North County duo Lonesome Roses, featuring Molly Jenson of Rancho Bernardo and Rheanna Downey of Encinitas, began a few years ago as Shhhhh!, before realizing their unusual name was hard to say or explain. But the music on their debut EP was clearly of high quality, instantly placing them among San Diego’s most talented up-and-coming acts.
This week, they kick off the second year of a monthly series at Fox Point Farms in Encinitas that features a different musical guest each month. The shows are entirely unplugged, held in a small glass-walled building with great natural acoustics.
Jenson and Downey’s impressive circle of friends means they often recruit top-notch guests; last fall, Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins joined them.
View this post on InstagramLonesome Roses have spent much of the past two years writing for Paramount, contributing more than 30 songs to the company’s library for future use in film or TV. They’re also gearing up to record an album of their own with producer Tyler Chester (Madison Cunningham, Margaret Glaspy, Watkins Family Hour).
For the latest installment of our “Five Questions” series, we caught up with Lonesome Roses shortly after they played a February gig at Jitters Coffee Pub in Oceanside with Jason Mraz (who recently became a co-owner of Jitters). Mraz also is booked for the Fox Point Farms series, which begins Thursday with guest Derren Raser ($26.50; 6:30 p.m. doors open for the 7 p.m. show).
How did your monthly series at Fox Point Farms come about?JENSON: We make goals for the year every year, and one of our goals in 2024 was to find a place to play unplugged with really good acoustics in San Diego. We realized we had some great places to play in L.A., but we really wanted something in our town.
We played a house concert at one of Rheanna’s friend’s houses, and there was a guy in the audience who owned an art studio. He he came up to us and said, “I have this art studio that has really incredible acoustics. You should play a show there.” We went and checked it out, and it was incredible. So we worked with him in Little Italy for 2024. It ended up being about eight shows. We loved it so much, but things were kind of changing with his space, and we wanted to do something in North County.
So Rheanna reached out to Fox Point Farms, because she had a connection there. And they had this space that was just so beautiful. Brian, who designed and developed and runs it all, invited us to play, and he keeps asking us to come back. They were super generous with us. They still are.
2. The guests so far for this year are Derren Raser on March 26, Jason Mraz on April 30, and Tristan Prettyman on June 25 (with artists to be announced on May 28 and July 30.) Can you tell me a little about how you booked these acts?
JENSON: I went to college with Derren at Point Loma Nazarene University, and we were friends there. We both were working on our solo music around 2005-06. We played a lot of shows together. I’ve always been a huge fan of his. Rheanna found him around the same time, and was a fan of his as well. He left town for a while and was living in Kansas City, but he moved back, and we reconnected with him. It’s important for us that the people we have playing with us are people we really love and respect and really, really dig their music. Collaboration is important to us too, so we want to be able to collaborate withthem. So he’s such a perfect fit.
DOWNEY: I think one of the things that’s unique to for us with these shows is that we’re bringing in a certain caliber of musicianship. It’s really important to us that they be veteran musicians on some level, not just “we play a couple gigs in the area,” but this has been their career path for a while. Everybody should know that these are veteran musicians, that this is their livelihood. It’s not a hobby. This is what they do. And they’re very, very good.
3. The Jason Mraz and Tristan Prettyman shows are already sold out, not surprisingly. Can you tell me about how you connected with the two of them?
JENSON: I worked at a coffee shop when I was 22 and my co-worker was obsessed with Jason. She dragged me to one of his shows at Java Joe’s in Ocean Beach, and it was the most incredible show. He just commanded the room. He may have had a self-released album at that point, but he definitely had not been on a label yet. After the show, we kind of said hi to each other. I’ve done a couple events where I’ve been pulled up to sing with him over the years. The way we kind of got reconnected was that Anya Marina was back in town playing a show at Jitters, and she asked me and Tristan Prettyman to come play. And then I asked Rheanna to come. I played a solo song, and then Rheanna came up and we played one of our songs. After that, Jason asked us to play a show at Jitters, and we asked him to play our shows at Fox Point Farms.
DOWNEY: We’ve both known Tristan separately for years. All of these people we know separately. We have connection points, but from when Molly and I weren’t even friends. I’ve known Tristan forever, because I surf and Tristan surfs, and we also play music. She knows me as a musician. I had loose connections to the surf industry, and I would see her over the years, and she would catch me up on what was going on with her music. When we played that show with Anya Marina, It was like full circle. I think that’s the first time she’d seen Lonesome Roses play. So it was like instantly like, oh my gosh, we should be playing shows together. So that’s how we got her (on the series).
4. How did writing songs for Paramount come about?
JENSON: I have a really good friend in L.A. and her brother-in-law’s wife was a music executive, and she came to our show. The whole time she was on her cell phone, and I was like, oh, she hates us. But afterward, she came up to me and was like, “Would you guys be interested in writing for film and TV?” And I was like, “Yes, we absolutely want to do that.” She asked us to send her our catalog of what we’d written. So we sent that off to her the next day, and within a couple days, she got back to us and said, “This is great, I love it, but we are really interested in hiring you to write five original country songs for our music library.” We contacted another old friend that I went to college with, Mark Suhonen. The very first band I was in was with him when I was 18 or 19. We played a house concert that he ended up coming to, and we reconnected there. So we started working with him as an engineer and drummer, and we wrote these five songs for Paramount. We sent them fully produced songs, and they loved them. One guy said it was the best group of songs that they had gotten as long as he’s worked there.
DOWNEY: They were so encouraging. Every time we’ve done rounds of songs for them, it’s like somebody telling you how beautiful you are or something. They’re just like, “Oh, I loved this part, I got chills here.” It was just like, “OK, thank you so much!”
JENSON: They gave us a few changes, like add a harmony here, or bring up the drums here. And then once we sent the final songs, a week later they hired us to do 10 more. So we’ve done four jobs for them now. It was the beginning of 2024 that we started working for them, and in that time, we’ve written 35 songs for them.
DOWNEY: I do want to say also that we had put down on our goals list that we wanted to write for TV. That was a big one for us that year. I think just stating what you want is an important thing, so you know what you want.
5. Is there ever any conflict between what you write for Paramount and ones you want to keep for yourselves? And to that end, is there a new Lonesome Roses record in the works?
DOWNEY: Our new single (“When I’m Gone”) is a song that we had written for Paramount and decided we would like to keep. Here’s the deal: They tell us, “We want 10 songs,” and then we go out to the desert or wherever and we write a lot of songs. We write more than the songs that they ask us to write, and we determine what is for us and what is for them. It’s just that simple. Sometimes we figure it out when we’re in the recording process, but nothing belongs to them until we send it off. So we’ve never been in a situation where we’ve given them a song and been like, “Wait, I want that back.” We determine that ahead of time.
JENSON: We have just signed on to work with Tyler Chester, who’s up in Los Angeles. He’s worked with a lot of artists we really love, and is another longtime friend. We are right now working on getting our plan together to start fundraising so we can pay for this, but we plan on recording this summer. We’ve got all the songs. I mean, honestly, the problem for us is that every time we sit down to practice, we start writing a new song, because we get inspired.
DOWNEY: I feel like he’s going to help us narrow down what this record should look like. Because if it was up to us, we would just be making this epically long record that we couldn’t afford and have no business making. So I think it’s really important that we have someone like him.
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