Q&A: Searching for a Garden to Bloom in With Alyna Rose
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY GIGI KANG ☆
ALYNA ROSE IS AN INDIE-POP ARTIST BASED IN PORTLAND—She joins me for a call from Italy. It’s a few days before her wedding, and we talk about love. Love in art, love in like-minded friends, and love in finding your place. It’s a love-filled time for Rose, and music is a path she goes down to celebrate just that.
Rose is an introspective musician. As much as music is a joyous tool for commemorating the good times, she also tells me about its role in translating some of her tough times. She shares, “Music gave me a backbone and safe space to explore who I am and retreat into the haven of expression and creation.”
Her album Down to the River, released in October 2024, is a symbol of music’s role throughout Rose’s life. As her debut album, this project examines themes of seeking solace in nature’s embrace, heartbreak from lost friendships, and reconnecting to the core of who she is while navigating life’s challenges. She explains that she hopes “listeners feel a sense of home in the lyrics and the melodies and the music. I hope listening to it brings a soothing feeling. I think that this world can feel really harsh at times and it’s important to have places to rest and feel safe. I hope to be able to extend that to people.”
Rose is currently working on her second album Lost and Found, which she will publish later this year. It will be a mix of seven spoken word poems and five songs. In Lost and Found, Rose reads several poems out of her journal that describe the themes of courage, unconditional love, darkness, resistance, and hope. These are followed by songs that investigate these topics.
During our call, Rose and I also chat about forms of art beyond music, like design and poetry, that unlock different hues of self-expression. Overall, art is less of a choice for Rose, and more of a way of being.
Read our full conversation below.
LUNA: Tell me about your musical journey. How did you start and how long ago?
ROSE: I played music my whole life. My great grandfather was a concert pianist and passed that passion onto my grandmother. I grew up attending her concerts at Carnegie Hall, wondering when my turn would come to be on stage too. I feel like music runs in my blood. My mom isn’t a musician, neither is my dad, but I feel like since they weren’t, they projected their musical dreams onto me. So I started playing classical piano when I was about eight years old. The height of my classical playing was the piece “Fantasie Impromptu” by Chopin. I would wake up every morning hearing the melody in my head and go to sleep mimicking the patterns my fingers would play. I played for about ten years, and then just kind of abandoned it when I got to college. I later picked it up towards the end of college, just on a keyboard playing around singing The Beatles covers.
Then, I rediscovered my own love and passion for music outside of rigorous classical piano and more in an improvisational way that led me to a lot of songwriting. I taught myself guitar which I’ve been playing for seven years. I learned guitar because I had a really bad keyboard that didn’t sound anything like the beautiful acoustic piano that I grew up on. I just couldn’t stand that—I heard one version of the piano in my head, then it just sounded so tinny and fake. So, because an acoustic piano wasn’t available at the time, I gravitated towards the instrument that was. I got my first guitar on Facebook Marketplace for $150. It was a Fender electric acoustic that was way too big for me (laughs). I love the portability of the acoustic guitar and the percussive elements of it so much.
I played drums in a few punk bands in college too. So that was my introduction to playing music publicly. Only recently, I’ve been embracing doing music on my own professionally. It took a while for me to believe in myself, but I’ve finally arrived.
LUNA: You said that your parents aren’t very musical, but are still interested in it. What kind of music did you grow up listening to together?
ROSE: From my dad’s side, it was a lot of American pop hits. We listened to Alanis Morisette, Fleetwood Mac, and Adele. These artists’ love for storytelling influenced mine. My mom is both Latin and Middle Eastern so from her side, it was a huge variety of music from all over the world including Facundo Cabral and Zaz. Even though my last album was in more of a softer indie-folk pop realm, I can still feel the way my music is informed by all of these genres, even though it’s not directly in [them]. I always gravitated towards singing harmonies and catchy melodies, even as a kid in choir.
Going forward, I’m excited to embrace a more direct approach in my music. My last album explored a lot of my own sentiments about the world and self discovery. In hindsight, I think it was a great place to start because now I have a foundation of who I am in my music. Going forward, I can express more of my thoughts about the world. I’m queer and my partner is trans—that’s a really important topic to me. So there’s a lot that I want to say that I’m excited to be more direct about in my future music.
LUNA: Previously you’ve said, “Art was my first friend.” I think a lot of us who end up going into creative spaces have felt that, and have felt the comfort of our favorite artists. For me, if I’m in a new city, or not having a great day, I’ll go to a museum or a bookstore. I feel so much better just being around art. Tell me more about that quote and what it means to you.
