Luanne Hunt- Midnight Rain & Roses (click on image to watch video)

 5 March 2022

Luanne Hunt’s single, “Midnight Rain & Roses,” is a story song. A sad story song, though, as it’s a tale all about love and loss. The roses in the song’s title, represent – as they usually do to – love and romance. The lyrical suggestion is that one man’s last gesture to his lover was to send her a bouquet of roses. His hope was to be with there when these love symbols arrived in order to celebrate their partnership. However, he doesn’t live long enough to see how she responds to this gift, and in the tragic love song tradition, he dies and doesn’t ever return. 

This tragic subject matter is drawn from Hunt’s 21st studio album, Portraits in Song. Her career has already spanned 27 years, and her style falls within the country/Americana realm. Stylistically, this keyboard-backed track may remind you of Seventies rock icons, such as Fleetwood Mac. 

Hunt sings these words like an outside narrator. She’s watching from afar, as this romance takes its tragic turn. Although this track is not especially country – instrumentally – Hunt’s voice sounds a little bit like that of Skeeter Davis, who had a similarly sad love song hit titled “The End Of The World.” Hunt sings it relatively dispassionately. She doesn’t perform it with a cry in her voice, for instance, but just tells the story straightforwardly. Perhaps ironically, this track’s arrangement is relatively bright – considering its dark subject matter. 

These roses are transformed from something that reminds this woman of love, to symbols of her loss. Flowers intended to be objects of joy become reminders of a hurtful loss. Although the word ‘rain’ only appears in the song’s chorus, this watery act of nature has always represented tears in most songs. It’s significant that this rain is falling at night too because it suggests the widow in the song is up in the middle of the night crying and unable to sleep. 

The track has a gentle, thumping groove, which especially brings Fleetwood Mac’s heyday to mind. While keyboards lead the instrumentation, the recording also includes some tasty electric guitar licks interspersed within. At one point, Hunt sings, “Love can be the sweetest thing/Or it can be a bitter pill.” This widow has experienced some of love’s sweetness in the past but is now seemingly destined to a long period of tasting its bitter pill. 

Few genres address tragedy better than country music. Luanne Hunt knows this and draws upon the genre’s longstanding tradition of putting pain and loss into music. The death of a relationship is bad enough. Some have said that losing a lover feels worse than death itself. However, when you combine physical death with the demise of a relationship (due to death), well, it can hardly get much worse than that. This is a song that may make you think differently about roses. We send roses to show we love someone, but we also lay them at the graves of loved ones that have passed on. And in the case of “Midnight Rain & Roses,” these blooms serve both purposes, simultaneously.

Dan MacIntosh - Dan MacIntosh has been a professional music journalist for 30 years and his work has regularly appeared in many local and national publications, including Inland Empire Weekly, CCM, CMJ, Paste, Mean Street, Chord, HM, Christian Retailing, Amplifier, Inspirational Giftware, Stereo Subversion, Indie-Music, Soul–Audio, Roughstock.com, Country Standard Time and Spin.com. 

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