A cure for the Summertime Blues

Rogue Valley with Communist Daughter and Total Babe
What: CD release party
Where: First Ave., 701 1st Ave. N.
When: Aug. 13, 6 p.m.
Cost: $9 advance, $12 at the door

Local folk strummer Chris Koza sits where you’d expect a local folk strummer to sit: in a coffee shop. This one is Common Roots Café in Uptown, and Koza is right at home. The creative juice behind the moniker Rogue Valley talks the way you’d imagine a folkster to talk: kept, with a quality of pliable candidness. His wife of just over a month is the barista, and she brings him a coffee topped with a foam heart.
Iced coffee, because it’s summertime, damn it.
Koza just finished the second installment in Rogue Valley’s four-LP project dedicated to the seasons. The summer-inspired LP, “The Bookseller’s House,” follows the same folky thread as its spring predecessor, “Crater Lake” — with an added shot of summertime glory. You could say it’s “Crater Lake” sunburned.
“The summer album was kinda challenging, because we wanted to be more adventurous,” Koza said. “We wanted to get near what, for us, was a deep end, but not get too self-indulgent with things.”
For Koza, spring represented awakening — from the claustrophobia of winter, from the halls of academia, from everything winter. If “Crater Lake” was a man waking up, then “The Bookseller’s House” is one wide-awake, jacked on living, for good or bad. Or both, as Koza reminds us on the album’s first track “Rose Festival”: “Nothing goes together better than the good and the bad.”
“[Summer] is a shoot first, ask questions later sort of time. It’s a time where — at least when I felt younger and more invincible — you stay up all night and ride your bike ’til dawn,” Koza said. “It’s a time to have fun with little repercussions.”
Whereas “Crater Lake” was a literary folk opera performed at the sumptuous Fitzgerald Theatre with actors and poets abound, “The Bookseller’s House” translates summer as the season of rock ‘n’ roll. Not only will the clan take its act to the dirge-y sweat chamber of First Ave., but there will, indeed, be electric guitars.
“I used to play electric guitar a lot. I used to play it too much. It didn’t match up well with the kinds of songs I was writing. So when I was approaching this album, I wanted to bring back the electric guitar because it’s one of the contextual differences I wanted to convey on the summer album: to have more energy, to change the instrumentation a little bit,” Koza said.
The band encourages audience members to dress like their favorite pop/rock icons, with “incentives” promised for the festive folk who play along. Wonder if anyone will go as Prince …
Onward, Koza said we can expect the autumnal edition by mid-to-late November, also promising a step out of the sunny grandeur of summer, and into the amber melancholy of fall.
“It’s gonna be a little more atmospheric and organic and earthy,” Koza said. “I just wanna capture the ruggedness of fall.”