Story Behind the Song: Runaway June, ‘Blue Roses’
Runaway June's "Blue Roses" is a deeply personal song for all three members of the band, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of the style of music that brought the trio together in the first place. Read on as the group's Naomi Cooke shares the story behind the song.
It just made sense to us to name the album Blue Roses after this song, because it's one of our favorite songs we've ever written over the duration of this band, and it's a really personal song for all of us.
All of us have lost people that we love. My brother was killed in a car accident a few years ago, and I wrote that song with him in my heart. So it's a song that really, really connects us with our audience. It makes everyone feel like we're in a living room whenever we play it. It doesn't matter where [we are]. So it was kind of unanimous that that was the name of [our 2019 album], that everyone can go straight to it.
It's the oldest song that we wrote [on this album]. And it's so special to us. We all formed a band as songwriters. We all met in a songwriter's room. So that song is all about three-part harmony, and it's organic. We grew up on traditional country music and bluegrass, and that's kind of the heart of the band, and [the song] ends in three-part harmony, too, so it was kind of cool to end the record in a cappella, three-part harmony. Because that's where we started, as a band.
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