The Roseline, a heartland rock-styled Americana band from Lawrence, Kansas, has toiled long in the U.S. to little success (though, to their credit, their songs have been heard on the soundtracks to several TV shows through the years, including Nashville and Virgin River). The group began life in 2004 when Tom Halliburton, back home after attending art school, hooked up with several high-school pals active in the local music scene. As he explained to Kansas City Star reporter Timothy Finn in 2006, “I was in the desert, in Santa Fe, bored out of my mind. So I got a guitar and taught myself some chords. Then I started writing songs and recording them.” He shared those four-track demos with his friends, who were blown away—and encouraged him not just to make an album, which was his initial goal, but to perform on stage.
Their independently released debut, A Wall Behind It, arrived in 2006 and earned plaudits from the local press. Listening to it now, however, one hears much promise but also some flaws, most notably a paper-thin production. That’s neither here nor there, of course, as it’s a fate shared by many bands working from shoestring budgets. That they also sounded like a watered-down Whiskeytown isn’t much of a concern, either; everyone starts somewhere—and there are far worse bands to pattern one’s self after. A second, third and fourth album followed, each better than the last, then a fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. As the years came and went, so too did band members—life’s responsibilities don’t always jibe with the late-night demands of playing out, after all. But an odd thing began happening with their second outing, Lust for Luster in 2008: Their albums appeared on the Euro Americana charts.
As anyone who follows such things can attest, Americana-styled music and its offshoots have long been popular in Scandinavia—just as Nordic noir, aka gritty mysteries, are here. What may also surprise some folks is that, thanks to their multi-lingual abilities, the songs are often sung in English, not their native tongues—see Malin Pettersen’s Wildhorse for one example and Heigh Chief’s A Chorus of Crickets for another.
The Roseline’s Live in Norway was recorded at Moskus, a small club in Trondheim, a city located in the Midt-Norge region, on March 14th, 2024. In addition to Halliburton, who plays acoustic guitar, the band now consists of Bradley McKellip on electric guitar, Colin Jones on bass, Jim Pillar on drums and Heidi Gluck—who Juliana Hatfield fans should remember from her Some Girls days—on keyboards. (Gluck also proved invaluable for a reason beyond the keys: Thanks to her Canadian roots, she knows how to drive in the snow!)
The 13 songs are drawn primarily from the band’s last three albums, though one song dates to their second album. It starts relatively light, with “Back of My Mind,” and—as Halliburton jokes in the intro—gets “progressively more depressing.” I.e. it’s packed with country-tinged laments about love, heartache and heartbreak that resonate alongside McKellip’s electric leads, veering from the heartland rock of “Seven Hundred Second Chances” to “I Was a Gun,” during which Gluck could easily be confused for Roy Bittan.
Halliburton’s grainy gravitas and the band’s effortless swing remind me somewhat of Sid Griffin and the Long Ryders. “Ghost Writer”—no, not the classic Garland Jeffreys song, though that would have been fun—is a good example of the latter, while “Hunker Down” serves the first. The set closes on another high with George Strait’s “Here for a Good Time.”
All in all, Live in Norway is an exceptional career summary that, for folks like me, serves as an excellent introduction to their talents. Anyone who enjoys roots-first rock with a country bent will find much here to like.
The Old Grey Cat 