Atticus Roness

Atticus Roness has written about eleven hundred songs and remembers the chords to the four hundred and fifty he rates.

Roness played a live session in the McBastard Studio before sitting down for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, an episode Brad opened by pointing out that it was sponsored by absolutely nobody. They had first been in touch six or seven months earlier. Brad heard the Beatles in the set and said so, which landed well, because Roness got a Beatles chord book from his parents as a kid, every song A through Z, and read it like a Bible.

He got his first guitar at eleven, a tiny silver thing, and played Ode to Joy on it until his mother asked him to close the door. His father's Jeep was where the rest of it came from, hours of ELO, AC/DC, Zeppelin and the Clash with no say in the playlist. Later he worked at a record store called Waterloo Sunset Records, where the slow shifts meant getting paid to sit in a library of records he had never given himself a chance to hear. That is where his taste for country and soul came from, and he still pulls George Jones and Gil Scott Heron into rock songs. He forgets his own lyrics and has to read them. The chords stay.

He was in a band with his brother, the Corduroy Blue, from the age of sixteen. Ed Roland of Collective Soul took a chance on them, let them record a single at his house, and pointed them to Will Turpin's studio in Jonesboro. Then his brother left to become an actor, the band ended, and Roness was twenty three and lost. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and was looking at moving out. A guy named Caleb Heipel, who he had met at one of the last Corduroy Blue shows, texted him out of the blue offering to produce, and they cut his first solo record, Square One, in Caleb's mom's basement. He went from a Collective Soul studio to a basement, then to Tweed Recording in Athens for Power Pop World Domination, and still plays cover gigs for venues that insist on them.

Brian Collins called him back to the Jonesboro studio after hearing the second record, and Will Turpin took him on properly this time. Turpin texted him recently to ask whether he was more of an uncle or a big brother. In April they opened for Collective Soul at the arena in Dothan, where nobody in the seats was there for them, and played a dive bar in Athens the next night with kids spilling beer and shouting for Free Bird. He works at a bar for his day job. One of the regulars, a successful lawyer, told him he envies waking up not knowing whether today is the day.