006: The Roulettes

Written and Edited by Eve Mikkelson, host of Brooklyn Buzz on WPIR
Photography by Elise Swaim
Interview on 11/2/2024

In early November, Brooklyn Buzz interviewed The Roulettes — a lively, riot grrl-inspired band based in NYC — as a celebration of the release of their newest EP, “Mommy Comes Back.” Talking with Rebecca, Rachel, and Alice was a blast. They discuss the deep meanings behind their latest songs and their reunion after a hiatus of releasing music, while also mentioning Bill Murray, working as a teacher, recent Halloween costumes, and much more!

Do you wanna give a brief introduction to who you are? Who is who as regular people before your rockstar personas?

Rebecca: I’m Rebecca Keith, or Rebecca Roulette is my band name. I grew up in the city and I’m also a writer, mainly a poet. I teach high school English in public school and am a mom to a 4 and a half year old.

Rachel: You’re a great writer! Rebecca also knows how to curate events.

Rebecca: Yeah I book all our shows and I love putting bands together on a bill. I used to run a reading series for 11 years at Cake Shop, which was a really great punk venue with cake upstairs and a record store.

Rachel: Bouncers that weren’t all that nice sometimes…

*laughs*

Rebecca: But Andy, the guy who ran it, was a great supporter and friend of ours. I ran that series once a month and we played there a lot too.

Rachel: Rebecca and I went to college together at Oberlin.

Rebecca: But we knew each other a little bit in high school! We were a little bit setup with one another. I was at Broad Science and Rachel went to a private school.

Rachel: But I went to Hebrew school with this guy named Teddy who also went to school with Rebecca and when he found out we were both going to Oberlin he mentioned we should meet each other.

Sounds like the stars aligned for you guys!

Rachel: Yeah, so Rebecca and I have known each other forever! I also met my husband through Rebecca – they went to school together. I would always tag along to their poetry readings and stuff. I wrote a little bit but not really. *laughs* I’m a social worker and have a private practice and I also work for bank street college. Mom of a 5 and half year old.

Rebecca: We forgot to say our instruments! I’m vocals and guitar.

Rachel: I’m drums and vocals. I wasn’t the full time drummer on our older album though. I grew up in Harlem right when the 1 2 train came out from underground and I feel like that’s where I got my rhythm, growing up with the “ticka ticka ticka” [of the subway] all the time.

Alice: An internal metronome.

Rachel: Yeah! I was always into dance and banging on pans anyway, though…

Alice: And I’m Alice Danger, I play bass for The Roulettes but I’m also a singer-songwriter. I pretty much do music full time and odd jobs here and there. Like name something and I’ve done it, you know? *laugh*

Rebecca: Like Riverdance!

Alice: Yeah I was on tour with Riverdance, I drove trucks, I build stuff. I work for Columbia at sports events. Like even this week I think I did like four jobs. I just did stuff for fashion week and the marathon.

Oh my gosh, you’re all over!

Alice: Yeah, hustling. But you know I was just thinking, the first time I approached Rebecca and Rachel was at Gutter. I was in another band called Animal Tropical and we were playing a show with them.

Rebecca: Yeah we were between bassists at the time.

Alice: The first time I saw you guys play was at Hank’s Saloon, though.

Rebecca: We didn’t play there! I don’t even know where that is.

Alice: Yes you did!

Rebecca: Are you SURE?

Alice: I just remember that I had seen you guys play once before and I thought “Oh they’re mad cool” and I wanted to play bass with you. Then we booked that show together.

Rebecca: She approached us at that party and said “I want to be your bass player.” We had token male bass players for a few years before that because our original bassist, Dana, is a West Coaster for life and we moved back to NY after Portland. So when Alice approached us we were very excited to have a new girl bass player.

Alice: It was fun!

The confidence to just say “I wanna be your bass player”... Oh my gosh, I wish I had that confidence.

Alice: I think it was alcohol. *laughs* I was really nervous to approach them.

That’s very sweet.

Rebecca: But Alice is also classically trained. She knows all the theory and stuff when Rachel and I are self-taught mostly.

Rachel: I always like to explain it like Alice is actually making it as a musician, whereas I know she explains herself as being in the hustle. But you’re really doing it, Alice

Alice: Thank you thank you. I studied upright bass but I don’t play upright bass anymore so…

Rebecca: Well we have one right here!

*laughs*

Oh my god, I wish! Well, how would you guys describe the genre of music you play? I know it kinda sucks to pick a genre but for those reading.

Rebecca: Riot grrrl inspired. Surf punk-y, influenced by all the 90s bands, some 70s bands like Delta 5 I really love them too. Also probably influenced by hip hop a little bit, more so our older stuff. Sometimes a little heavier or a little psychedelic too. Riot grrrl punk is probably most accurate.

Rachel: Sleater-Kinney was a big influence.



I thought you had been on a strong 20 year hiatus, but it sounds like you were more on and off actually, is that right?

