Battery Acid Romantic: Driving Into the Fog with Rae Cole

I'm driving along a country road outside of Portland, Oregon, called Tile Flat Road. It's early morning, and the fog is laden and heavy, clinging desperately to the ground, to the brown fields, to the skeleton orchards that I'm gunning past. The air outside is cold enough to snap a twig. Inside, the stereo is fighting a war against the silence, pumping out a track called "Box Wine" by a Nashville-based singer named Rae Cole.

It's the right kind of music for driving in the country. It isn't safe music. It makes you want to just keep driving out and into the horizon without looking back, to find the edge of the map and drive right off it. To reach your hand out into a future that doesn't exist yet and squeeze it until it becomes real.

This is my routine drive most mornings, but I've been keeping Rae's music in the chamber more than others lately. I keep coming back to her small but addictive catalog. There is a specific frequency in her voice--a mixture of Southern California sun-bleached optimism and the gravelly, hard-won wisdom of someone who has seen the dream die and decided to wake up and build a new one anyway.

It reminds me of something Lester Bangs might have muttered through a haze of cough syrup: the only true currency in rock and roll is the ability to stand naked in front of a crowd and bleed. Rae Cole is bleeding in 4/4 time, and it sounds fantastic.

She sings, "One day I'm waking up and I'll tell myself, it was worth the walk through hell." My nine-year-old daughter, sitting in the back seat, sings along. She knows the words. She doesn't know about the hell yet, but she will. We all do.

I called Rae on a Saturday at noon. She was in Nashville, nursing the exhaustion of living through November. I was in Oregon, nursing the specific exhaustion of a father who had taken his kids to a concert the night before. We started talking about the things you talk about when the pleasantries die--the wreckage, the music, and the road.

The Battery Acid Romantic

To understand Rae Cole, you have to understand that she is a study in managed contradictions. She grew up in Huntington Beach, California, the oldest of three in that rare, nearly extinct species: the intact, supportive American family. She was singing before she could walk, a child performing on stages at age two, later refined in performing arts academies.

By all accounts, she should have been a manufactured pop product. She has the training. She has the "perfectionist" streak--that self-flagellating whip that artists use to flay the skin off their own backs when the art doesn't match the vision in their heads.

"I've always been a gnarly perfectionist," she told me, her voice crackling with an energy that even the phone line couldn't dampen. "All I've ever wanted was to be great at something."

She describes herself as a "Battery Acid Romantic." It's a lyric from her song "Scared," a track that is a folky-alternative-countryish sound combined with a questioning yell to the universe. "She feels like writing when she's herself, watch her dance like a matchstick, battery acid romantic."

"I don't know where I got battery acid from," she laughed. "But I love that it creates the idea that you're a romantic, but everything just falls apart when you touch it. It feels like you're toxic, so it's just never gonna work out for you."

This is something I love about her songwriting: wonderfully evocative imagery that hides a terrifying depth of self-awareness. We are all trying to be romantics in a world that burns us upon contact. I get that feeling anytime I'm trying to develop connections with people in my life.

The Fine Art of Lying

There is, of course, an undercurrent of darkness to Rae's music. It comes from her time working behind the bar as a bartender, and it feels like there are parts to the job that feed into her music. A fact that she reluctantly confirms.

"I hate being a bartender sometimes," she confessed to me. "I am a big advocate for mental health. It is really tough when you see someone struggling, and they're at the bar, and it's my job to be like, 'Stay here and drink more.' If I really cared about this person, I'd tell them to go home. But I can't. I'm the one making money off you."

You can feel how this moral conflict bled into her song "Fine." A song that was written in chunks--the first verse during the collapse of the commune, the second after her grandfather died. It tackles the great societal lie: How are you? I'm fine.

"Every day a lesson takes a sharp left turn, and suddenly I'm blind to the future I'm so used to seeing. Now it's just a thing I leave behind."

"I wrote that because the rug got pulled out from under me," she said. "You have this future in mind, and then one thing happens, and you're blind. You don't know where you're headed."

I can’t help but feel, as I’m driving, that the song is for the people who are driving on their own Tile Flat Road in the fog, unsure if the road leads home or off a cliff.



The Death of the Commune

Before her solo work, she was one of two lead singers in the band Calling Cadence: a band recording strictly to analog in a digital world. They were picking up momentum and publicity. They had an indie label, a management team, and were playing shows left and right. At the same time, Rae was living a sort of 1970s Laurel Canyon-esque dream, living in a van in a "hippie commune" in Palos Verdes with her ex-boyfriend.

"It was paradise," Rae explained, "thirteen people, waking up, having coffee outside because everyone lived in yurts and vans. We had an analog studio. We were living the dream."

Calling Cadence had the management. They had the "team." They had the image. But if you know anything about the music industry, you know that "the team" is often the first shovel of dirt on the grave.

Rae told me a story about showing up to a music video shoot. She walked in, looking like herself, feeling like an artist, feeling confident in her choices, feeling good about who she was. And instead, the management took one look at her and said, "We have clothes for you."

"I had almost no control back then," she said. "So with this current project, I was like, I'm literally just gonna do everything I freaking want. It's gonna be weird, and I don't even care if it's weird. It's my liberation."

