This Thursday, Maggie Rose and her band will be dead.
“Dead Sexy!” Rose proclaims, clarifying the theme. The band will be uniformly deceased to celebrate Halloween at the Eastside Bowl. “We’re all going to be freshly emerged from our graves!” she chuckles excitedly. She explains, “For the recent tour, we used a lot of flowers and earth tones. And the Halloween setup will be a kind of ‘Upside Down’ version of all of that, with everything dead – from the flowers to the band itself.” She’s referencing her recent tour in support of her latest LP, No One Gets Out Alive, released in April of this year.
Presented by Lightning 100, the No One Gets Out Alive Halloween Bash will be in the main room of the Eastside Bowl on Thursday, October 31, with doors at 7 p.m. and music at 8.
With the album’s song titles alone, it’s easy to see why Rose feels that “This record lends itself well to a spooky Halloween theme.” There’s “No One Gets Out Alive,” “Dead Weight,” and “Lonely War,” which could all easily be screenplay titles for blockbuster zombie films. And as Rose points out: “The song ‘Vanish’ is about ghosting someone.” And is there anything truly scarier, kids?
Sitting outside of Roy’s Meat Service, enjoying an unseasonably warm, beautiful October day in East Nashville, with the sweet smell of freshly smoked barbeque drifting through the air, Rose explained another reason why the theme resonated with her. “It’s also fitting because this album is really about perseverance, and the album itself almost died.” She says that after the album was released earlier this year, she changed representation, ultimately landing her and the album with Virgin Media, and “it was like I had to bring it back from the dead.” But such a great album is not so easy to kill.
Maggie Rose: No One Gets Out Alive Halloween Bash at Eastside Bowl
tickets are available here
No One Gets Out Alive, recorded at Starstruck Studios, is a tour-de-force and Rose’s most ambitious work yet. Produced by Ben Tanner, this collection of songs further cement Rose’s status as a genre-defying songwriter with broad appeal and highlights a recurring theme in her career: resilience. Suffice it to say that she has faced many challenges in her fifteen-plus years as a recording artist.
Those challenges, how she’s navigated them and maintained control of her output as an artist, have defined her career. That and, of course, her soulful and powerful voice. The latter is the centerpiece of every song on this album. From the anthemic and surprisingly positive opening title track to the blues-tinged R&B power-waltz “Fake Flowers,” replete with biting lyrics about duplicity and hypocrisy, the album sets the bar incredibly high right off the bat.
It continues to elevate throughout, with infectious rhythms, artful vocal harmonies, stellar dynamic arrangement, and production within and among each track. The album moves seamlessly from song to song despite its diverse exploration of genres. An example of such dynamics can be seen when “Underestimate Me,” which builds upon the aforementioned lyrical themes in “Fake Flowers” but with a Bill Withers-meets-Chuck Brown groove, moves right into the high-energy barroom Southern Rock tune “Dead Weight,” both of which optimally utilize her incredible band for this album (Sadler Vaden, Peter Levin, Zac Cockrell, Kaitlyn Connor, Kyle Lewis and Chad Gamble) in very different ways.
Autographed vinyl of Maggie Rose’s latest album, No One Gets Out Alive, is
available now on her website
Those songs and “more covers than usual, since it’s Halloween” will be performed at the Halloween Bash. She is coy, in a way unusual for Nashville and its propensity for name-dropping, when she also teases “a whole lot of special guests and sit-ins” for the event without giving anything else away. Considering the company Rose has kept in her career, any fan should realize that this is especially exciting.
Also exciting is that Billy Allen + THE POLLIES, featuring Rose’s producer Ben Tanner in the band, will kick things off for the event. She lets herself gush a little about her opening act, whose album Black Noise is another multi-genre triumph, saying frontman Billy Allen “reminds me of Tina Turner and Michael Jackson. There’s this androgyny and presence that’s so appealing!” Then, Nashville’s favorite party jam band, LadyCouch, will host the official after-party at The ’58 on the other side of the lanes.
All of this sets the stage for a lively end to 2024 for Maggie Rose, who just kicked off a new season of her empowering, female-centric podcast Salute the Songbird at Chief’s in downtown Nashville with the recent cover star of The Nashvillian, guitar goddess Grace Bowers.
So, head down to Eastside Bowl this Halloween, where the vibes nudge up against the spirit world and remind us to let it all hang it because no one gets out of here alive.
