Rosetta: Interview with Dave Grossman

Rosetta have been together, doing the DIY thing for 7 years now, blending ambience and brutality to create some of the most intensely diverse records available. Last month, they released their most brilliant record to date, A Determinism of Reality (on Translation Loss Records). "Uncompromisingly beautiful and absolutely devastating" sums it up in a few words.  Bassist, Dave Grossman was kind enough to let me run up his phone bill while he told me about the band, the new album and what it's like on the road, in Philly and overseas.

Tell me about the new album, A Determinism of Morality. Has a lot changed since Wake/Lift?

Well I guess it still sounds like us but it’s a little bit different.  We’re obviously not going to write the same songs over and over again.  It’s sort of hard to describe what’s changed from the perspective of the artist but I just feel like we sort of wrote better songs, which I’m sure everybody says but that’s how we feel.  We really just want to make something that we like and all enjoy and that’s pretty much what we did. I mean beyond that, we hope that other people like it but at the end of the day it’s more important to us that we’re content with it than anybody else.

So are you content with it?

I think everything about it is the best thing we’ve ever done.  I think working with Andrew Schneider made the production better, I think we wrote better songs, I’m probably the happiest with this record and I think we all feel this way.

How did y'all come together?
We were all playing in different bands and we all knew each other and all our bands were playing a show and I remember saying something about starting a joke side project band that wasn’t even going to sound like anything we ended up sounding and we got together and played and we liked what we were doing.  We liked our songs and our other bands just sort of fell apart and this became more and more of a focus and things have just sort of fallen into place.  Sadly we can’t tour as much as I think some of us would like just because of what other people's goals as far as other things in life besides playing music but we get offered good tours pretty regularly so my expectations have been blown away from what I thought would happen to what really happened.

I heard you had planned to tour Europe, but that’s not happening anymore, what happened there?
I can’t really go into great detail about what happened but it pretty much didn’t work out for the time being so we just decided to tour the states instead because that just worked better for the time period for numerous reasons.  It was sort of out of our control.

But you’ve done Europe before, right?  How did that go?
Yeah, we did Europe last summer.  Probably the best shows we’ve ever played. I mean every show was insane.  I think we were all nervous because we were pretty much playing last every night and we were supposed to be the drawing band for each show and we were just blown away with the turnouts and the reaction.  I mean I wasn’t ever expecting to sign autographs or show up in Poland and sell out a show or have like 300 people know all the words to all our songs and be screaming along when most of them can hardly speak English.

I can’t imagine that’s the same reaction you get when you play stateside…
I don’t know. We do a lot better over there than we do over here.  I mean most of the shows were very well attended, we’d look out at the venues and they’d be pretty much packed and people would just know the words and it was just crazy.
We haven’t [done a full US tour] in a while, for the most part we usually stay on the east coast but we did Australia and the shows in Australia were all better than the shows we did in the states and then Europe topped Australia which we were really surprised about.

I haven't gotten a chance to see Rosetta live.  Why don't you do guys ever come to The South?
For us, the issue is that our singer is a high school teacher so we can only tour during summer and for the most part it’s sort of been a case where the last few years we’ve decided to do Australia and Europe so we sort of just haven’t had the chance and this summer when we decided to do the tour it’s just the way the tour came together, it just happened to get skipped over.  I think we are going to do south by southwest this year and do some dates with a band that’s really good, that we love a lot. Hopefully if we can do this tour later this year, like winter-time or really early next year we’ll go down [to the south] cuz I really want to play Atlanta again, I really do want to play Florida again, I want to play Savannah and you know, those places, Alabama; Birmingham we’ve played twice and both shows were really, really good so those are places we definitely want to go to but for this tour it just didn’t work out in the routing  because when things started to come in and get confirmed it just worked its way through.

We can only tour for a month and it just sort of got skipped over because of the way things kind of came into place so sadly, not now but we should be down there, hopefully, in the winter.  The shows we played in Georgia were pretty good and Florida, well Florida was pretty bad to us but I wouldn’t mind going down there again. That band City of Ships, who we tour with a lot are from Florida so at some point, I feel like we’ll do something with them down there because we play with those guys pretty regularly.

What's it like for you, is Rosetta a full-time job?
I guess I am the more free spirited, “I want to do whatever the hell I want to do, how I want to do it,” member of the group… I’ve got a bunch of other musical projects that I’m trying to get underway in the next year myself just cuz that’s what I love to do.  I am trying to do this band with Eric, from City of Ships, me, my friend Jon who sings for this band Restorations and the drummer from Battlefields and the bass player from East of the Wall.  We are hoping to get together for like a 2 week period in the winter and sort of just record and write something and put it out.  There’s another band that I can’t say the name of that I might be singing for that are also on Translation Loss so I’m trying to keep myself busy with music stuff.

What's the scene like where you live?
The Philly scene is really kind of weird and bad.  Philly just isn’t really an art/music friendly city, but what I feel like our scene and community of bands and friends and artists that are friends is, I think that it’s an awesome, awesome little community.  I mean lots of these guys in bands and playing music are my best friends, dudes like Eric from City of Ships, Rob from Battlefields, Jon from Restorations, Brett from East of the Wall, those dudes are guys I talk to regularly I mean lots of the bands aren’t technically in the same genre but bands that we have done tours with and played lots of shows with, like The Minor Times and Engineer and Restorations is a good example of a band that sounds nothing like us, Braveyoung all those have been guys I respect the hell out of  as musicians and they’ve always been just awesome and everybody’s real supportive of each other and everybody’s, you know, just really friendly.  I think, in general, the whole underground sort of scene is really, really a great community.  I mean once you become friends with those people, they’re people that you can rely on no matter what.

Would you say Rosetta is successful as a band?
I guess we’re not considered successful in a conventional sense but I’m more than content with what we’ve achieved.  Growing up, I think that when you first decide that you want to play music, the average person would feel lucky to play some shows and write songs that you think are cool and hopefully you’ll get to record it at some point so I mean this has blown away any expectations that I’ve ever had.  I’ve been to places I thought I’d never go to period, let alone getting to go there to play music.  If somebody told me that some guy would pay to fly me to Prague in the Czech Republic and to Athens, Greece to play a show and I’d show up and people in Athens would come to see my band, I’d be like “yeah, you’re full of shit, that’s never going to happen to me.” My expectations have been completely blown away.

Head to  Gravedigger Magazine's Tumblr to stream a song from Rosetta's new album, A Determinism of Morality. Check out Rosetta's Tumblr to find dates for their tour with City of Ships this summer.