ROSE: I appreciate that. Honestly, I feel like it’s kind of a sad backstory, but the liberation I found through art is the beautiful part. My parents divorced when I was 12 and it was a really rough time. I’m the oldest of five kids and I grew up in a really religious setting that was extremely challenging for my mental health. I didn’t feel like I could express who I was in school. I didn’t feel like I had the freedom to express who I was at home. And I always loved drawing. So, I turned to the canvas. I would sketch portraits or flowers or landscapes, really just whatever was in front of me. When things got really hard in my external world, I turned towards my expression of my internal world which, at the time, was illustration in the form of drawing with pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and acrylic.
Art was there for me when nothing else was. It gave me a backbone and safe space to explore who I am and retreat into the haven of expression and creation. I have a bachelor’s in art from the University of Florida and I went on to keep pursuing painting, illustration, and graphic design. But it definitely started for me because I felt so much, I needed to put it somewhere outside of me where it would be safe.
Music was very much a regimented activity that I kind of had to do. Some days I loved it and some days I hated it. But looking back, I’m so grateful that I have that foundation of music theory under my belt.
LUNA: It sounds like you experiment with a lot of different types of art and they all inform each other. I know you also write poetry. What is the relationship between your poetry and your music?
ROSE: I’ve always been a very introspective person. I grew up in a world that was really loud, and I didn’t feel like there was space for me. Naturally, I turned to poetry. I journaled for years and years. I don’t really share it too much with people, but I have a book that I might publish. It’s called Sometimes I’m Too Tender. It’s ready to go with poems that I’ve written since I was in my teens. I just have to work up the courage to publish it.
I remember sharing the first song I ever wrote at my fourth grade talent show. I wrote a song and gave it to my music teacher, Ms. Gill, who wrote the music for it and we performed it. So that’s just like a sweet thing, and I feel like in terms of poetry and music, they’ve always gone hand in hand for me.
I’ve always felt safe in poetry. Reality is so fickle. So we can do this cool thing in poetry where we can kind of speed up time, or we can go back in time, or we can take something like a flower wilting and spin it around, or make it mean something else. Maybe I’m the flower wilting. I feel like poetry was this endless imaginative world that I could just get lost in and convey deeper sentiments that might seem out of place in daily conversation. It’s endless, really.
I’ve been studying metaphor lately and understanding why metaphor is so important because I use a lot of it in my music. I feel like it helps me take a step back and objectively look at the situation or myself in a different lens. Sometimes it just takes some distance and some whimsy to understand life a little better. I think metaphor is part of the human condition. We all want to understand what we are through other means. I can ramble forever about poetry.
LUNA: There’s a line that I really like in “Ribbon of Mountains.” It says, “I’m still searching for a place to put myself.” You also say, “I’m still searching for a home to lay my bones in.” Tell me a little bit about that song. It’s my favorite on the album.
ROSE: Thank you so much! I wrote it a little less than a year ago on the island of Kauai. My partner and I were in Kauai for a short time. We were mostly visiting Maui, then found out that our friend was there. We were invited to our friend’s album release party. It was a super intimate thing and we just spent the whole night singing. It was so much fun and I was feeling so inspired from that party.
When we got home, I didn’t have my guitar with me but my friend had a guitar. It was this big red guitar with super rusted strings that hurt the hell out of my fingers (laughs). But I needed to play because I just felt it tumbling out. I needed to put it somewhere. I sat down and wrote that song literally in less than 30 minutes. It’s the only 6/4 song on the album so it’s got a different kind of groove.
When we were on the plane flying to Kauai, we were right about to land and my partner was looking out of the window. He said, “Wow, those ribbons of mountains are gorgeous.” Because it was these abstract green shapes and the clouds were coming through. I bookmarked that phrase and then the song pretty much wrote itself.
There was also this uncertainty if we wanted to move to Hawaii or where else we wanted to move. I feel a kinship with so many different parts of the world, especially because I grew up in the crosshairs of three cultures. I speak five languages and I grew up seeing a piece of myself in so many places. I’ve always been too Middle Eastern for American people and too white for the Latin people. I’ve had to embrace that. That’s just part of who I am and nobody can take away my ethnicity just because I look a certain way, you know? I feel like all of that informs the song. One of the other lyrics is, “I’m searching for a garden I can bloom in.” I want to be planted. I want to be somewhere I can simultaneously rest and also give back.
