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Music

Angelica Rockne’s “Married by Elvis” Is a California Country Classic in 2017

The second single from her debut LP, 'Queen of San Antonio,' is perfectly lonesome.
Photo: Ian Fuenzalida

In between the flashes of honky-tonk energy on Angelica Rockne's forthcoming debut, Queen of San Antonio—when the singer-songwriter dips back into the country canon and pulls out dive-bar dust-ups and cosmic clutter—there are torch songs. That's when Rockne's voice settles in, she starts drinking to forget, the slide guitars back off of one another, and the heart of the record comes through: weary but not quite broken-down.

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"Married By Elvis," premiering on Noisey today, is one of those songs. It's about the passing of time and battered expectations and, the more you let it sink in, the more devastating it becomes. The trick is the chorus, which rises and falls with a forlorn grace that's undercut by the steel at the back of Rockne's throat.

"'Married by Elvis' is like the ending to a long wearying night," Rockne wrote in an email to Noisey. "When everyone's left the show, when you're alone with your incoherent thoughts and reflections. It's about inherent loneliness, and the existential crisis that is modernity, tied to a ride-or-die romance, the desolate bit when the love is used-up but runs deep, you're restless and hungry and whether the feeling will last only for one day or the rest of your life, you just can't quite say."

Listen to "Married by Elvis" below. Queen of San Antonio is out October 27 and you can pre-order it right here. It's extremely worth it.

Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.