julie

“I like to hear people’s stories.”In the moonlit hours of a late summer night, upstairs in the corner room of an old Victorian farmhouse in New England, a radio is playing a country waltz that keeps time with the branches swaying just outside the window. By the light of the dial, you lay in bed trying to place the voice. Emmylou? Patsy Cline? You get up out of bed and turn up the volume to hear the DJ announce the artist’s name. At a moment like that, the right song sung by the right voice at the right time isn’t a lullaby to help you sleep. It’s a sound that stirs you awake and makes you remember someone you’ve been trying to forget. If there’s a soundtrack for a night like that, it’s the music of Julie Rosenthal. Like a lonesome ballad on late-night radio, Julie’s songs have a way of nestling into your memory when you’re wistful and missing someone you can’t reach anymore.
“The new record, Another Kind of Life, was co-produced by me and Austin Nevins, who is a fabulous Boston based musician and a joy to work with. He and I had were very in -sync in terms of our ideas for how we wanted the recorded to sound.”
While developing the material for her full-length debut, Julie poured her life and her experiences into the lyrics, many of which deal with complex relationships that she observes in her job as a social worker. “Bite Your Tongue,” for example, is about a little boy she worked with at a treatment program for children and adolescents.. “Lots of the kids I worked with were living with one parent, usually the mother, as the father had long since disappeared for all intents and purposes, since he was no longer involved in the child’s life,” explains Julie.
One of the consistent lyrical themes running throughout the record concerns going after something that may not be the best thing for you while not seeing that good things are more readily available if you take a minute to reflect. The title track of Another Kind of Life was inspired by a visit to Mohegan Sun, a casino back east. Julie explains that she “wanted to dig deeper into the minds of the folks who are constant fixtures there and capture the deeper meaning of what their motivations might be.”
Another Kind of Life was recorded in Somerville, MA (near Cambridge) in Austin Nevins’ home studio. “I chose a home studio for the initial recording partly to save money and partly because I just liked the idea of doing it in a more grassroots fashion.”
Like the record, Julie’s career has been growing with grassroots support from her original fans and friends back east. In September, she kicked off her tour in support of the new record at her old stomping grounds, Club Passim.