Q&A: Sydney Rose is Learning That “If Nothing Changes, It’ll Never Change”
HOW DO YOU COPE WITH CHANGE? — Singer-songwriter Sydney Rose is still searching for the answer. The 20-year-old, who made her mark singing gut-wrenching, stripped-back covers on YouTube, has released her debut album, One Sided, about grief and growing up. Rose credits the making of this album as one of the only sources of solace during a tumultuous two years of her life.
The album, written almost entirely by Rose alone, is a showcase of the singer at her most comfortable and powerful. With the exceptions of “Growing” and “You’d Be Stars (feat. chloe moriondo),” the instrumentation accompanying Rose’s vocals is minimal, usually a single guitar or piano at the forefront of production. Here, in the calm ethos, Rose opens herself to the world in a candid reconciliation with the past and the future.
Rose grew up in Georgia, spending her entire life cloaked in familiarity, only to find that change is inevitable and nobody transitions from adolescence to adulthood unscathed. She’s most content blanketed in a rosy nostalgia, knowing that there’s a safety in her memories. Since creating One Sided, Rose has been bracing for the future. She just moved to Nashville, the first time leaving her childhood home.
From her new bedroom, we got the chance to catch up with Sydney Rose about growing, finding her voice, and her childhood aspirations. Dig deeper into her story below.
LUNA: I know that growing up you sang in your church worship group. Generally speaking, is that the musical influence you had growing up? Were the adults around you instilling any sort of musical influences or is that something you kind of found on your own?
ROSE: I grew up with a lot of different music around me. My mom and dad loved music. My dad played music growing up and we've always loved listening to music. My brother loved music, and no one really played any instruments or sang anything around me. But I really enjoyed singing growing up and I didn't know where to go, where to start, how to do that. I grew up going to church, and they had a band and I eventually joined that band because I just love singing. All I ever wanted to do was sing songs for people in any way. So that's really where I started singing.
LUNA: You really have a gift for songwriting as well. It's amazing how you're able to articulate such emotions in a really candid way. I'm curious when you started to discover that you were gifted at songwriting and it was something that you enjoyed doing?
ROSE: It's funny, because I never really made my own songs, or wanted to write my own songs when I was younger. I never really even thought it was a possibility for me. I loved singing covers. [Singing songs] that other people wrote always felt almost like therapy to me. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I really started presenting myself as an artist, but I only really did covers and I was kind of thrown into a bunch of songwriting sessions, just to dip my toe into the songwriting community. After all that, I felt so free being able to write things that were my own because I never really thought I could do it until I started doing it. And then I just started writing music on my own and it felt so natural. It wasn't really planned for me, in a way it just kind of happened.
LUNA: It feels like the opposite path of how a lot of musicians start is. It feels like your voice found its way first and then the storytelling came after. Did you keep a journal growing up at all? Were you writing about your life in any way?
ROSE: I do keep journals now. Growing up, I was a very artsy kid. I did drawings. I really wanted to be an animator when I was really young and so I've always had creative outlets. And because I was also a really quiet, self conscious kid, I never really thought that I could do something as great and creative as making a song in the same way that I like to paint or draw or write.
LUNA: Totally, it takes an added level of vulnerability to voice your secrets and emotions. What movie or animation made you want to be an animator?
ROSE: I loved Cartoon Network growing up. I loved animated movies. I love DreamWorks movies. I loved some Disney movies. I was weirdly obsessed with My Little Pony growing out. [I loved] Steven Universe and Adventure Time and a lot of those movies and shows. I still watch them. They really shaped a lot of who I am in my art direction in a kind of way.
LUNA: All of them are really action-adventure based. Something you harbor in this album is nostalgia for childhood. Specifically for this album, what was the writing process like?
ROSE: I kind of just graduated high school and the second EP came out. Me and my people were like, “Time to make an album. Let's figure that out.” I didn't really have a kind of direction I wanted to go in or anything. I knew that if I just let it happen, it would happen. I stayed at home for a year. I didn't really do many songwriting sessions, unless I was traveling for a show and I got to have a couple days where I wrote with people.That entire year of being out of school for the first time in forever, not going to college when everyone else was going into college, not having many people around my age, and not not having a lot of friends around, I felt lonely, anxious, and scared for the future. I just wanted to go back to my safe space back then. That's really where a lot of the songs came out. I was in my room, feeling all the things that I felt and it just happened naturally. I had so many feelings and so many emotions and so many things were changing. It was just such a big time in my life to write so many of the songs that I wrote for the album.