"[Calling Cadence] was a high of my life, for sure," Rae said, her voice dipping into a lower register. "I got to open for The SteelDrivers in Nashville. I was so happy, I cried in the dressing room.” She said with a laugh.

Calling Cadence was burning bright and then, like all beautiful, volatile things, it fell apart. At the same time, the commune scattered. The relationships frayed. It seemed like everything good was ending at the same time. “I lost my friends. I didn't have my boyfriend anymore. The band broke up. Everything happened at once.”

This is part of the context for "Box Wine." It feels like a kind of oxymoron, a hopeful dirge played at double speed. It starts with a record scratch--a nod to the end of her analog era. It's a song about looking at the disaster strewn about you and deciding to pick yourself up, even if you’re not sure what else lies ahead.

Three Days to Nashville

There is a specific madness that overtakes a musician when the safety net snaps. You can either get a job at a bank and die inside, or you can throw your life into a sedan and drive east until the ocean is a memory. And Rae chose the latter.

In late 2022, Rae Cole was homeless in the spiritual and literal sense. Bouncing between couches in Los Angeles, paying rents that would make a medieval serf weep. A friend, a photographer who had been displaced from the same "hippie commune", called her from Tennessee.

"Do you want to move here?"

"Sure."

That was it. A life-altering decision made with the casualness of ordering a sandwich.

"I texted my dad," she recalled. "And we drove my car and rented another little sedan and just boogied across the US. Got here in three days."

They landed in Nashville, the neon beast, the graveyard of a thousand songwriters. Most people arrive in Nashville and spend six months cowering in their apartments. Rae arrived, unpacked, and within the hour, went to an open mic called “Pitch Meeting”. It’s an open mic created specifically to bring together musicians and songwriters to learn and play songs on the fly. It is, by all accounts, very hard to get chosen to come up on stage and play because of the number of people in attendance.

She didn't bring a guitar for her song, but instead she brought a dulcimer guitar. An instrument that had been gifted to her and had “become her thing”.

"I rolled in there," she said. "And I thought, they're gonna pick me. My instrument is the weirdest one here. And they did. I was the first one chosen."

She played a song called "Nashville," written before she had ever stepped foot in the state. “I guess I kind of became ‘the dulcimer chick’ that night,” she laughed. It was the universe relenting, it seemed. Perhaps a sign of the better road ahead.

Soul on a Scooter

I asked Rae about the best thing she's ever done. "I’ve done a lot of weird, fun, crazy things," she said. "I hope I haven't found the 'best thing' I've ever done yet, because that means I have so much more ahead."

Which feels like a wonderful summary of Rae's attitude about life. I found it amazing, given that soon we were talking about some of those weird, crazy experiences--including getting on the back of a scooter in Turkey with a stranger.

"I was twenty-one," she said. "I was in this little town called Selçuk. I met a guy who took me to this village over the mountain. I'm sitting there thinking, I could be taken into a van right now. But I ended up in this closet-sized hole in the wall, drinking wine. It was awesome."

She hitchhiked through Rome with no money. She took her dog on a boat to an island in Croatia. She approaches life with a Hunter S. Thompson-esque appetite for the experience, regardless of the safety rating.

"I thrive when things are a mess," she admitted. "I feel like sometimes I'm addicted to the chaos. I do very well when I'm slightly overwhelmed."

It's a sentiment I understand. When you are an artist, stability feels like death. You need the friction. You need the threat of the scooter crashing on the Turkish mountain road to feel the wine hit your stomach. You cannot manufacture the kind of soul Rae Cole has. You have to earn it.

The Sound of Survival

We talked for well over an hour, rambling through the psychology of perfectionism, the trauma of divorcing a band, and the weird salvation of curiosity. She spoke with the urgency of someone who knows that time is the only thing you can't get back.

"I want people who are at a low point in their life to find the one thing that's going well and follow it like freaking crazy," she told me. "I followed Calling Cadence in my darkest time, and that obviously didn't end up great. But it sent me to Nashville. None of this would have happened if I didn't go through any of that bullshit."

Rae Cole feels like a singer for a burned-out generation. She is Stevie Nicks with a dulcimer, spinning gold out of the wreckage of her twenties. Her music is a permission slip to be weird, to be broken, and to keep driving anyway.

It takes courage to start over. But as she told me, "I'd rather be myself and inspire other people to do the same."

She's succeeding.

The Future Road

Rae is staying put in Nashville and building another dream from the ground up, navigating the muddy waters of being a solo female artist in a town built on the backs of them.

She has a clutch of songs that are ready to go. She’s planning shows. She’s working on building a band, but this time, she's the leader.

"I've never led a band by myself before," she said. "I'm not gonna lie, I'm nervous as hell about that."

But she's doing it. Because the alternative is silence. The alternative is to let fear take the wheel.

Instead, she's waiting for the next wave to crash so she can ride it.

If you see a girl with blue hair playing a dulcimer like it's a weapon and a life preserver, buy her a drink. Just don't ask her for a shot if you're feeling sad. She's seen enough of that.

Ask her about Turkey. Ask her about the commune. Ask her about the music.

And then listen. Because in a world of noise, Rae Cole is a signal worth hearing.