Rocket is a Los Angeles band made up of vocalist/bassist Alithea Tuttle, drummer Cooper Ladomade, and guitarists Desi Scaglione and Baron Rinzler. Tuttle and Ladomade have been friends since preschool, and while all four members connected in their freshman year of high school, it wasn’t until several years later that the project kicked into gear. During lockdown, Scaglione would show Tuttle, his girlfriend demos that she might want to write and sing over – it was a completely new experience for Tuttle, who was on her way to becoming a professional dancer before suffering a serious spinal injury in 2016. Rocket’s grungy, energetic debut EP, Versions of You, arrived in 2023, and led to them opening for their heroes in Sunny Day Real Estate, Ride, and Smashing Pumpkins. Named after a song by ‘90s post-hardcore outfit Radio Flyer, their debut album, R Is for Rocket, was recorded between 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, but rather than calling in a big-ticket indie producer, Scaglione helmed the process himself. All but one of the record’s early singles were tracked at Studio 606, pushing forth its most thunderous and anthemic qualities; but what makes R Is for Rocket such a refreshing, fully-realized debut is its emotional range and earnest experimentation. “I wanna be the one to make it out of your dreams,” Tuttle repeats on ‘Another Second Chance’, as they all sound like they’re living their own.
We caught up with Rocket for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about their friendship, recording R Is for Rocket, showing up, and more.
I saw in another profile that one of the last decisions you made for R Is for Rocket was the album cover, and that was the day before you did that interview. What does it mean for you now that you’ve sat with it for a while?
AT: For the longest time, we had talked about a very specific idea of what the album cover would look like. I do all of our artwork usually, but there was so much to get done that we decided to have someone else do it. The first design we thought would be the cover, once we saw it, we didn’t know if it felt right. Then I was going through old photos we had laying around, and I picked one up, and that’s my dad in the photo. I was like, “I’ll just give it a try.” I cut out the little R, drew it out, and sent it to everybody. That was the only time we all collectively liked something. Before that, we really needed to turn the record cover in, and it was coming up with something we didn’t dislike. I don’t remember if my dad passed before or after we chose the cover.
Desi Scaglione: Before.
AT: Before, yeah. At least for me, it’s nice to know that even though he never got to hear the record – he did hear one new song – we have that as a way of commemorating him. He was a huge fan of the band, and all three of you were close with him too. It maybe wouldn’t be my first choice in every universe, but because of the sentimental meaning, I think we all like it. It was just happenstance – going through photos and being like, “Here’s a cool one.”
Baron Rinzler: It just felt right immediately.
DS: I agree. I don’t even think we knew it was your dad, either. You just sent it.
AT: And I didn’t want to say it was him, because if I’d said right away it was him, of course you would’ve all been like, “That’s amazing.” No one could say, in that moment, “I hate that.”
DS: We did turn in the cover probably the day it was due.
AT: We scrambled, but I’m glad we ended up not going with what we had initially thought of for a really long time.
Even putting its personal resonance aside, that image of skydiving is pretty evocative of the album’s sound. Is it something you would or have tried?
AT: I would absolutely go skydiving. I bet I can predict their answers in my head.
DS: I don’t know if I could. I would consider it if the three of them were like, “We’re going skydiving.” Then I’d be like, “Well, I guess I have to.” More of a FOMO thing. But my first answer is: I would never jump out of a fucking plane, no.
BR: What do you think I would say?
AT: I think you would say yes.
BR: I would say, “Hell yeah.” Absolutely, bro.
AT: What about you, Cooper?
Cooper Ladomade: I don’t know, I feel like I would say yes and then get up there and not do it.
AT: Yeah. I think you’re in the same boat as Desi – if everyone was doing it, you’re getting on that plane. Getting on the plane is the easy part; obviously jumping out is the hard part. You’re never gonna want to do it. You’re gonna be scared the entire time, but then you’re like, “Okay, well…”
BR: Here we go.
DS: It’s one of those crazy things – in that moment, you’re up there and you’re kind of like, “I may be jumping off this plane and killing myself right now. I might be sealing my fate.”
AT: No one dies from skydiving – you’re more likely to get hurt, paralyzed on the impact of landing incorrectly, or if your instructor does. That’s more rare, unless your parachute doesn’t open.
BR: They have an emergency parachute for that reason..
AT: That’s why you go with the guide.
What if it was for a music video?
BR: We should have thought of that. That’d be great for this album.
AT: That would be the easiest way to go do it, honestly – you’d be like, “Well, I have to.”
What comes to mind when you think about experiences or activities outside of music that have really bonded you as a group, however extreme or mundane?
