Search - Rosie Flores :: Single Rose

A very personal portrait of an alt-country stalwart

Joe Sixpack -- Slipcue.com | ...in Middle America | 10/26/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Fans will be delighted by this stripped-down live set which features Rosie at her most buoyant and upbeat...She doesn't have the most perfect voice, or always stay in tune, but she sure knows how to have fun and the gal sings and writes a lot of great songs, including several here that she's never recorded before. She starts out with an off-the-cuff recollection of when she broke into the maverick LA alt-country scene of the 1980s ("Palamino Days") and delves even deeper into her past with a particularly nice version of "Bandera Highway," which she dedicates to her father; in between in a brace of other fine songs and lively interaction between Flores and her audience. It's a really nice portrait of one of indiebilly's stalwart performers at her most charming. Worth checking out!"

Intensely intimate and nostalgic solo live outing

hyperbolium | Earth, USA | 10/03/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Flores' second live outing is a world apart from 1999's honky-tonk band effort, "Dance Hall Dreams." This time out she's solo, with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a catalog of intimate, often nostalgic songs, between her and an adoring Nashville audience. Flores' warm introductions and her interaction with the crowd is born more of the folk-troubadour tradition (e.g., Loudon Wainwright III's recent "So Damn Happy") than the electric rockabilly of her earlier albums.



The opening pair, "Palamino Days" and "Mornin' Light," sets the disc's personal tone with a newly-penned autobiographies of Flores' musical youth and the road life it fostered. The title track gives Flores a torch to croon, and lynch-pins of her catalog, like "Bandera Highway," adapt beautifully to the solo treatment. Her sassy rock roots are here too, cast as folk blues on the originals "'59 Tweedle Dee" and "Little Bit More," and she closes with fiery finger-picking of Albert Lee's "Country Boy (Girl)."



Tammy Rogers guests on fiddle and James Intveld harmonizes on the co-written "Midnight to Moonlight." Add in a half-dozen new songs and you have a uniquely revealing view into Flores' music, both yesterday and today."