Over the past seven years, Brett Rosenberg has grown his project Quichenight into a staple of Nashville’s rock scene, loved for his songs (wry but not snide), guitar work (technically impressive but heavy on feel) and pop-rock arrangements (a masterful balance of complexity and catchiness). On Saturday, he ends a three-week tour with a release celebration at The High Watt for Cooler Heads, his seventh full-length under the curious name. It’s a collection of tunes perfect for folks looking to both boogie down and engage in some self-reflection.
Rosenberg plays with a full band, which currently includes Sam Skorik on drums, Asher Horton on 12-string guitar and Dan Carroll on bass. But on Cooler Heads, as with the vast majority of other Quichenight recordings, Rosenberg performed all the parts himself in the studio. Leah Miller’s artwork on the album jacket depicts four silhouettes that look like a flower when you stand far enough away — an image that suggests a group effort. With all this conflicting information, it’s worth asking: What exactly is Quichenight?
“The illusion of Quichenight is that it is a group of people playing together,” Rosenberg tells the Scene. “I play everything, but I do things on the drums to make it seem like the drummer doesn’t already know every second of the song, and to create that illusion of spontaneity.”
He describes Quichenight as “a fantasy band,” a composite of influences and themes he wants to explore. More importantly, it’s a DIY venture from a man who has embraced the do-it-yourself ethos in a pure, straightforward way, with emphasis on the idea that everyone should be able to express themselves through music, no matter how skilled they are or what resources they have. This also inspired the name.
“Anyone can have a ‘quiche night,’ because eggs are cheap,” says Rosenberg. “You can be fancy, and you don’t need to spend a lot of money or come from any particular background to have that experience.”
When Rosenberg moved to Nashville from Boston, he first tried playing with a random assortment of musicians he met on Craigslist: “I played in a blues band, a country band and with a girl who made Irish music,” he recalls. But he soon formed more fruitful relationships with members of the local rock scene like Pujol’s Daniel Pujol, Thelma and the Sleaze’s Lauren “LG” Gilbert and other musicians he met at Battle Tapes Recording, the studio of his then-roommate, prolific producer-engineer Jeremy Ferguson.
Drawing inspiration from his new social and musical circle as well as pop, rock and folk champions like The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and The Roches, Rosenberg recorded Quichenight I on a TASCAM Portastudio four-track cassette machine and released it in 2011. It served as his attempt to make music that folks he knew might “find in their record collections.” The witty, nimble, rocking sound of Quichenight was born.
Fast-forward to June 1, 2018, when Michael Eades’ Nashville-based indie label YK Records released Cooler Heads. Eades has been a fan of Quichenight from the beginning, and praises Rosenberg’s pop sensibilities as well as his ability to achieve a balanced perspective.
“His lyrics are self-effacingly hilarious, but also have an empathy to them,” says Eades.
One place to hear that balance at work is the suite “A Funky Thing Comes Undone.” The track is a reflection on how age undermines and erases our ability to get “funky” — to do things confidently and with style. Rosenberg’s droll reverence makes it clear that his intent isn’t to shame folks who are going through this experience. “Every young band is going to get old,” he says. “Every young, beautiful person is going to get old. Everything is decaying.” There’s a strong influence from The Beach Boys in the late ’70s (a time he calls “the Fat Beach Boys era”) including intricate layers of vocal harmonies and guitar parts, as well as an absurd bit where he chants “rock ’n’ roll music and hamburgers” over and over.
Another album highlight is “Really Good Publicist,” which Rosenberg cites as an excuse to make use of a chorus of “las” that he wrote some time ago. The galloping tune composed of odd non sequiturs and doublespeak — “Don’t come around / There’s a bathroom on the right / Don’t look now / But he’s all-the-way quiche tonight,” goes one verse — is form of commiseration with musicians who’ve had negative experiences with unprofessional people in the music business. At least, sometimes they’re people.
“I hired a publicist one time, and one day their website got turned into a Russian porn site,” says Rosenberg. He later found out that his contact was actually a computer program. At least he got a song out of the deal. And a refund.
The clever eloquence of Rosenberg’s songwriting makes his job look easy, even when he’s doing the work of several people. Maintaining the illusion that Quichenight is a band yields something extraordinarily real.
