Gold Star

Hollywood speaks and Marlon Rabenreither listens. The artist known as Gold Star works at a bookstore there, where the streets are perpetually cluttered with a melange of strange and compelling characters, some of whom occasionally provide Rabenreither with music: “I was listening to all these rivers,” someone muttered near him one night not too long ago, “and they all run in the key of C.” 

“I’m just like, ‘Keep talking, I’m writing this down,’” Rabenreither says, recalling the moment he got the line that eventually became the chorus of “3 Rivers,” the finale of his latest LP, East Side Blues. “I have no idea what that means or where that comes from, but it sounded so beautiful to me. Like, what if she’s fucking right?”

“3 Rivers,” like the rest of East Side Blues, reads like a chapter from a Denis Johnson book and sounds like a cosmic country adventure being gently brought back down to Earth — like something worthy of soundtracking a movie made at one of the studios just down the street from Rabenreither’s job. Working with iconic producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck, Guided by Voices, Kurt Vile), Rabenreither hit on something new on this record that he’s been building toward during his entire rise in the L.A. rock scene: “I feel like it’s been a long time finding my voice,” he says. “Not necessarily the timbre of it or the range, but on a more existential level. I feel like this record, in a way, sounds more like me than anything I’ve done.” 

Rabenreither’s story starts in Vienna, Austria, where he was born into a musical family, literally, as his parents played in a band with a light shoegaze sound in the style of Mazzy Star. The family moved to Los Angeles when Rabenreither was four, and the musical genes kicked in soon after. With some help from his dad, Rabenreither taught himself how to play the guitar, and began writing his own songs partially because he found that to be easier than learning how to play someone else’s. “I could do that,” he laughs. “I could figure that out.” Rabenreither eventually went to Los Angeles County High School for the Arts on the east side of town, and initially thought his calling was in visual arts. But it wasn’t long before he realized that music was what he was born to do. “It pulls you back in,” he says. 

Before Gold Star started, Rabenreither was playing in the Sister Ruby Band — a crucial chapter in which he learned to harness the spirit of both regal ballads and punk rock in his songwriting. Then Lucinda Williams changed the course of his life. The country legend invited Rabenreither to open for her with a solo acoustic set, a dream scenario for which there was just one problem: He’d never done anything like that before. “But she’s Lucinda Williams,” he remembers thinking, “so obviously I have to figure it out.” Gold Star was born that night — named for the famed Gold Star Studios in Hollywood where everyone from the Beach Boys to the Ronettes recorded — as Rabenreither discovered that, sometimes, you can do more with less: “When you’re already kind of more exposed like that,” he says, “inherently it just digs a little deeper.”

More than a decade later, Gold Star has become a quiet institution in dive bars and beat-up cars, and for East Side Blues, Rabenreither has created the most affecting and unforgettable collection of his career. Recorded over two and a half days at Rob Schnapf’s Mant Sounds Studio, Rabenreither assembled musicians like Connor “Catfish” Gallaher (Father John Misty, Lana Del Rey) and Jay Rudolph (Weyes Blood, Marina Allen) to hunker down with him and trust their instincts — and to trust Schnapf, too. Schnapf helped Rabenreither to “get out of my own way,”  he says, with early takes and raw, untreated vocals. He also encouraged the band to record almost everything live, like opener “Easy Money,” a heartland-style heartbreaker, and “Joyriding,” a Tom Petty–worthy freight train of a song. “Jesse came by, bandaged in white,” he sings on the latter track, “With a fifth of Four Roses, and pinpricks for eyes.”

East Side Blues is the product of a crossroads moment for Rabenreither creatively and personally, a transmission from a pivot point in his journey as he reflects on the paths he’s already walked. And while he has such a literary style that you might assume he’s creating characters in these songs, he’s actually just writing about himself and those around him. “It’s all either happened to me or to my friends,” he shrugs. Take the soaring “State Lines,” for instance, with a line about seeing “Valley girls on cemetery walls.” That’s a reference to one particularly woozy night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which started with an outdoor screening of the Nicolas Cage classic Valley Girl before things turned sour at a nearby bar. 

The record is a visit to the L.A. that Rabenreither is listening to on the streets at night — the one that’s a little rough at times, but inspiring all the same, just as indebted to Elliott Smith as it is to authors like Raymond Chandler and John Fante. The L.A. that’s “not just palm trees and fucking sunshine,” he says. The one in his song “Abre Camino,” which refers to a prayer candle that his friend bought him that promises to reveal new, better worlds ahead. “You light it and you say a prayer,” he says. “Come open my roads.”