Mike Dillon’s latest album ‘Rosewood’ musically signifies transition and transformation. The 13-track collection was written and recorded during a period of profound change. Dillon found himself relocating from his fourteen year base in New Orleans to his current residence in Kansas City. This coincided with the beginning a new relationship that would result in marriage. Recorded intermittently between January 2018 and September 2019, its 13 majestic tracks swirl with the tangled and bittersweet emotions of one chapter ending as another began. Dillon created the album solely with vibraphone and percussion instruments and titled the record ‘Rosewood’ after the type of lumber used to make marimba bars.

“I started spending time in Kansas City in August 2017, where I’d previously lived in 1997,” explains Dillon. “My friend of twenty years, Peregrine Honig, invited me to see her beautiful art studio converted from an old church building called Greenwood Social Hall. By December, I brought my marimba there and would play for hours. The songs on this record wrote themselves in that sonically sacred space.”

Furthering this metamorphosis, ’Rosewood’ also finds Dillon, who’s been hailed “a punk jazz provocateur,” shifting from the freewheeling, anything goes aesthetic that informed his primary touring unit, The Mike Dillon Band, to a more conceptual and compositional approach. He’d hinted at this side of his musical personality with the 2016 album release ‘Functioning Broke,’ as well as, three performances with his 23-piece New Orleans Punk Rock Percussion Consortium at The Music Box Village. The introspective ‘Functioning Broke,’ however, relied heavily on outside material, including songs by Elliott Smith, Neil Young and Martin Denny, while the latter performance experiment required the massive energy generated by two dozen musicians on percussion and mallet instruments. On ‘Rosewood,’ Dillon boils down the essence of those two projects into a focused auditory journey, drawing almost exclusively on his own compositions with exception of two additional Elliott Smith songs, “Talking To Mary” and “Can’t Make A Sound,” along with the ghostly take on Johnny Cash arrangement of the classic Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt.” Dillon performed all of the parts himself with exception of contributions by drummer and frequent collaborator Earl Harvin and the guiding hand of Dillon’s old friend, recording engineer Chad Meise.