Rosie Cima & What She Dreamed is a band rooted in spontaneity. Coming together as part of a Flashband collaboration in Washington D.C., an initiative that connects musicians to work on and perform new material at one-off showcases, the outfit formed a connection that would eventually see Cima themselves move across the country from San Francisco to pursue the project. Together with Steve Burch (bass), Mashaal Ahmed (drums) and Barrett Browne (guitar), Rosie Cima set to working on their distinctively scrappy style, melding folk, punk and art rock to support a heartfelt and often poetic lyricism.
This month sees the release of Realm of the Warring Gods, the band’s debut EP to be released on This Could Go Boom! Illustrating the variety and depth of Rosie Cima’s influences, the title is derived from Buddhist cosmology, which they apply to contemporary society as a means to probe deeper into the metaphorical and spiritual lines below the surface. “Just before moving, I read a book that said the division between earth and the realm of the hungry ghosts—where desire and cravings and addiction go wild—is probably thinnest in places like Las Vegas,” Cima says, “and the realm of the warring gods—where egos clash and the will to power reigns supreme—is of course Washington, D.C.”
Rosie Cima supports these weighty themes with personal touches and emotional intimacy, using a poet’s eye for image and detail in order to evoke a sense of heart. So while pictures of warring gods conjure a sense of grandiosity, the album is in fact the opposite. A collection of songs rooted in the human experience, albeit one shaped by the larger outside forces of power.
Today we’re delighted to share ‘Waxwing’, the latest single from the record, and one of its most personal. “In March of 2019, a friend of mine was hit while riding her bicycle and died,” Cima explains. “It was the first time losing someone that close to me.” The song faces this loss with disarming honesty, from simple statements about the funeral (“the email said bright colours, I wore yellow / I hoped I wouldn’t be the only one”) to straightforward admissions of pain (“it wasn’t supposed to work out this way”), and circles around a line from Nabokov’s Pale Fire. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.”
But across its seven minute length, the song pushes beyond grief itself, digging into the love that underpins it. This is brought to life by both the swelling sound and Cima’s impassioned vocals, ebbing and flowing into a fiercely heartfelt climax. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,” is the opening line of a poem by the fictional John Shade, a sentence is completed in the following line. “By the false azure in the windowpane.” A bird killed, that is, by the illusion of sky and open space. But with ‘Waxwing’, Rosie Cima & What She Dreamed are not preaching a fear of freedom and the traps therein, rather an embrace of it. After all “I know everyone I have ever loved is someday going to die,” Cima sings. So why risk feeling alive?
Photo by Jake Godin