LA singer/songwriter Rosy Nolan offers the first look at her debut album ‘Main Attraction’ with the storm-soaked, fiddle-driven single “Rising Up” – a burst of gothic country charged with the urgency of political resistance.
Stream: “Rising Up” – Rosy Nolan
The rain comes hard and fast, pooling in the streets and flooding the sky with its heavy gray haze.
You can almost feel the damp air clinging to your skin, smell the sharpness of wet asphalt and redwood bark. In that kind of weather, everything slows down – except for the thoughts racing in your head. Rosy Nolan’s “Rising Up” channels that mood and that motion: A storm in the mind and the heart, where political unrest and personal reckoning churn together. It’s gothic country at its finest – a mix of old world and new, bluegrass and blues, with searing fiddle and mandolin dueling in the downpour, and Nolan’s voice cutting through the fray like a signal fire in the dark.
The hooks are missing from under the bar
The porcelain mug is cracked
My fingertips are sticky from breakfast
This shirt barely covers my back
I’m sitting up real high on a barstool
Just waiting for someone to call
Nick Cave bleeds out
through the ceiling speakers
Then drips down the cafe walls
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Rising Up,” Rosy Nolan’s first release of 2025 and the lead single off her forthcoming debut album Main Attraction (independently out October 17). Steeped in Americana roots, Western swing, honky tonk, and vintage country, Main Attraction pays homage to the great American records of the 1920s–1940s while baring Nolan’s own heart and history. “Rising Up” is one of the record’s most politically charged tracks – written during the 2016 presidential election, yet made newly urgent in the years since – pairing imagery of floodwaters, destruction, and Northern California’s winding coastal roads with the roaring fire of Nolan’s delivery.
This song is a force of nature in every sense: The fiddle work sears and the guitars pulse with urgency, with each upstroke hotter and heavier than the last. Above that rising tide, Nolan’s voice soars – clear, aching, charged with raw feeling, heartache, and defiance. Light vocal harmonies in the chorus add extra lift to an already hard-hitting hook, a rallying cry wrapped in melody:
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down every barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy, to destroy
It’s a vivid image of overwhelm and erasure, the kind of scene where nature’s force mirrors the weight of social and political upheaval. Each line swells like the waters she’s singing about, the melody lifting even as the words paint a picture of collapse. By the time she repeats “to destroy,” it’s less a cry of defeat than a declaration that, even stripped bare, she’s still here – still singing.
That fight for voice and visibility is rooted in place for Nolan, who traces “Rising Up” back to the winding roads and rain-soaked landscapes of her old Northern California home.
“I was thinking a lot about Mendocino County when I wrote this song,” Nolan tells Atwood Magazine. “How no one in LA seemed to know how to drive in the rain. I didn’t realize it was a NorCal superpower until I moved down here. I spent a lot of time weaving up and down Highway 1 when I was up north, hugging those turns as I pressed on the gas, flirting with the broken yellow line. Dappled light spilling through the redwood canopy like some holy revelation. Cigarette in hand, trouble in mind, and me chasing the next mile marker on my way to feeling fine.”
It’s a poetic snapshot that captures both the song’s cinematic scope and its intimate core: The road as a place of meditation, escape, and reckoning. That drive becomes a metaphor for surviving turbulence – personal, political, environmental – with grit and grace.
I’m ignoring the paper on the counter
Can’t bear the news these days
Shaking my head wherever I go
At this country in disarray
These Angelenos can’t handle the rain
They slow to a crawl down the highway
I’m from up north where clouds clutter the sky
On bad roads we quicken our drive
Written in the tense days leading up to the 2016 election, “Rising Up” was born from a deep unease. Nolan recalls sitting in a Los Angeles café during a torrential rainstorm, hearing Nick Cave bleed through the speakers like it was dripping down the walls. “It was clear Trump was going to win,” she says. “I was donating money, phone banking, going to protests and rallies. I was really caught up in it all.” The area was hit by so much rain that the Los Angeles River threatened to flood; homes were being sandbagged. “I felt overwhelmed by this deluge – both the rainfall and the political adversity – and silenced by the storm and the tense political climate,” she remembers.
That sense of urgency surges through “Rising Up” from the first measure to the last. It’s there in the way Julian McClannahan’s fiddle and Billy Lupton’s mandolin spar and entwine, in the steady gallop of the rhythm section, and in the edge of Nolan’s voice when she sings, “The water is rising up and drowning the sound of my voice. It breaks down every barricade, leaves nothing left to destroy.”
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down ever barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy
Rosy Nolan has long used her voice to fight for women’s rights, to lobby bills with the ACLU, and to protest injustice in her community.
On “Rising Up,” that activism intertwines with her artistry. The result is a song that refuses to be quiet – a reminder that even in the heaviest rain, we can still speak, still stand, still push forward.
With Main Attraction due in October, “Rising Up” sets a powerful tone for what’s to come: An album of resilience and reckoning, joy and longing, all carried by a voice that can be tender as a candle’s flicker or fierce as the wind before a storm.
Stream “Rising Up” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and let this one move through you like the weather – sudden, unstoppable, and alive.
The water is rising up
And drowning the sound of my voice
It breaks down ever barricade
Leaves nothing left to destroy, to destroy
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:: stream/purchase Main Attraction here ::
:: connect with Rosy Nolan here ::
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Stream: “Rising Up” – Rosy Nolan
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