AT: I’m not even joking when I say a bar game. A game at a bar.
BR: Straight up, yeah. Any game.
AT: Bowling.
BR: We do a lot of things together. We’ll come up with a game just at the airport – who can throw something the farthest, or the most accurate.
AT: It’s very serious, and you will be tested.
DS: We’ve all been friends for so long, it’s hard to recall specific moments. But damn, so much of our life is music, even if it’s not as a band – we grew up going to shows together. I mean, Alithea’s dad dying was a very big bonding experience, truly.
BR: That is true.
AT: It makes you rethink, obviously, a lot of stuff; your headspace is totally different post-that. Which is not a fun game, but a game nonetheless. This game of life.
BR: There you go. Which we actually haven’t played altogether.
AT: Oh, Life? You’re right.
BR: This summer in particular, we went swimming a lot. Swimming in pools, not so much the ocean.
DS: Honestly, spending time together outside of the band is very bonding – as fun as this is, there are moments where it does feel serious and like a job, but you have to separate the two.
You said music was part of your friendship in the form of going to shows, but tell me more about those pre-Rocket years of getting to know each other.
DS: I met Cooper and Alithea and Baron all in 2015. We had never played music together until 2020, maybe, when me, Alithea, and Cooper started playing together. But this band didn’t get serious until 2021. But Cooper and Alithea’s friendship predates that by like 15 years.
How close were you, Alithea and Cooper, during that time?
CL: I’m trying to think about preschool…
AT: It was tight the whole time. Never really had a moment where we weren’t.
CL: Yeah.
AT: Us and a couple of our other friends were close basically from the time we met until now.
DS: There’s a group of five girls who all went to the same elementary school together, and they’ve all been friends. The two or three others just don’t happen to be in the band.
AT: Wait, really?
DS: You guys hung out every fucking day.
AT: Literally all of middle school, all of elementary school.
CL: That’s true.
AT: We went to different schools, but we’re still hanging out. Obviously, now there’s just no school.
School of life.
DS: School of Rock.
I know you recorded your debut album in different studios, but a lot of the writing took place at Cooper’s parents’ yard. How did you learn to make each other comfortable in that kind of writing environment?
DS: I think we make ourselves comfortable by being sensitive and trustworthy of one another. If you have an idea and bring it in, one, we’re already like-minded – that’s why we’re in a band together, why it works so well. Chances are everyone’s gonna like it. And we’re good at seeing through all options. Sometimes three of us are on the same page and one person says no, and you ask why, and they’re like, “You just don’t understand what I’m trying to say yet.” Then they show you, and you see the light or you don’t, but at least you tried it. Also, we put an AC in our rehearsal space recently, which has made things very comfortable, climate-wise. [laughs]
BR: I think it just takes trust in each other, to see things through. And a willingness to try new things.
DS: Or, honestly, on the flip side of that, one thing that is very comfortable is none of us think too hard about things. Songwriting is a labor of love, and there’s a time and place to say, “This needs to be better.” But I think one of the hardest things is saying, “This is as good as it will be” – whether it’s the first thing you came up with or not. Because it’s easy to feed a fed horse, and you don’t want to do that all the time.
That said, a lot of the decisions on the record feel very thought-out. Even structurally, the way ‘Crossing Fingers’ and ‘One Million’ are paired together and both hone in on the final choruses.
AT: It’s funny you say that, because live we actually play them together, but flipped. We’ll do ‘One Million’ into ‘Crossing Fingers’. They work both ways, but for some reason that’s how we decided to do it.
AT: Honestly, every decision – there were so many smaller details that probably no one will ever notice, but there were so many meticulous decisions we went through. Tracklisting was definitely a big one. We’d make a playlist of all the songs, put them in an order we thought worked, and go with that for a couple days. I think we were on tour, like, “Let’s just listen to it.” Which, at that point, you’ve heard it literally a million times, so you want to sparingly listen to it so that you’re not getting burnt out on it.
Desi, I feel like a lot of that comes out in the sensitivity of your production – the way you tune into the lyrical nuances of the songs. The cloudier desperation of ‘Crossing Fingers’, for example, feels like a subtle way of honoring the emotional weight of the song.
DS: With all the songs, but a song like that, I think most of the emotion and sensitivity you hear is in the performance. Not to take any credit away from what you’re saying, but when you’re recording something like that, picking the right take is probably the hardest thing – especially with vocals, because that’s where you hear the most passion and emotion. I also tried to mix the vocals on that song, and really the whole record, louder than on the EP. Ultimately, I think that’s something I would go back and change if I could, and I didn’t want to make that mistake. That being said, people will always be like, “The vocals aren’t loud enough,” like your parents and shit.