LUNA: That transition of leaving high school is brutal. Nobody leaves that period unscathed. Was there anything during that growing period that was a shock of how much it affected you, for better or worse?
ROSE: There were some relationships that I thought I would have for the rest of my life. I had some friends that were my best friends. And I kind of planned out my whole life with them in a way. Looking back from this November to last November is crazy. I just thought I had everything planned out. [In this album] I touch on hating change. I just hated the way that things changed and I blamed it all on myself. A big thing about the album is feeling so down on myself that I was the reason why everything happened even though in retrospect, it’s definitely not. Now I look back on how horribly sad I was last year, and how much I was beating myself up. I thought I would never get over it. And now I moved. I love it here and I have met so many new people. I'm so happy about it. I thought I would never be happy about it.
LUNA: It's really beautiful that you get this album as a time capsule of this really formative experience and time in your life. I want to talk a little bit about the production of the album because it's so stripped back. It’s mostly just you and a guitar. What was the choice to make it sound that way?
ROSE: When I look back at the first couple songs that I've made and the songs that I'm most proud of, they're literally just pure voice memos. Even “Turning Page” was just piano and me. For the first two EPs, which I love, I was experimenting a lot with different producers and elements. I was seeing what I liked and what other people liked. I knew for the album, I really wanted to go back to all the stripped down stuff because that's my favorite kind of music. That's the music that I want to play at live shows and put out for everyone to hear. It's just the stuff that makes me most happy. I feel like with this album, it's the most me that I've ever felt when I've made something.
LUNA: It’s a great place to be in, to have control over the way your art sounds. “What Kind of Winner” really showcases this stripped down sound.
ROSE: It does. It was a voice memo. That's one of my favorites. I'll listen to it and be like, “This is really good.”
LUNA: A lot of the songs on this album were written a year ago. What’s it like to have the added perspective being a year out from when you felt all of these things?
ROSE: I look back on “Growing,” and there’s a line, “If nothing changes, it’ll never change.” I wrote that song when I was still in the bubble of needing everything to stay the same. Now I'm in Nashville. And I'm not upset about other things that happened a long time ago.
LUNA: I think of “The House I Grew Up In” and how that likely has a new meaning now that you’ve moved away from home. Do you think there will be more songs to be written about actually leaving home?
ROSE: Probably. Even though I've moved and I love it here, I'm still afraid of the fact that I'm away from my family and my dogs. I'm really, really close with my family. [“The House I Grew Up In”] means a lot more now after moving because I never wanted to leave that house. I never wanted to leave the comfort of everything that I've ever known. I still feel that way a little bit. But now that I've moved, it's not really so scary anymore.
LUNA: Yeah. There's a lot more to be joyful about then there has to be dreading. The majority of your fan base is your age, or a bit younger, it's a lot of peers. What is it that you want them to take away from this album?
ROSE: A lot of the songs are really sad until the very end [of the album] where I'm like, “Actually, it's not your fault.” I make songs for the same reason I listen to a song that gets me through it, even though it’s a really sad song. I know that someone else is feeling the same exact way that I am. With this album, I thought I was the only one feeling the way that I felt writing the songs and I just really hope that someone younger than me, or my age, will listen to the song and be like, “Oh my god. This is me.” It's really comforting.
LUNA: Finding that connection is so important and powerful. When I heard “Throwing Rocks” for the first time, I was struck by how vivid of a storyteller you are at your age. To me, the song centers around focusing on how far you’ve come. How do you keep yourself from letting your expectations get bigger in a bad and destructive way rather than a positive way? Especially just moving to Nashville, having all these new experiences, and probably being around a lot more industry people, how do you stay grounded?
ROSE: For the longest time I tried, especially with the first EP, I tried really hard to please my crowd and try to sound like other artists that I like. And just try to be someone I'm not. When I'm sitting down and writing a song, my best songs come out when I'm feeling something that I need to write. I'm trying not to just be like, “Oh my god, the people are going to love this.” If I relate to it and it makes me happy, it will make someone else happy. I don't want to write a song for someone else that I don't like. I feel like I started to really [be myself] on the second EP. The second EP and the album are kind of like bridges to each other. In a lot of ways, they have the same themes.
LUNA: You're going on tour again soon. What do you like about touring?
ROSE: I think singing for people is my favorite thing ever. You take me to any concert and I'll be bawling my eyes out. It's just such a cool experience for everyone to be in the same room and experience the same feeling. To be the person on the stage facilitating that, it makes me feel like I'm helping other people in a way.
LUNA: It's kind of like being back in your church worship band.
