The title for Rags Rosenberg’s “John Doe” was a pre-COVID relic. “It first came to me in 2019,” says the California-based singer/songwriter. “It occurred to me that the song could be narrated from the morgue by a homeless man who died in the cold. I’d been working with it for a while but only discovered that the man was a veteran when the line, ‘They called me a soldier, then called me a bum,’ showed up.”
That’s where the narrative took a sharp turn. “It led me to what happened to him—the addiction to the pain pills and the eventual loss of his job and family,” says Rosenberg.
A songwriter for much of his life, Rosenberg only got serious about the occupation when he had no other choice. After losing his construction company and his house in Atlanta, he relocated to Nashville, where he found sanctuary at the legendary Bluebird Cafe, honing his craft with mega-hit country music writers like Craig Wiseman, Jeffrey Steele and Bobby Braddock. Taking what he could from that experience, Rosenberg eventually returned to his home state and shifted his focus to the more poetic storytelling of idols like Bob Dyan, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.
Available September 19, Song Of The Bricoleur (Coyote Gulch) may be just the second LP for this 78-year-old late-bloomer, but he’s obviously made an impression on the right people. The album features percussionist Marcie Chapa (Beyoncé), violinist/pianist Bob Furgo (Leonard Cohen), pianist Jeff Paris (Keb Mo) and drummer Danny Frankel (John Cale, Ricky Lee Jones, k.d. lang), among others.
“Last year, I studied with Gretchen Peters,” says Rosenberg. “She’s one of my favorite writers because her characters are so multidimensional, so real. I’d been playing what I had of ‘John Doe’ at my live shows, but I knew it wasn’t done. Gretchen listened to what I had and told me I could take it deeper. That’s when the last verse rolled into view with the line, ‘Somebody tell me how your story lives on, when your name don’t live on anyone’s tongue.’ It doesn’t matter whether you think a war was justified or not. What matters is how a nation brings home the soldiers they’ve sent into the hell of war, how they help them heal from the indescribable trauma and how they reintegrate them back into society. On this score, I think we have a long, long way to go.”
We’re proud to premiere Rags Rosenberg’s “John Doe.”
—Hobart Rowland
