“Carlo Rossi” (Love in the Face of Great Danger) by Tyson Motsenbocker, Saturday, April 22, 2023 (reformatted repost)

Last year, my most streamed song on Spotify was Tyson Motsenbocker’s “Carlo Rossi” (Love in the Face of Great Danger). I wrote about the song in December, but the weather didn’t seem appropriate for Motsenbocker’s tropical sounds. While it’s only April and I’m kind of on a mini-vacation, I thought that this song would be a fun revisit, particularly after the heavy subject matter from the previous two days. That’s not saying that the subject of this song about falling in love when the world is on fire isn’t just as serious—it’s just the chill guitar riff adds that illusion. Enjoy the rest of the original post from December!

TAKE ME ON A NEW VACATION. "Carlo Rossi" (Love in the Face of Great Danger) is my pick for song of the year for 2022. Tyson Motsenbocker condenses a novel's worth of theme into a single song while offering vivid imagery that feels like a classic film, yet it is uncanny how contemporary that classic film seems. On the Labeled Podcast, Motsenbocker unpacked the themes of "Carlo Rossi" and helped listeners understand some of the esoteric language of the song. Motsenbocker sets the song in Central or South America during a riot. The speaker of song and his love climb into an abandoned hotel with a bottle of cheap wine, Carlo Rossi, and drink it from the bottle watching the riot unfold. As I listen to "Carlo Rossi," I always picture a cinematic version of a Tennessee Williams play, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman or Gregory Peck, portraying an expatriate experience millennials read about in literature class when we read about the Roaring '20s  or saw in old movies when the advent of the jetliner made tropical destinations all the rage. But we never really enjoyed this experience because of a slowing economy. 

THEY BURNED A CAR IN THE PARKING LOT. Both on the Labeled Podcast and The Black Sheep Podcast, Motsenbocker talks about the themes of his latest record, Milk Teeth. The title of the record refers to growing up; baby teeth are the soft teeth that we lose in early childhood and sometimes referred to as milk teeth because they are the teeth that grow while a baby is still nursing. He describes the record as the one where he is putting the past to bed, dealing with becoming an adult. He also discusses how the moving goalposts for his generation has created a generation of nostalgia. He says, "As millennials, not only were we not sold that our future was going to be this Blade Runner dystopian hellscape that it's turning out to be, but we were sold that it was going to be so much better than anything that had ever come before us, that you could be anything you wanted to be; you could be the president; you can be an astronaut . . . and everything you do is amazing." Motsenbocker talks about living moment by moment in the present, which becomes a collection of moments that feel right that lead to another moment that feels right. On Labeled, Motsenbocker explains that the song deals with his success at a time when the world seems to be on fire. For Motsenbocker those moments that feel right led him into a relationship and into a marriage. It's a song about coming of age at what seems like the end of the world, and living the best you can with those circumstances. I'll drink to that!

Read “Carlo Rossi (Love in the Face of Great Danger)” by Tyson Motsenbocker on Genius.

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