Danny Rocco guides us through the heart and soul of the new Des Rocs record, a celebration of rock and roll romance in all its forms.

When the Love is Gone
This song is about losing something that was everything to you. The riffs are aggressive but it’s all tied up in these vulnerable moments. It’s funny because rock music can feel so distant. like it’s coming from up on some hill. But I’ve always felt that when you mix it with real pain & real stories it hits harder than any detuned riff or breakdown on the planet. That’s what I’m always chasing.

Fall Together
Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a place where no matter what you do you’re gonna lose. This song’s about that dead-end feeling when both roads lead to the same place, but you’re experiencing it alongside someone who’s in for the same ride. In a way it serves as the emotional core of the album.. I hope this song can help those navigating those unimaginably tough forks in the road we too often receive in this thing called life.

Sing Me Back to Sleep
This song’s deeply personal. It’s about those things that nourish you in your darkest times. When you’re exhausted. When you feel like the world is crumbling around you.

The More She Wants
This song sure was a challenge. Yes it is a ballad, but it’s not about love in the traditional sense. It’s really about that sort of complicated love within the family. The one that comes with growing up in a tough way and the evolution of it with the passage of time. That ever-changing push and pull. It was one of the hardest to write, but I think it’s one of the most important songs on the album for me personally.

The Riders of Red Hook (Legends Never Die)
Just a fuckin WILD ride of an adventure that poured out of me in a day and was one of the most fun times I ever had writing. We got to record this at the Power Station in the heart of NYC. It’s such an iconic room. You feel the energy in there the second you walk in. Some of my favourite records ever were made there, it just gives you goosebumps. As far as Red Hook goes, I’ve spent so much time in that neighborhood over my life. There was one especially critical time in my life of spending months and months working on a body of work that went absolutely nowhere. It was freezing cold in this little studio in a warehouse on the water. Each night after working some shitty day jobs we’d huddle around space heaters and pour every ounce of strength into making music. We’d wrap late, but since Red Hook is such a transportation desert, we’d have to hike out and wait forever for a subway that felt like it never came. There’s also something about Red Hook that feels like it’s NYC in a different time. Like the NYC of the movie The Warriors.

The King
‘The King’ is this kinda primal explosion that like Riders was just so much fun to make. We went in a million different directions with some hilarious left turns before we went in this direction. At one point this song had a full audio sketch in the middle of it that involved a royal court meeting. The song is all about capturing delusional power.

This Land
I’ll never forget the first call when they were telling me what they were looking for in a song for Borderlands 4. I couldn’t stop grinning. They were describing exactly where my heart lies – rock that is loud, raw, unfiltered & built for a very foreign kinda landscape. This song’s got that unhinged wild energy. It’s real and it’s rowdy like the music I worshipped growing up.

War
‘War’ deals in themes of inner conflict. I’ve written a lot on this subject over the years, and hardly an album goes by without addressing an updated version of it in some way. In fact, my greater body of work is kinda like one big play on this theme – inner conflict, and the duality of a performer versus the demons inside. Sonically, I feel this song really ties together where I’ve been with where I’m headed.

The Juice
This song is like my rock ‘n roll fantasy land. It’s about feelin’ yourself, like a kinda self-empowerment anthem. Again I’ve got a whole lot of duality in me – the entertainer versus the fella battling whatever demon du jour. And this one’s all about letting go and having fun with it. The idea of having this on an album with songs like ‘Fall Together’ or ‘Sing Me…’ or ‘More She Wants’ is just so creatively weird and exciting to me. It’s so representative of who I am as a person and an artist.

Supernaturalize
I’m always trying to push myself into territory I haven’t explored before. With this record I wanted to capture that magic that made rock ‘n roll feel so universal when I first heard it. The kind of energy that makes you feel like the world’s wide open in a way it wasn’t before you pressed play. Those are my favorite types of songs in the world.

The Way
This song’s a real rattlesnake. It’s all about the beast within. It’s that moment when everything feels like it’s about to explode, and you can’t hold it in anymore. This is one I workshopped for many years and had many different versions of before settling down with it. I usually end my albums with sad songs, and like with the new approach to our live shows, I thought it would be a refreshing change of pace to end on a fastball right over the center of the plate.