Rebecca: It was a 20 year hiatus from actually releasing music. We stopped playing in 2004 because people went to grad school, some of us were moving back to New York, and we were living all over the place. In 2009 we did a one-off show where we only played 2 songs. We thought it would just be a fun little thing but then we realized “Oh, we actually want to keep playing together.” It just was very slow going. I was in a lot of other bands and life stuff. Also then we had our other part time drummer – Rachel and Amanda used to share drumming and keyboards.

Rachel: We would switch off which is part of the Roulettes idea. We would change instruments.

Oh that makes sense! That’s so cool!

Rebecca: Amanda left and we started rewriting in a new way with Rachel being drum-central. Once Alice came in, we started writing most of the songs that would be on this album. So it took us a while to form our new “final form,” especially with us not having the money to record for a while. The guitarist from my other band, Eli Jacobowitz, started getting equipment and we recorded things with friends in 2016, but we only began finishing them in like 2022.

Rachel: Both Rebecca and I wanted to have babies which took a lot of our time.

Rebecca: And without COVID, it probably would have been a little sooner too.

COVID messed everybody up for sure.

Rebecca: I know, some people just holed up and wrote albums but…

Alice: That’s what I did, I was having a great time.

*laughs*

Rebecca: And her solo album is amazing. Even now you’re like “I’m ready for the next thing.”

Alice: Well I have a whole EP ready.

That’s exciting!

Alice: Everything is just so expensive.

Sounds like you gotta have a lot of connections…

Alice: Yeah! And even if you do have connections they’re usually trying to start their own business so you want to support them still.

Rebecca: Like with Eli, because he was running it out of his house and had a full time job, for everyone’s schedules to coordinate it was tricky. But for the last song, “Honolulu,” we added it at the last minute and we paid to do one day of tracking and one day of mixing. We did that with Jeff Berner at studio G where a lot of our friends recorded. So we did one the simple way.

Alice: It was funny because the album took 20 years but that song took like 6 hours.

It must feel great finally letting it out then.

All: YES!

Rebecca: It’s felt really good. Hopefully we can do little bits of touring in the Spring to let it out a little more.

That’d be great! I know you have a couple shows coming up, is there anything you’re particularly excited for?

Rebecca: We’ve only done one tour date so far for this album when we played in Rhinebeck for Porchfest. Next one we are playing is the Avalon Lounge in Catskill, we are excited for that. They have really great Korean food actually.

Rachel: Oh I didn’t know that!

Rebecca: Yeah, but it’s a great venue with great people who started it. And we are going to play with our friends – genre-wise it’s a weird combination – but the Chapin Sisters who are beautiful folk-rock.

Rachel: They covered “Toxic” by Brittney Spears and you should listen to it.

You just had your release show too, how did that go?

Rebecca: It was super fun, we did costume changes.

I was just gonna ask what you dressed up as!

Rebecca: We wore stuff like our Roulettes jerseys.



*Side note: Go watch their music video for “Batter Up” where they wear these sick jerseys!

Those are super fun colors.

Rachel: And the back is angel numbers!

Rebecca: At the end of the show we wore bloody lab coats for our song “White Coat” too.

Oh I love that. My next question was going to be “What is your favorite song off of the album?” but I know they are all kind of your babies…

Rebecca: It’s hard because they’re all SO good. *laughs*

Alice: I think my favorite to play is “White Coat,” it’s very fun. Or “Bill Murray,” who needs to come to the show…

I was gonna ask! Are you guys big fans? What was the inspiration?

Rebecca: We love him, but also we met him because his son had a restaurant in Greenpoint around 2012. He was there and I was like “Oh hi… my husband’s working on a movie with you right now” and he just said “oh come join us!” I totally wasn’t going to but I think Amanda was excited so we sat there for like 20 minutes and had a drink.

That’s like out of a dream.

Rebecca: I guess he has been known to just show up at weird places.

Alice: Hopefully, it will be one of our shows.

Rachel: Did you hear about the wedgie thing with Bill Murray? I guess he walked up to this guy and was like “If I gave you a wedgie and you told the story later do you think anyone would believe you?”

Rebecca: There are a lot of “no one will believe you” stories. Did he give him a wedgie??

Rachel: That’s the thing, no one knows…

I feel like I need to know now.

Rachel: I think that’s how I interpret our song “Bill Murray” a little bit too, about believing and matching up stories.

Rebecca; The song isn’t totally about him though it’s also about getting too drunk and figuring out that issue… The end of “Bill Murray” is one of MY favorite things to play though. In terms of the recordings, I love “Batter Up.” It's just so fun.

And that’s what the recent music video is for, right?

Rebecca: Yeah and it was the lead single because it’s a party song.

Rachel: That and “Ineffective” is just so good.

I wanted to bring that up because I was particularly interested in the background and story behind “Ineffective”.

Rebecca: The teacher stuff? Yeah, so to clear the air I never got an “Ineffective.” Yay!

Rachel: Oh my gosh, is that what you think of? *laughs* I never put that together!

Rebecca: That’s the lowest teacher rating in the current rating system of teacher evaluations and it can be easily misused as a “gotcha” by principals. The woman the rubric is named after wanted it to be a growth tool, but it breaks up teaching into different domains. Like, yes of course you have to engage your students but we are in a particularly distracting and challenging time, especially post covid zoom school where everything went out the window. So there is a lot of extra pressure beyond what you would normally think of. My first year of teaching I was a teaching fellow which is for career-changers; You can get a subsidized master's degree but they throw you into a classroom with just a summer's worth of training, even though I had some teaching experience with writing and stuff.

