Rozi Plain: Roam From Home

Years ago, in Manchester, I promoted a gig for Thanksgiving, for an artist with the onstage moniker of Adrian Orange. It was the first show I'd ever put on, and I was nervous. I'd not come into contact with real touring musicians and artists before, and it was surreal.

Wearing sandals and strange necklaces – and speaking mutteringly about ice cream – Adrian arrived with another songwriter I loved, a tiny Frenchman called François, who seemed half of six-foot-four Adrian's size. Next to François stood his girlfriend Rozi, and their drummer Rose. To me it seemed like they had stepped out of another world, one that Jeffrey Lewis calls ‘Art Land' in a song. I felt like Lisa Simpson in that episode of The Simpsons where she goes to the beach and makes new hippy friends.

Later, I learned that Rozi made her own music and Rose drummed with a band called Sleeping States. Later still, Rozi would move to London, where I lived and made my own music, and I would play in her band. And I would see that Art Land isn't really any different to the other world; it just involves doing less maths, and you can hang out with your friends during the week, not just the weekend. Those are the main differences.

So now I play with Rozi. And, not long after the release of her second album, Joined Sometimes Unjoined, here we are talking about her music, in the daytime, in the week. I know from experience she can be hard to prise open: when we did a session for Lauren Laverne, Rozi answered each question measure for measure, careful not to offend or tip the balance. Laverne shuffled in her chair, frustratedly.

“People always say, what sort of music do you play, and I say, ‘Oh god… sort of indie… folky… pop songs,' and it makes me squirm,” Rozi tells me. Her music is hard to place – there's a ramshackle folkiness about the hand-picked guitar lines, but there's a groove to her drums and guitars that springs from American and British indie sensibilities. Her voice sits atop, calm and clear, like a lighthouse overseeing the waves.

“People always say, what sort of music do you play, and I say, 'Oh god'” – Rozi Plain

Rozi grew up in Winchester, a small town with a big cathedral. At 16, her brother Sam, the songwriter Romanhead, took over the local open mic night at The Railway, a little pub with a black box of a band room and a hallway scented with vomit. “He gave me a guitar, he got me into music,” Rozi explains. Her parents weren't hugely musical themselves, “but would listen to a lot of stuff – quite a lot of folk music, and English folk music.” As a family they would listen to Van Morrison, who she describes as occupying “such a gigantic place in my heart.”

Her first album, Inside Over Here, was recorded partly in Winchester by her brother, and partly in Scotland with Kenny Anderson, alias King Creosote, Fence Records doyen. Rozi met Anderson after she and her brother put on a show for King Creosote in Bristol: “We gave them a CD of our stuff, and then we started being friends; then I did that album and they released it.” By then, she'd moved to Bristol to do an art foundation degree and met Rachael Dadd, a songwriter and one of Rozi's kindred spirits, and François.

If the first album's gestation was relatively simple, Joined Sometimes Unjoined was comparatively tortuous. “It took absolutely forever,” she sighs. “I had a few crises doing it. I started an album about three times. It was indecisiveness and doubt, and a couple of things making me question everything and making me feel I was incapable and didn't know how to finish it. And then realising I could… and then worrying again.”

And yet, the record sounds very much a piece: it reminds me of Bristol, of the DIY scene there; the people and the places, the steeped houses with old-glass windows, showers with heaters, open views over the city from Montpelier. Gigs played in sheds, cinemas and front rooms, on old guitars and baby amps. Its lyrics circle around homes: Cold Tap explains that 'it will take twice as long / if you don't turn it all the way on'; Eating in Your House starts with the sound of rain and seagulls, the narrator singing of 'following you home.' Slices states: 'How right is / your cupboard when it's full of life and slices'.

Where or what is home for her? “Often in reviews, I get described as really English,” she says. “At first it surprised me, but then it made sense. I've got a plummy accent!” With its old charity shops and cobbled streets, Winchester is steeped in a cosy, English mixture of history and homeliness, and it's a warmth that finds echoes in Rozi's music. “I love England, and I'm feeling especially fond of it recently. I like the vibe, the weather, the feel of it. You're really connected to the whole history before you, without realising, when you live in a place.”

On hearing some of Rozi's new songs, I notice they've got that same wistful melancholy, but have a wider scope and broader lyrical landscapes. Since finishing Joined Sometimes Unjoined she's left Bristol, briefly moved to London, and now lives an itinerant life on friends' floors or on tour, playing her own music or performing with her long-term collaborator, Kate Stables of This Is The Kit.

“I wanted to not feel so bound to a place,” she explains. “It felt like it would be really hard to move to London, and actually it wasn't. It made me feel more freed up.

“And now I don't live anywhere, so I'm completely free!”