Some albums can take on a life of their own and become bigger than the sum of their parts. The music of "Frankie and the No-Go Road" stands tall in Rita Hosking's impressive discography of well-crafted, meaningful songs that convey her sincere voice and unique version of mountain soul. But dig deeper and her sixth studio album is a doorway to "more worlds than one"---a realm where unseen mysteries move with unstoppable fluidity and timeless grace.
Unlike her other records, the concept for Frankie and the No-Go Road came to Rita while she was drawing. “I realized I was illustrating a hero’s journey, and that I would love to write a collection of songs inspired by those drawings."
The theme was a natural for Rita. “In college, an Eastern Religions professor was drawing a dream I had on the board for the class, interpreting it as he went along. At one point, he called me ‘the hero’. I protested—I certainly didn’t feel like a hero in the dream, or at all. He spun around, looked me square in the eye and said ‘we are all living our own hero’s journey.’ It was one of those pivotal moments where the human puzzle began to make a little bit of sense.”
On the surface, "Frankie and the No-Go Road" is a superb collection of twelve West Coast Americana tunes, awash with soaring, heartfelt vocals, earthy banjo, folk-music authenticity, and the production sensibilities of a modern country record. On another level, it’s an intricate exploration of the soul's journey through life. Is the hero of this journey Frankie, or Rita herself, or the human heart in all of us? That's for the listener, or traveler, to decide.
Rita Hosking is a staple of the country/folk scene, a heavily acclaimed artist who is known for her hard-hitting lyrics set upon sweet musical backdrops. Her sixth album ‘Frankie And The No-Go Road’, is no different, building upon her reputation as someone who sings about hardship and real life. Northern Californian native Rita is the descendent of Cornish miners, with the folksong they would indulge in during their working hours the foundation of her musical upbringing. Splitting her time between the US and the UK and honoring both aspects of her heritage, her new record dropped on September 22 on home soil and will find its way to the British Isles on October 30, accompanied by a subsequent tour in November.
However, ‘Frankie And The No-Go Road’, while essentially a continued evolution of Rita’s artistic development that began back in 2005, is also a marked departure from her conventional material. The concept for the record arrived while she was drawing, and she realized that she was outlining a hero’s journey that she could interpret through song. She decided to make an entire record out of the tale she had created, inspired by the words of an Eastern Religions professor she had had in college who reminded her that we are all living our own hero’s journey. As a result, the experiences and subsequent realizations of Frankie can be applied universally; in other words, s/he represents us all and the answers that we are searching for in life.
Each of the songs on this carefully-crafted Americana album are penned in extreme vignette, and often the lyrics only convey part of the puzzle, or a blurry, ambiguous image of it; to guide us more purposefully through the exact meaning of each track, Rita has included a very short description underneath the titles as they run in chronological order inside the album sleeve. She opens with the sweet waltz ‘A Better Day’, which is described as “Frankie sees room for improvement in world”. Lamenting all that she sees as wrong, this feeling of helplessness at the problems around us is something that many of us relate to, as every day the news is full of yet more bad news. The next track is ‘Wetiko’, named after a word for soul-eater and often described as “the bug which feeds the experience of terror within our mind and out in the world”. Rita’s description is apt; “Villain at fault becomes apparent” gives us our first revelation in that our biggest opponent is fear. It immediately goes some way to answering the first track, which questions why there is so much wrong in the world.
http://forthecountryrecord.com/2015/09/30/featured-rita-hosking-frankie-and-the-no-go-road/
October 2015