Wow, that’s a lot to have put on your plate so quickly. I had no idea.


Rebecca: It’s hard. And the schools should support those teachers but a lot of them don’t. They think “We are gonna dump some really rough kids on you and we aren’t going to give you time with a mentor teacher, you have to seek that out on your own,” etc. So it wasn’t a great first year, I ended up leaving and teaching at a transfer school in the Bronx for 3 years which I loved and had more support at. But it’s not just about me, the song “Ineffective” is about the horror stories that would go around, things that you see done to people… We are in this environment where it’s hard to get teachers at all and then you don’t train them or give them resources as they go.

Alice: They’re really in for it.

Rachel: And I’m a teacher therapist, so I know too.

Rebecca: I mentioned rough principals but it's just layers and layers of hierocracy. Some corporations want to make money so they have the school try things that aren’t solving the fact that students are traumatized by living through COVID. Or like new immigrants roll up and they just say “take this standardized test.” Seeing obviously our Mayor and other leaders – the election is right now – I think “Ineffective” can be less about education specifically and more about leaders in general.

Rachel: Yeah I think about that song a lot right now.

Alice: With a lot of leaders it’s not even that they aren’t solving the problems, they just don’t even want to see them. They just take money and exert blame on people who are actively trying to help.

Rebecca: They also love to have you sit and talk about doing fake stuff instead of actually doing the work to set up what is needed for our students. They’ll say “you need to do that on your time.”

The unpaid labor is definitely intense in education.

Alice: I think any career that involves passion suffers from that, even like being a musician. There’s an attitude of “you love doing this so we don’t have to pay you.” You spend thousands of dollars making an album and put so much time toward setting up shows and promoting, but at the end of the night “here’s 20 dollars…”

Rebecca: “…to split between the four bands.”

*laughs*

Rachel: In NY they need to pay their rent so I feel for those venues too.

There’s a couple other songs that we haven’t even mentioned, too. Are there any fun stories behind songs that you just want an opportunity to share?

Rebecca: “White Coat” sort of comes from the term “White Coat Fever.” I have high blood pressure and White Coat Fever is how your blood pressure rises while you’re in the doctor's office so every time they take your blood pressure it seems higher than normal and it’s hard to tell if you have a real issue. We wrote that song years before any of us were pregnant and we both went through traumatic experiences with that too. So it ended up taking on this new meaning of how women are treated in hospitals. But it’s weird because this song has like three words. *laughs*

Rachel: The “let it go”s though are the most powerful to play for me too, with all of us having had medical traumas. It sort of helps me let it go every time we play it.

Rebecca: There were also a couple songs that didn’t make it. We may release them as bonus tracks online or if we do release a vinyl in the spring which is a question at the moment.

Awesome, hit me up if you make vinyl.

Rebecca: It’s tricky because they’re so expensive to make but it would be so nice to walk into a record store and see our stuff. It’d be fun to get the other old songs out too. “Honolulu” on the album I think of as the ballad.

Rachel: Awwww!

Rebecca: It’s also maybe the most surfy. The chorus to me is about past relationships. You know, one in particular.

We all have that one I think.

Alice: I have like 17 of those.

*laughs*

So, we briefly mentioned the “Batter Up” music video. I was wondering if there were any details you could let us in on behind the scenes?

Rebecca: The original idea was an homage to “The Warriors” movie. The baseball furies and roller skating punks was the first idea but we ended up going full baseball. There’s general campiness and a full dance montage with choreography. That was the main goal with that one.

Alice: You know what’s funny, they actually just emailed me back saying we are allowed to use the field.

Rebecca: Are you serious??

Alice: We booked this field through Parks, filmed like in August, and a week ago they sent me an email saying our request was approved.

*laughs*

Rebecca: It was also wild because there was a jazz festival going on in the park and it sounded so good but we were trying to learn the dance and it was hard with the competing music. Punk vs jazz.

Kinda silly thing to end on, in an email forever ago you mentioned you do karaoke with Dave from Pleasure Island. I was just wondering how that came about?

Rebecca: Anna Copacabana, who is an Australian showgirl which is how she describes it, runs an intimate karaoke night at TV Eye on Tuesdays. That’s how I met Dave. There’s some great singers there, and he and I just bonded. How did you find them?

He was one of the first people to reach out to me after I had been doing Brooklyn Buzz for a while just to let me know about a single release or something. I thought he was really sweet and I was so thankful because I just thought it was so cool getting to talk to local artists.

Rebecca: Well I found out about your show when he reposted about you playing Pleasure Island.

That’s so awesome! And now we are here. Well we are nearing the end of our time now, is there any last thing you would want to promote?

Rebecca: Well if there’s any Mets players that read this, we think “Batter Up” should be one of your walk-on songs.

*laughs*

More images from our shoot with The Roulettes, photographed by Elise Swaim:

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.