meditative collection
of folk-pop that it is.
She gropes around for a while for an answer
to why her record seems to have resonated most
with the people of the plains and denizens of
the Bible Belt. Then she gets it: Because of
their relative isolation from the rest of the
nation, she speculates, listeners from the great
middle of the country just might not be as jaded
as their more world-weary compatriots of the
right and left coasts.
“I think people (there) are more appreciative
of music when it comes through town,”
she said. “Out here (in San Francisco),
you have an embarrassment of riches.”
Whatever it is, she’ll take it.
Released late last year on Roback’s own
Hear Kitty label, Just Like Breathing traces
its genesis to 1998 when Steven Roback began
encouraging his wife — who had hitherto
been content to harmonize while her husband
played the guitar — to begin writing songs
of her own.
“I’d been singing all my life,”
she recalled. “It had always been my fantasy
to make a record. But I’ve always been
very shy about my voice.” After playing
for a while in a cover band and then quitting
because “I wasn’t into it,”
Roback threw herself into her music. Then, in
1999, proving that fate has a backhanded way
of telling you what you need to know, she received
the confirmation that she was headed in the
right direction.
“I was the editor of MacWeek, and we
went out of business,” she said. “I’d
always wanted to lose my job. I took it as a
sign to reevaluate what I was doing with my
life. I cranked out a lot of songs.”
For the unfamiliar, the tunes that make up
the disc recall Aimee Mann’s better moments,
and they share Mann’s literate eye for
detail — perhaps only natural since Roback
remains a writer by trade.
That literary bent is nowhere more apparent
than on “New Britain,” a bittersweet
ode to Roback’s hometown in Connecticut
(In the interests of full disclosure, your author
is also a Nutmeg State native and was amused
to find that he and Roback often shared the
same stomping grounds.).
Accompanied by gentle guitar and organ, Roback
confirms what most of us already know: No matter
how far you travel, you never really shake off
where you’ve come from.
“You can physically leave a place, but
you never really leave,” she said. “When
you’re growing up, you’re not really
thrilled with your hometown. It’s not
until afterward that you start to appreciate
it … It’s like leaving your mother
or something. It’s really intense."
But, she adds with the voice of experience,
“I might be romanticizing it too. I don’t
think I could ever live there full-time again.”
When she was asked to describe the writing
process for the record, Roback admitted to a
method that some might unorthodox. “I
haven’t had a radio in my car since 1995,
and I realized that I didn’t miss it,”
she said. “I would write in the car, and
sing. Every morning, I go into work, and go
into the ladies room and sing the line.”
Recording the album, she said, was an education.
But it was not totally unfamiliar territory.
She had
already seen her husband through the Viva Saturn
discs. “I’ve lived through the making
of a couple of his records. It just takes over
your life,” she said. “There’s
nothing like doing it yourself. I would never
have though that there was so much to recording
a vocal. It was such a valued experience.”
Adult experiences shoot through the record,
and Roback wondered aloud where music for those
of her generation, the ones who grew up with
The Rain Parade and the first wave of American
college radio, fits into the contemporary pop
marketplace. “If those people are making
it, no one knows how to market it,” she
said. The music industry is “so focused
on youth, they wouldn’t know what to do
with good music for adults if it bit them on
the ass.”
Future plans to promote the record include
a possible tour. “I really want to tour,”
Roback said. “I’m a free-lancer,
so I have the schedule. It just comes down to
how much time I can spend. A couple of weeks
I can do. A couple of months, probably not.”
In the meantime, Roback remains convinced that
she has begun this chapter of her life at the
right time, that the experience of age enabled
her to make a better record. “I’m
probably writing better,” she said. “If
I were 25, it would be easier to go on the road
for three months and live in a van … It
takes such a belief in yourself.”
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