Dreaming of Roses
Dreaming of Roses had more weight behind it than the first album, in all spheres. Just like Ruby & Rose, though, all songs in it connect in some way or another. You could even make them into a story if you wanted to.
This time, most of the songs were fresh written with this album in mind, with a few exceptions. Lilac and Lavender was written in late 2021 or early 2022. The very first demos for Everything is Rain and With Love, Death date back to 2020, though they were ideas I’d been playing around with since the year before. Memories Die is also from sometime in 2019. All of these songs had been considered for Ruby & Rose but ended up not making the cut because they either didn’t match or would have been too complicated to record back then. None were “discarded” and then worked on later, I was just saving them for a better moment, as I do many of my older songs I still believe in.
Recording and producing this album took seven months, as opposed to the Magic Spell sessions, which took three. It was an extremely intense and tiring process, which I would not have been able to finish without the help of my longtime collaborator and friend, Gustavo Albuquerque. We had been in a band together before, and I was thrilled to be able to count on his creative and elevating bass playing and admirable work ethic for this particular musical project. He played synthesiser and piano for a couple of tracks, helped me produce it, and also mixed and mastered all the songs. My dearest Ana Ledesma, a wonderful voice and even more wonderful human being, recorded backing vocals for Lilac and a couple of voice lines for the intro on Genuine.
Those were not the only people who were important in shaping the music contained within this album. The first live lineup of Ruby & Rose’s accompanying band had Edgard Teixeira and Chiva Lopes Flores, the latter of whom was a key player in rehearsing both Ruby & Rose’s first live performance and some of the Dreaming of Roses songs. I also thank João Paulo from Estúdio Orfeu, in Brasília, in whose studio some of the guitars for the album were recorded with a lot of help from him. And all the way across the globe, I couldn’t have reached the technique and confidence to sing on this album the way I wanted to without the lessons I’ve learned from Sophie Amelkin and Chelsea Helm.
Like I wrote when I announced this album, this musical project might have begun as an individual endeavour, and this essence is never to be lost at any point, but it is in the strength of the group that magic is allowed to happen.
I am very proud of this album, and believe it to be the beginning of something beautiful.
The art was once more provided by Kiley Fediuk, whose colourful retro style is a match made in heaven for Ruby & Rose. Once more, there are a few allusions to the songs within the album on the strip right under the smart new logo: lemons, for Lemon Fic Limerick, lavenders, for Lilac and Lavender, and a broken quill splattering ink everywhere, for Quillbreaker. Funnily enough, those are the last, the middle and the first song on the album, exactly. What a fun coincidence, or is it?
There are other hidden references, but those are a lot more subtle and me listing them straight up would rob you of the fun. Still, Kiley absolutely knocked it out of the park here. I am enamoured with the collage — those are actual scans of actual paper, which she cut out after writing on a real typewriter, the kind of retro chic thing that suits this album like a glove. I could not be any happier with how this turned out.
