We caught up with Lane over the weekend on the back patio of Three Links, as photographer Vera “Velma” Hernandez and Rosegarden’s new percussionist, Dean Adams, sat down to do Paqui’s One Chip Challenge.
It’s a sight to behold as Lane goes live on her Instagram to share the moment with friends and fans. Hernandez remains stoic, slowly sipping her Heineken Zero, as Adams falls into tears, grasping for his non-alcoholic Dark ‘N’ Stormy.
This is certainly a different Rosegarden Funeral Party than the one we first met (and were the first ever to interview) brooding in the corner of The Nines in Deep Ellum. That was six years ago, when the band had only two singles to its name. It’s a difference that Lane wears on her head, now with blonde hair.
“I’ve always been really into reinventing myself, and reinventing my look is a big part of that,” she says. “When I make giant changes in who I want to be and how I want to conduct myself and how I want to live my life, I tend to change my appearance. Whether it was cutting the mullet into a bob or growing my hair out super long, it was all a mirror of me changing inwardly. I reflect inward change outwardly.”
She was done holding onto the past and who she used to be, and Lane realized that things were just going to have to be different if she was going to heal and continue moving forward.
When Lane returned from touring in Europe last May, the band’s lineup changed, prompting her need to say goodbye to parts of herself that she always thought would be there and become a new person.
“I needed it to happen then,” Lane says. “I can't expect everyone to always prioritize Rosegarden when Rosegarden is my thing. It's my baby and it's my idea, it's my music, it's my image. Everything about Rosegarden is my idea.”
The band is designed in such a way that it never intentionally rides on Lane, so that it never has to be hindered by someone deciding to leave — a lesson Lane learned the hard way when her first band Moon Waves bifurcated into Rosegarden Funeral Party and the now defunct Acid Carousel.
“With lineup changes, you lose things and you gain things,” Lane says. “I haven't done a record since December of 2021, when I released In the Wake of Fire, so that was two years of musical interests changing and personality changing. I've always been really into new wave, avant garde rock and night rock.”
With the lineup changing, Lane was able to craft songs that fit more with her change in outlook and more closely mirrored her direct influences.
“Songs like ‘A Different Kind of Carnage’ or ‘The Rain’ could have never been brought to the previous lineup,” she says. “Now that I have guys with me that were really capable of playing the music beautifully and interested in that music and were extremely encouraging of me to do it, [we can] expand beyond the typical Rosegarden sound.”
This is a quieter album than the band’s previous work, eschewing the wall of sound that made In the Wake of Fire so over-the-top — largely because of Lane’s growing confidence in the songs themselves. The irony is that Lane took a much more rapid approach to songwriting for this album than she had with the songs she had agonized over in the past.
“All of these songs, with the exception of ‘Almost Heaven’ and ‘Embers,’ were born between January of this year and late-February,” she says. “The whole album was written and recorded in two and a half months, and most of what the album is about is stuff that is extremely immediate to my life as it stands right now.”
Rising Up
The songs on the band’s new album, From The Ashes, which hits streaming services March 22, cover the subject matter familiar to Rosegarden fans — break-ups — but there is also a shift in perspective that shows Lane’s maturing perspective on the greater meaning of relationships.“‘A Different Kind of Carnage,’” Lane cites as an example, “is one of the first songs that I've written that is about the general subject matter of people in your life that hurt you rather than one specific person that I'm directly referencing. That and ‘The Rain’ take the concept of writing about an ex-partner and zoom out and talk about moving on from the past in general.”
From The Ashes has a clear story arc, making it an album to be enjoyed all the way through. The album is also sung in different voices.
“They're almost two completely different girls singing to you,” Lane says. “The first half of the album is very traditional lyrics for Rosegarden — I'm sad, and I miss you, I love you — but as you progress through the album, it gets a little bit more resigned to the idea of leaving, and that concept of leaving.”
In this way, the album begins at the ending with “Doorway Ghost,” an empowering song that was the first song Lane wrote for the tail end of the band’s European tour.
“That was when I first kind of began to realize that sometimes loving someone is recognizing that you can't help them, and you have to leave,” she says. “That really is the message of the whole album — sometimes love looks like a goodbye.”
For Lane, personally, saying goodbye also meant getting sober.
“I'm drinking a Heineken Zero right now,” Lane says turning the can to show the label clearly. “I was a pretty heavy drinker from age 16 to about a couple months ago, and I was drowning in my alcoholism. And alcoholism, especially [for] a girl in bands, is a really, really, really dangerous thing. And I was always surprised because I'm such a silver liner as a person that a lot of the dudes around me, no one said, ‘Oh my God, we've got to keep her safe.’ They said, ‘Look, free game!’ a lot of the time. And it wasn't always something that turned out to be physical. A lot of the time it was, ‘Oh, I can manipulate her because she's so messed up into believing things that aren't true.’
“I was dying, but when you're the kind of alcoholic that I am, no one ever tells you to quit drinking. I've held down jobs, I was fun at bars, and no one ever looked at me and was like, she's being unenjoyable right now. I was lucky that I had people come into my life at just the right time who saw that I was kind of this dying bird and that I was surrounded by dark entities that were really trying to feed off the life that I was trying to put into the world.”
One of those people was Adams, who is still recovering from the One Chip Challenge, looking on through spicy tears, refusing to open his mouth for fear of reigniting the heat, as Lane explains the important role he took in her life.
“Dean saved my life,” she says as a matter of fact. “He was like, ‘You don't have memories, you have ghosts in your little bell tower, but you go into in the center of your chest, and you just sit there and you smoke cigarettes with them all night, and the ghosts just make you sick. It's like you mourn everything like it’s this great loss, and you miss everything so much that you don't even allow yourself to have memories when you've had one of the most beautiful lives with all these cool adventures, all these cool people of anyone that I know, and all you think about is how sad you are that you don't have it all the time, rather than just being grateful for the fact that it happened in the first place.’
“That really woke me up, the difference between a ghost as something that haunts you, and a memory as something that's warm and inviting and beautiful like a charm on a bracelet.”
With that lesson taken to heart, From The Ashes is truly an album about learning how to let go rather than an album about having already let go.
“I think that the biggest difference between Rosegarden now and Rosegarden then is that I'm not going to mourn everything forever,” Lane says. “I'm not going to hang on to everything in the kind of toxic way that I used to, making myself sick by viewing everything that left my life as a death. It's like the snake that slithers over the saw and doesn't realize that the saw is not a predator. The saw is a saw that cuts the snake as the snake wraps around the saw and tries to strangle the saw as an act of vengeance, and slowly kills itself. So I'm no longer going to slowly kill myself by smoking cigarettes with ghosts in the bell tower in the center of my chest. I'm trying to view things as beautiful memories and not as losses, not as funerals.”
Lane isn’t sure if the name Rosegarden Funeral Party will stick, but one thing is certain: She will definitely still be making music six years from now.
“I don't ever think that far into the future, which is something that really irritates primarily boys I've dated,” she says with a laugh. “I will say, though, I'll never let another two years of just overt dry spell happened to Rosegarden again. That was a product of severe depression and severe dependency that just ruined me.”
Leah Lane will play a solo acoustic set at the Observer members' party at 7 p.m. on May 16.
