Andrew recommends “Tender Heart” by Rosali
It’s high summer. It’s humidity and bugs. It’s the darkness an hour past the last silhouettes of Little Brown bats performing figure 8s through the yard. Lightning crawls across the thunderheads backed up to the south, already easing over the Mississippi and into Illinois. Nearby, University Ave. slows and enough silent space opens up for Rosali’s song, “Tender Heart” to fill the dark periphery around the backyard fire where I sit alone.
The song begins with the slow strum of an acoustic guitar and a punctuated peel of echoing guitar distortion joined by a gentle brush and shake of drums. Then Rosali’s sincere, honeyed voice eases in, before pleading “Oh tend this fire / why would you make it this way?” It’s the coda to an album littered with imagery of sparks and flashes in the dark: “attractive like some firelight;” “making fire from embers;” and “all this lightning ain’t frightening to me.” As the rhythm steadily plods on, the distortion ebbs and flows as Rosali’s lyrics alternate between statements (“by and large / we have stormed all this weather”) and questions (“why the false wildness?”).
The feedback and distortion drag the song along before it stirs to a crescendo at the top of the bridge, where Rosali’s voice moves up in register to sing “the craters in me / they form and recede” before returning to its sonorous sweet spot to utter “through my heart / raging through my heart.” But there’s a calmness to the delivery of those last two lines that’s both haunting and reassuring to me.
Throughout “Tender Heart,” Rosali walks the dotted white line of a discourse between two people and an individual wrestling with their own inner dialogue. I’m never quite sure if she’s singing to someone else or herself—but that’s part of what draws me in. She offers a challenge or casts a concern, but then nearby there’s an assurance: We’ve got this. You’ve got this.
The song runs out at the same slow pace, with Rosali singing, “I don’t mind / spending my time / like this.” And I don’t. There’s no loneliness here; instead, it’s a seeking of the solitary fire in order to recenter. As an introvert, there’s a grace in distilling the setting to base elements and settling in with a contemplative song. Songs like “Tender Heart” serve as guides, as entry points for articulating self-contemplation. Or maybe that’s just the whole of this album—No Medium is a complex gaze at the distorted beauty of considering and reshaping ourselves. It’s a summer storm of an album. An internal tornado siren. An external performance of personal reckoning.
As I play the song on repeat, the horizon continues to flash and the low growl of thunder hangs in the distance like another instrumental track overlaid on the song. There is abundance and danger and tenderness within. There is distortion and woodsmoke and an assurance that we can storm all this weather building under the surface or lurking off in the distance.
Andrew Jones is Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Dubuque and Assistant Editor for Split Rock Review. His poetry collection, Liner Notes, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020.
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