
Rogue Wave is ready to release their new album, Permalight, on March 2nd. The back story to this album is an interesting one:
In September 2008, after the band returned to Oakland following a summer tour, Rogue played a solo show opening for Nada Surf. Two days later, the singer woke up and couldn’t move. There was some concern that he might be having an aneurysm or heart attack, so doctors wheeled an X-ray machine into his living room to check his‚ heart and lungs. It turns out Rogue had slipped two discs in his neck, which were pressing on his spinal cord. “It was the worst pain I had experienced,” he says.
Over the next few months, his condition grew worse until he eventually lost feeling in his right hand. Con¯¬ned to his bed, there was nothing doctors could do for him, no medications that could relieve his pain. “I just felt like I was being tortured,” Rogue says. “I felt like I was dying.”‚ In January, the pain began to gradually lift, giving him just enough sensation to pick up the guitar and strum it. He celebrated the recovery the best way he knew, by pouring his relief into new material. “When I started writing I wanted to make a record that was a little more up, a record you could move your body to because I couldn’t move for so long,” Rogue says. “I told Pat I wanted to make a total dance album.”
To do that Rogue decided to make a conscious break from the past. “I decided when I picked‚ up the guitar again I didn’t want to play anything I knew,” he says. “Even if that meant yelling into the microphone or detuning a guitar, I wanted to record all those ideas.”
Here’s the free track they’ve offered up.







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This is really a huge loss. He was a prolific and talanted musician. I was never really into his music, but he seemed to be getting into a lot of different types of music. I know he was working on a few projects that were supposed to be departures from the punk/garage rock stuff and it would have no doubt been excellent.
fml. please put that comment under jay retard’s death.