Ziemba, aka René Kladzyk, put out her albums True Romantic and Unsubtle Magic back in 2020 and 2021 respectively, and we haven't heard a peep from her since. In the interim, she moved from El Paso to Los Angeles, and she kept working on music.
"The Perfect Rose," Ziemba's first new song in five years, is out today. It's a brisk folk-rock epic with a lot of ornate touches that do nothing to slow its momentum. I hear elements of the Weather Station, the War On Drugs, and Bruce Hornsby in there, and the way Kladzyk sings the word "California" is pure Joni. Lots of lyrics here jump out — from "Silver in my belly and my time is running out/ Don’t know what to do and my teeth are turning blue" to "I’m on a highway with a splinter in my hand/ Hoping to get lucky and find somewhere to land" — and the cello adds a certain elegance.
Kladzyk offers this helpful context for the song:
I was driving from New York to California in fall 2022 with a broken arm and broken heart when this song was born. "The Perfect Rose" feels like a drive to me; like that part of the country where all the sudden the sky is oppressively large and you feel overwhelmed by your smallness. I made it to my sister’s house in Woodland, CA (nicknamed Woodyland by my Dad, who had passed away a couple years earlier), and wrote this song on her piano with a vast landscape of cellos and bursting guitars in my mind’s ear. The song riffs on similar patterns, but repeated in alternating major and minor, sifting through emotions and feelingtones before ending back at the same place it started. I’m searching for something: something beautiful, maybe even something perfect, is that a curse?
"The Perfect Rose" was recorded at the Tropico Beauty recording studio in Glendale, California in spring 2024, after it was workshopped heavily with Will Segerstrom (of Mega Bog), who plays guitar on the track. Even though it’s a sprawling and expansive song, we were determined to capture the full band in a single take, and that’s what you hear: me on upright piano, Andrew Maguire (Deradoorian, Luke Temple, Hand Habits) on drums, Will Segerstrom on guitar, Jay Heiselmann (Habibi, Roya) on bass, all in a small wood-paneled room together. Cornelia Babbitt (Weyes Blood, Angel Olsen) came in and tracked cello the next day, and Elizabeth LoPiccolo flew in some flutes from NYC for flourish.
Listen below.
