LA-based songwriter Rosie Tucker returns this month with Sucker Supreme, a brand new album on Epitaph. Recorded between a long year of touring and a longer year of lockdown, the release represents a line between what is and what might be. A belief in the promise of what might come next. Not a happy record or a sad record, but a record in which such binaries are committed to the past.
Opening track ‘Barbara Ann’ is a perfect example of the Rosie Tucker style, to their uncanny ability to weave personal experiences into songs both playful and fierce. The track is best introduced by way of an anecdote, a memory from a visit to their maternal grandparents on a farm out in northeast Illinois. Tucker was given total freedom to explore the area, though not without some ground rules. Rules, it turned out, they could not help but break. “Once, in complete secrecy, I laid an open palm on the electric wire that ran around the property even though I’d been told a million times not to,” Tucker explain. “I desired the knowledge more than I feared my parents. The shock felt like falling to the ground from a great height. I didn’t cry and I didn’t tell a soul for many years.”
‘Barbara Ann’ traces this resolute spirit back not only through Tucker’s memories of Illinois but their maternal line too. For as the world changes, and with it the food on our plates, the method of survival has not. Hard graft and comfort, childhood safety and naked electrical lines. The enormous load shouldered by those who care for others, and their steadfast refusal to ever give up. It’s a song, Tucker explains, about the Midwest both now and then:
How corn and soy monoculture relate both to wider industrial food systems and to farmers trying to make a living. It’s about my grandmother, a working-class woman who spent every second working, not just the work of mucking the chicken house and raising children but of imbuing a hard life with sweetness for herself and her daughters, the work of reminding them that survival means laughing a lot and refusing to yield to the will of any man, be it boss or husband.
Check out the lyric video by Jason Link and Eli Rae, filmed by Tucker themselves and based on photography by Lucy Sandle.
Barbara Ann, don’t fuck around
With a Louisville Slugger under
Your side of the bed
No one’s gonna hurt you now
No one’s gonna hurt you
Sucker Supreme is out now via Epitaph and you can get it now from the Rosie Tucker Bandcamp page.