Since the early 2000s, Rob Moose has been collaborating on some of the most celebrated songs, including recordings by Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, Maren Morris, FKA Twigs, Joshua Bell, The National, Moses Sumney, Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Legend, and so many more. He is responsible for writing and playing the string arrangement on Miley Cyrus’s number one hit, “Flowers” and he arranged the Oscar-nominated closing credits song, “This is A Life,” from the 2023 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Mooses’ work with genre-defying chamber ensemble yMusic, both in presenting commissioned music and collaborating with artists such as Nico Muhly, Ben Folds, Dirty Projectors, and ANOHNI has garnered the highest praise from classical and pop music critics alike.

To be able do this, to move between writing arrangements for Eddie Vedder and playing violin with Perfume Genius and The Killers, one must be adept at navigating a variety of relationships –– the relationships between people, of course, but also the relationships between sounds; between songwriting and performance. “Growing up, I was always the kid in orchestra who was trying to learn Nirvana songs on my violin,” Moose says.

A lifelong fascination with the fluid relationships between genres and a desire to “make sense of the separation” between classical and pop music has led to Inflorescence, Rob Moose’s first solo release.

Considering the breadth of personal and artistic relationships which Moose deftly navigates, it should come as no surprise that this solo work is not only significantly collaborative, but that the list of collaborators comprises some of the most acclaimed singers in pop music. Moose’s soulful and dynamic string arrangements and performance provide the bedrock for Inflorescence, while Phoebe Bridgers, Sara Bareilles, Bon Iver, Brittany Howard and Emily King deliver memorable vocal performances. And these are the sole elements that make up Inflorescence: strings and vocals.

Throughout his career, Moose evolved from a player –– often violin, sometimes guitar and mandolin –– into one of the most in-demand arrangers in popular music today. But while string arrangements are so often thought of as fulfilling a supporting role within a bigger picture, with Inflorescence, the strings are stretched across the whole of the stage. And Moose is placing great trust in the listeners, who he considers among his collaborators here. Though these recordings are too beautiful to be called challenging, in the omission of drums, sequencers, electric guitar, one finds a good deal of space. The songs breathe and sometimes fall quiet between lines, and in this quiet, the listener is invited to intuit, to fill in the blanks. This is music born of respect and intimacy; music which leaves space for the listener’s imagination to blossom.

Moose left a masters program at Columbia University in 2005 to join then underground sensation Antony and the Johnsons. Maybe reckless or risky, history will likely see this as a soulful decision, and his work with ANOHNI, which continues nearly two decades later, perhaps soulfully informs Inflorescence in essential ways. Today, Moose unflinchingly proclaims “ANOHNI is my greatest musical teacher.”

Each of the pieces on Inflorescence came to be by its own path. Rather than simply sitting down and writing a series of songs for each of the singers to come through and interpret, Moose collected and associated these works to each other and to themselves, in some cases reintroducing the works to their co-authors. “Extract” and “I Bend But Never Break” are songs written by Sara Bareilles and Brittany Howard, respectively, but which were perhaps destined to find no home until Moose’s reinterpretation. The Bridgers track is a similar story, while “Marvel Room” might be considered more of a co-write, beginning as a few threads that had been haunting Bon Iver sessions but which remained unwieldy until Moose and Vernon were to weave them together, together. “Can Only Be Love” was also collaboratively penned, with Moose making the first move, King responding, and so on, in a sort of conceptual and musical conversation.

Pre-order by Inflorescence Rob Moose HERE