Artist: The Rose Petals
Hometown: Nashville / Seattle
Song: “They Say You Loved a Good Man”
Album: American Grenadine
Release Date: April 23, 2021
Label: Envoy Records
In Their Words: “This song is about Calvin Coolidge, who served as president from 1923 to 1929, apologizing to his wife, Grace, for his shortcomings as a husband. Grace and Cal were an unlikely pair, and her friends found the match quite unbelievable. She was warm, friendly, outgoing, gregarious, and cheerful. He was quiet, austere, deliberate, uncommunicative, and sometimes glum. The Coolidges lived happily together for twenty-eight years, but when Grace was asked, toward the end of her life, how she had come to marry her husband, she said, ‘Well, I thought I would get him to enjoy life and have fun, but he was not very easy to instruct in that way.’
“So, really this song is about regret. It’s about living your life with the best intentions yet still falling short of expectations. Musically we wanted to tap into that wistful vibe, so we borrowed a bunch of tricks from some of our older influences – acoustic 12-string from The Byrds, synthesizer from the ’80s records of Bruce Springsteen, and some Beach Boys harmonies to top it off at the end.” — Peter Donovan, The Rose Petals
Photo credit: Dan Destiny
