Local Musician Calls For Community’s Help To Kickstart His Career
Tim Rose recording at Steelgrass Studio on Kauai PHOTO COURTESY TIM ROSE
Music can change your life. The power of a song can pull you along with something that’s greater than the rest of us. It’s that chicken-skin feeling when a song like Stevie Wonder’s Visions slowly spills over you, communicating the experience of one human being to the next.
Music changed Tim Rose’s life. Growing up, Tim initially thought maybe he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and become an attorney. Born and raised in Washington state, he became a self-taught musician as a teenager, and upon graduating high school, his father beckoned him to earn an undergraduate degree in the field of his choosing. So Tim moved to Honolulu to study music at University of Hawaii at Manoa.
“This is what is important to me. This is what I want. I’ve made a decision,” Tim told me during a recent interview at Coffee Talk in Kaimuki.
It’s been several years since he graduated from UH, but he is now more certain than ever that this is what he wants to do: “I want to make music for the rest of my life.”
To make this happen, Tim has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his first full-length album. (As of this writing, the campaign is 90 percent backed. Tim has until Friday morning to reach his goal.)
“Music is so important as a tool to inspire,” he says. With his first album, Tim hopes to inspire Hawaii’s music scene with a collection of songs that defy the popular conceptions of what a singer-songwriter should be.
“We don’t have to write tunes that will get us onto the radio. We can make whatever we want.”
With his Kickstarter campaign, Tim points out that funding his album directly with the help of fans has allowed him to write songs he wants to write — without being forced to compromise his artistic integrity.
“I want to create music that has deep emotional and social meaning, things that can be felt in the head and in the heart,” Tim writes on Kickstarter. “Powerful songs that, I hope, will inspire you to be a better version of yourself. I want to make those songs and share them with you.”
He just completed recording the forthcoming 11-track album at Steelgrass Recording Studio on Kauai with producer Will Lydgate and drummer Patrick Armitage. Tim now is in the final stages of mastering the audio and preparing the album for its release in May.
“It’s a great time to be a musician,” Tim says, explaining that the Internet has enabled artists to foster direct relationships with fans through conversations on email and Facebook. “The people I get to talk with are no longer just fans, they’re my friends.”
But the reason I’m writing this is not to convince you that Tim’s album will be the next Unorthodox Jukebox, or that it will relieve Hawaii’s contemporary pop music of its decades-long affair with the Jawaiian sound. I’m writing to tell you that you have the opportunity to not only support the creation of new music for Hawaii, but to also make a new friend in the process.
Help Tim reach his Kickstarter goal before Friday morning: visit timrosemusic.com/kickstarter.
For more from Roger, check out his blog at alohagotsoul.com.