One of my favorite vocal performances is in ‘Another Second Chance,’ which has another one of those drawn-out endings. Alithea, you’ve called this one one of your favorite moments in writing the record. What made you single it out?
AT: I think just the way that ending came to be was special. We spent so much time really trying to figure out every little detail of it, and it took us, honestly, one really long day of all of us together. Letting our minds run wild, like, “What if it was three times longer?” I also feel like because the ending is very sweet, there’s a lot of time for everybody to shine. The drums are having a moment at a certain point, and obviously the vocals throughout the entire thing are having a moment, and then at the end I play my favorite little bass line on the record. The drums bow out, and then the vocals bow out, and then it’s just their two guitars together, which I feel like is a really special moment, when it’s just the two of them. It was special that we couldn’t even get that take without them looking each other in the eye and turning the metronome off, Baron and Desi. They were just going off how long it felt it should be. And I like the lyrics a lot, I feel proud of those lyrics.
There are a lot of moments like that on the record, and I assume they’re different for each of you: the drum sound on ‘Wide Awake’, the bass and synths on ‘Number One Fan’, the interlocking guitars on the title track.
AT: Those are a lot of really special moments. I feel like we are lucky to truly love every song on this record. In every song, I could pick out something where I’m like, “That’s why that’s my favorite song.”
DS: Some of the most stressful but also fun moments of recording – and I hope we do more of this – were the first song and ‘Number One Fan.’ Those two songs we recorded much differently than every other song. Normally, we’d set up Cooper on drums, Levy on bass, me and Baron on guitars, and just run the song a bunch. But for that first song, it was done in multiple parts. There are electronic drums we did not track to – they were triggered off Cooper’s drums after the fact, but we knew they were going to be there. Cooper played drums, Baron and I played guitar, Alithea was on bass synth for the whole song, and then we went back – Alithea recorded bass, and then we added keyboards. For ‘Number One Fan,’ it was similar but switched. I was on guitar, Baron was on organ, Alithea was on bass, Cooper on drums, and after I put a piano down. That kind of stuff is more fun because you don’t do it as much – it’s a new experience. Those moments are really using a studio as an instrument, as opposed to recording a song like ‘One Million’. Even with ‘Wide Awake,’ with those drums you mentioned – since the demo, there were always doubled drums. It was a nice moment of experimenting with different sounds and performance techniques.
Desi, you mentioned utilizing the studio as an instrument, and I know there was a lot of vintage gear at 64 Studio, which comes through especially on ‘Number One Fan’.
BR: I remember playing the Farfisa organ on that track. I love playing keys, but it’s not something I do live right now. In the future, yes, but it kind of unlocked a different part of your brain, playing a different instrument. I think it opened up so many avenues for the future of things we could potentially do. As much as we did experiment and did cool shit, especially at 64 Sound, there’s so much more that I personally want to experiment with in the future. This was just the tiptoe into that realm of cool, weird shit that I think we’re all into.
DS: 100%, I agree with you.
I also feel the song’s instrumentation brings out the unspoken intimacy in the lyrics. Alithea, you’ve described it as a “shameless love song,” and there’s a kind of thorniness, too, in that earnest commitment. Have you all thought about that theme of preserving relationships, of not falling out, in a different light over the past few months?
DS: I think we all have. Whether or not it’s because of the songs, where we’re all at – like Alithea was saying earlier, we were all very close with her dad, and once he passed away… Once you lose anybody, you see life in a very different scope. You see relationships and the decisions you make for yourself and others in a very different light, for a long time, than you normally would. It’s like you’re slapped–
AT: Well, it’s the world’s biggest reality check. I personally feel so grateful and lucky to be doing what we want to be doing, to be young, to be healthy, and to have family around us. Not everybody is that lucky. I’ve always tried to live my life that way, but when something to this magnitude happens, your entire life changes completely. I’ll never think of anything the same way, let alone the next time we go in to start writing songs – that’s totally different now. Going on tour is totally different now. Something as simple as going to bed. In that regard, I guess I have been thinking about it every second of every day – just relationships, and how important it is to show up for the people you love. My dad would always harp on that. He was so passionate about showing up for people that matter to you, and showing people that they matter to you. At the end of the day, everybody could do a better job of that, but the only person who couldn’t was him. He was at every show within a 300-mile radius, pretty much. [laughs] Had flown to shows to surprise me and us. Showing up for people – that’s my main thing right now. It takes very little to check in on somebody, to put yourself in their shoes, maybe. Going into the next record, into new songs, into touring – it’s like I have different glasses on.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Rocket’s R Is for Rocket is out October 3 via Transgressive Records/Canvasback.
