Paul Rodgers has nothing left to prove, which is usually when the most interesting records show up. Midnight Rose, his first solo album in years, doesn’t announce itself as a comeback or a victory lap. It just exists—eight songs, 34 minutes, no filler—and that restraint says as much as the music does.
Asked to name a favorite track, Rodgers didn’t hesitate. “Let me say the title track alone does a lot,” he said. What grabbed him wasn’t the arrangement or the performance, but the writing. “The simpler the message, the better, the more powerful it is,” he explained. Lines like “If there was a red rose in a smoky room / I’m sure that rose would fade and die” do the heavy lifting, quietly. “It’s a simple way of saying you’re not alone,” he added.
That clarity runs through the whole album, which wasn’t planned as an album at all. Rodgers described the record as something that “developed” rather than something he decided to make. After years of touring with various bands, his own songs had been sidelined. “My own acoustic stuff that I was playing in hotel rooms… wasn’t getting a look in,” he said. A break at home changed that. Acoustic guitars came out. Songs piled up. “I thought, well, let’s put it all together and see what we’ve got.”
Instead of chasing a concept, Rodgers took those songs into the studio with a small core band—Rick Rarick on guitar, Todd Ronning on bass, and Rick Fedyk on drums—and treated the sessions like an experiment. “I didn’t say, ‘Let’s go in the studio and make an album,’” he said. “I just said, ‘Let’s go in and see what we come up with.’ Sometimes that’s all you need.”
That looseness doesn’t mean the process was casual. Rodgers was blunt about the illusion of spontaneity. “In theory, it should take five minutes to record a five-minute song,” he laughed. “But it takes ages to get the sound right, to get the atmosphere right.” The goal, though, was always for the end result to feel effortless. “You want it to sound like it just came down from the sky,” he said. “That’s what takes the time.”
The blues loom large over Midnight Rose, but not as a retro move. On the lead single “Living It Up,” Rodgers namechecks Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles—heroes who changed his trajectory early on. “The blues is behind all the rock and roll licks,” he said flatly. “It’s a staple of everything.” He traced a straight line from Muddy Waters to Led Zeppelin to Hendrix. “The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll,” he quoted, approvingly.
That lineage isn’t academic for Rodgers—it’s practical. Learning the 12-bar blues, he said, was what unlocked songwriting in the first place. “There are a million songs already written on that structure, and yet there’s still room for another million,” he said. “That’s an amazing structure.”
“Meltin’,” one of the album’s standouts, taps directly into that current. Rodgers described it as the most recent song written for the record, even if it sounds timeless. “I got the riff first and thought, that sounds very bluesy—where will that take me?” he said. The lyrics followed instinct, conjuring images of an outlaw on the run. “I just go with it. It creates an atmosphere.”
Elsewhere, inspiration came from unexpected places. “Take Love,” a song Rodgers had road-tested live with Queen years earlier, finally found its definitive version here—and it started with a cat. “We had a cat called Shiday,” he said, laughing. “You couldn’t get near her.” Hearing someone say, ‘I can’t love you if you keep walking away,’ sparked the song instantly. “That was the opening line,” Rodgers said. “I just went with it.”
That ability to let songs grow over time is something Rodgers values, especially now. Playing a song live before committing it to tape allowed space for perspective. “There are little points you discover by playing it,” he said. “That develops over time.”
The album’s brevity—eight tracks, vinyl-minded in length—was deliberate. Rodgers still thinks in terms of sides and sound quality. “Eighteen minutes a side was really your limit,” he said. “It was a good limitation. There was no fluff.” That discipline shaped Midnight Rose, and it also echoes back to his first solo album, Cut Loose, released 40 years earlier. Looking back, Rodgers called that record “a learning curve,” made at a moment of personal and musical recalibration. “I learned that I need other people to work with,” he said. “You need that spirit that happens between people.”
That spirit is all over Midnight Rose. Chuck Leavell’s presence only reinforces the sense of continuity—musicians who speak the same language, even if they don’t see each other often. “You kind of know each other through the music,” Rodgers said.
At this stage, that seems to be the point. No grand statements, no excess. Just songs, played by people in the room, built on something that never goes out of style. The blues didn’t leave Paul Rodgers behind—and he never tried to outrun it.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
