By day, René Kladzyk works as a journalist for The Project On Government Oversight, a D.C.-based watchdog. The work requires patience. You sit with documents, discrepancies, and patterns in information. Her music as Ziemba operates on the same logic. Nothing gets resolved until it has been examined from every angle.
She came up in Brooklyn's DIY scene. She has held residencies at MoMA Ps1, Pioneer Works, and the French Institute in Fez. She has played dive bars and house shows. Her music has appeared in Broad City and other television shows, giving her vocals and songwriting a nice patina finish that says “Been There; done that.”
In fall 2022, Kladzyk drove from New York to California with a broken arm and a broken heart. With nothing but road ahead, the questions she'd been outrunning finally settled in the passenger seat. What if starting over wasn’t freedom? What if she craved roots instead of escape? Where did she belong? Did anyone need her? The kind of questions you ask when you have spent years building a life that looks like free movement, but might actually be a repetitive pattern.
Her journey led her to Woodland, California, where her sister lived—a town her late father had affectionately nicknamed “Woodyland.” It was at that piano, in that space filled with memory, that “The Perfect Rose” took form, a song that hits hard and doesn’t soften the blow.
The piano-driven pop-rock ballad tracks someone trying to change by doing the same things over again. She dyes her hair to feel new, starts over just like last time, writes the same kind of song. She knows the pattern and calls it out directly. Sitting in Woodyland, she drinks coffee in her bathrobe and admits she is in freefall. California here is not a destination but a condition.
The recording itself was done at Tropico Beauty in Glendale, with a small ensemble of piano, strings, guitar, bass, and drums. René’s production keeps things intimate and elegant, with a very interesting late 90s indie-rock texture that makes it all stand out in a very finely-drawn manner, balancing introspection with a sense of thematically resonant forward motion, resolving in a way the crux of the issue presented by the lyrics.
Follow Ziemba on Instagram.
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