Appealing To 14 Year Old Girls And 50 Year Old Men

There’s something immediately genial and charming about Shakey Graves, aka Alejandro Rose-Garcia.

Perhaps this explains the tongue-in-cheek ‘hobo’ tag, especially given the kick-drum fashioned from a suitcase he’s frequently known to play. He’s not just a busking street performer though. First trying his hand at acting, Rose-Garcia enjoyed a reoccurring role in TV series Friday Night Lights and made a recent appearance in Sin City: A Dame To Kill. “My family have always been in theatre: my mother’s a playwright and director, and my dad’s in set and light design,” Rose-Garcia explains. “I started auditioning for film and TV when I was about ten, which was also about the same time I started playing guitar. Guitar was something I always loved and put a lot of work into, so I figured it was worth pursuing.”

I want to write stuff that’s just as important to a 14-year-old girl as a 50-year old man.

Rose-Garcia then contemplates songwriting, musing, “When you study people’s music, some people are very direct in how they write. Like Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat, the song’s clearly about something happening at that time in his life... I’m more trying to hint at archetypes and bigger themes we all experience. I want to write stuff that’s just as important to a 14-year-old girl as a 50-year old man. Shakey Graves is a soapbox to talk about that stuff.”

With 2011’s Roll The Bones still near the top of Bandcamp’s digital best-seller charts, second album And The War Came purposefully evolved through a much different process. With a larger audience now in mind, Rose-Garcia had statements to make. “The way Shakey Graves is evolving, we’re kind of at the tip of an iceberg we’re just figuring out,” he says. “The music is starting to change, so the second album is a bridge between the past and what will be in the future.”

Featuring ex-Paper Bird Esme Patterson on three tracks, Rose-Garcia was lucky to hit songwriting gold with the lady describing herself as ‘if Elvis was a girl’. “It can be hard to write songs that aren’t too serious, yet meaningful, but Esme and I just churned them out,” reflects Rose-Garcia. “We wrote Dearly Departed in probably in hour. We were shocked, like, ‘Woah!’”

Aside from figuring out how to bottle up and sell that songwriting luck, Rose-Garcia soon embarks on his debut Australian tour, co-headlining with husband and wife duo Shovels & Rope. Bringing a little piece of Austin to Australia in particular makes him proud. “That’s the real honour of it all, representing my city and its music,” he enthuses. “Austin is sort of the new musical frontier where some are getting disillusioned, but some are getting amazing opportunities. I lucked out on being born here.”