La Camionette

Gig announcements & the story behind 'La Camionette'

Meet you on the stage

6th February - Leeds @ The Attic (solo headline show)

7th February - Manchester @ Low Four Studio supporting Sophie Jamieson (FREE!)

27th February - London @ Ink84 Bookshop (solo headline show at the bookshop where I work!)

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Sat next to my dad in my flat in London, I notice he’s gone quiet. Glancing over to see what has stolen his attention, I see he's fixated on a tiny, interactive graph on his phone. When I ask him about it, he casually explains it’s the real-time stats for the heating system at his house, 250 miles away. Beneath the burly umbrella of the digital age, I think this micro-era we are living in will be remembered by the ubiquitous presence of tiny, interactive graphs for basic daily functions. And music is no exception. For those who don’t know, when you release music in this tiny-graph age you are granted access to an extensive buffet of real-time data analytics. And if musicians tell you they don’t look at their tiny personal growth graphs, they are lying. It’s from addictively checking these charts, that I have deduced that La Camionette is, statistically speaking, the current fan favourite of the EP. Which is interesting because it was the track that I nearly refused to release.

Rewind 5 years and I had yet to write a song that felt worthy of sharing. Deeply embedded in a music scene that championed neo-soul and halfway through a Jazz degree, the demos on my Google Drive were an amalgamation of lukewarm Amy Winehouse rip offs and Hiatus Kaiyote clickbait. I was so desperate to write music in the Jazz-adjacent idiom but, as a daughter of suburbia, my interactions with music had always been in classical and choral settings. I actively buried my love for the operatic, folk-driven voices of the 60s like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell in an attempt to write music that I deemed cool, young and modern. And, let’s be honest, to fit in like all anxious 20 year olds crave. It took the artificial severance from this scene during lockdown for me to finally drop the act and write from an honest place. La Camionette was the result.

There are certain emotion-curdling experiences in life, like break ups and moving house, that lend themselves to songwriting. In my experience, it becomes a way of explaining and expelling (or maybe capitalising on) the baggage of emotions they bring. But it often takes many attempts before I land (if ever) on the right tone and lyrics. As Boris Johnson called a national lockdown, I sat down to write a song about the recent breakdown of my relationship and realised I had in fact written a song about my previous boyfriend. It had taken 2 years, countless crap songs and an entirely separate love affair before I could finally articulate how I had felt about this person.

Prior to university, I spent the best part of 6 months in Europe living in a van with this boyfriend in question. Rolling around the big open skies of the Iberian Peninsula with someone at 19 years old felt so akin to a dream that the abrupt breakdown of our relationship upon our return to the UK left me deeply disorientated. Through writing this song I realised that I had naively confused our shared memories for love. Our desire for companionship and adventure had been the bedrock of our relationship which quickly became obsolete when we returned to solid ground and solid homes. I used to wish that I had lived for longer in that dream but, in the same way that my surroundings felt surreal, I realised I was also living out of step with reality. The temptation to warp my feelings to fit the shape I desire is a powerful thing and one I have bent to often. Through a warmer lense, this song also captures a moment in time when you feel really old despite being so young, blissfully blind to the bigger forces behind your craving for adventure, freedom and love.

I always liked the line ‘everybody knows you can’t be sad with the sand between your toes’ because I can’t remember if I wrote it sarcastically or if have nurtured my inner cynic enough to see it like that now. But it’s wholly both true and false. It’s healing to runaway sometimes but you can’t ever leave yourself at home.

The van in question

Although at the time it felt like a big break through, the song feels juvenile to me now. Singing lyrics that you wrote half a decade ago about a teenage relationship brings the specific squirming feeling of reading an old diary which is why I was reluctant to release it. But it holds a special place in my heart and I’m always surprised by how many people relate to my confessions of non-love.

When we came to record it, I did take after take, trying (and failing) to re-capture the wistful spirit of younger Rosie. Owing to the fact this was our big pop ballad, this was the only track where we captured the guitar and vocal separately (like a proper pop star). So we had spent a long time crafting the accompaniment when I U-turned and sheepishly said I think we should use the original demo instead.

The compromise was that we kept the new guitar parts and spliced the vocal on top from the original demo I had recorded at home in 2020. The only small issue is that they had been recorded at different tempos but what is life without a little cutting and sticking. In the end we used the new vocal recordings as backing vocals, so in the final chorus you’re actually hearing young Rosie sing in duet with old Rosie which felt like a strangely full circle moment. As soon as we decided to use the original recording, I felt comfortable releasing La Camionette into the world. I think there’s something to be said for letting things lie but I’m glad we found a way to share this little piece of my past with you all, here, in the oh so marvellous present.

It makes me quite emotional to see my little song, written by a version of myself I barely recognise now, make it’s own little way in the world and connect with all of you.

Baby Rosie exploring Europe by wheel

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This year I’m on a quest to try and support myself more through my music and writing in the hopes that I can dedicate more time to both. In light of this, I have switched on a paid subscription to this weekly blog which you can sign up to below if you would like to, and are able to, support me on the slightly mad mission to being a full-time artist. Thank you for being here.

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Meet you in the bookshop

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Whilst writing this post, I kept remembering books that I read during that trip. Many people know the first novel from Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, but this is my personal favourite. It follows two women in Afghanistan between the 1960s to 2000s from different backgrounds and generations who are brought into the same household. He is an absolute master storyteller and I bawled like a baby.

Meet you on the radio

Listen to my weekly playlist here!