Name: Rose Betts
Nationality: British
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Recent release: Rose Betts's new album There Is No Ship is out via Nettwerk.
Recommendation for Los Angeles and London: Go to the public library in downtown Los Angeles, it’s a temple! If you’re in London go for a swim in the Hampstead ponds!
Topic I rarely get to talk about: I think I've generally been able to crowbar all my interests into my work somehow. I love learning about astrophysics and black holes but wouldn’t dare give an interview based on my limited knowledge!

If you enjoyed this Rose Betts interview and would like to stay up to date with her music and future live activities, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud, and tiktok.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

Yes very much so, my family is intensely musical, we grew up singing together and being so immersed it felt only natural to make my own music.

I started writing songs at around 11, I think we were on a family holiday in Scotland and I picked up my dad’s guitar and wrote a sweet little song about home.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

Writing songs is definitely a form of self therapy for me, it’s also a world building exercise, even if the world just exists in the air. I love when a song is done, there is a kind of thrill, excitement at having made something like that, something I can listen back to as if I didn’t write it.

Literature has always informed my writing. Writers inspire me to find new ways of getting to the simplicity of a truth, stripping away the fat and just trying to say something that feels familiar and fresh at the same time.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Joni Mitchell always inspires me lyrically. Her album ‘Both Sides Now’ is a collection of songs from across her career and is so rich in poetry and vulnerability.



Keane’s album ‘Hopes and Fears’ was a big part of my childhood. I love how unfussy the lyrics are, quite open for each listener to imbue with their own feelings.



Also ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon!

I love the way he tells stories, it doesn’t feel overly personal that album, but I actually love that, we don’t always have to bare our souls.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

Oh wow, hard question! In Joni Mitchell’s song ‘A Case of You’ she has the line “on the back of a cartoon coaster in the blue TV screen light I drew a map of Canada” ...



I've never looked at coasters the same since hearing this line, but also it made me even more aware of the small things around me in moments that were important … The details of the room you get your heart broken inside of … these often benign objects that suddenly take on meaning for having been present in that moment.

Bringing them into my songwriting adds a kind of personal but also non-sentimental realism to the feeling I'm trying to express in the song.

It is sometimes said that “music begins where words end.” What do you make of that?

I like that, that feels true. When something is wordless it doesn’t need to be translated in your head in the same way, it’s a more direct line to your heart, or your feet or your tear ducts.

Sometimes words can get in the way!

I have always considered many forms of music to be a form of poetry as well. Where do you personally see similarities? What can music express which may be out of reach for poetry?

Poems and songs are both fairly concise art forms … They have a lot to say in a small amount of time which gives them a particular potency and precision. Novels, films and TV have a lot more canvas to establish their themes, so there’s something more immediate and arresting about a poem or a song.

I think what music has which poetry doesn’t, is that because it’s not always bound to words it can often feel author-less … as if it belongs to the air and came from it, and therefore it’s as if it could have come from you, could be an echo from a distant mountain. Isn’t that magical?

The relationship between words and music has always intrigued me. How do you see it? In how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

The music and the lyrics work together to sculpt the song.

Sometimes the melody finds its natural resolution before the lyrics have and then the lyrics have to adapt to fit the melody and I love it when a limitation forces creativity! The tussle between the two can take the song in a direction I hadn’t anticipated and that’s the joy and the magic of the whole thing.

It’s hard to pull apart the impact music and lyrics have on each other, there’s an unconscious relationship that is intuitive and subliminal that I think is kind of holy, and shouldn’t be over-examined or explained.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

Being alone … in positive and negative states is something I return to a lot as a theme/topic.

As a twin my experience is a little different to most, I feel like my sense of ‘aloneness’ is quite particular. It’s something I fight for and cherish but also seeing as I formed next to another being my feeling of togetherness and being drawn to it is very instinctive, I can get lost in it very easily.

On the basis of a piece off your new album There Is No Ship, tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

For this I’ll choose my song ‘Alderidge Creek’ because I wrote most of it without an instrument.



I’d planned to bring my guitar to a place called The Huntington Gardens in Pasadena and write the song under a great tree but they don’t allow instruments in so I had to leave it behind which then meant I had to write the song in my head.

I was sat below a willow and the story unfolded very gradually and I was conscious the whole time of never puncturing the world of these two lovers, making it feel like a trance or a dream …

The repetitive nature of the melody and the repeating of the same line “so we met by the pines on alderidge creek” acted like a root to tie the song to, and each verse would drift a little away and build on the magic of the world and the day but never break the spell.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

Things often begin at the beginning but sometimes it’s fun to finish a song and then swap things around, put the second verse first and see how it feels. Sometimes a verse will come naturally and only by the time I've written the chorus do I realise what the song is actually about.

I had some struggles with songs on this project that I wanted to go a certain way and the song kept resisting, it was like I was trying to force something with the lyrics and the song knew it and objected.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

Interesting question.

Sometimes EPs / albums do feel like one big song … and sometimes an EP is a collection of loose end songs, one’s that don’t have a home elsewhere so the EP becomes a kind of vehicle to get them out rather than a true cohesive artistic statement. I don’t have a problem with that, it’s hard enough to release music as it is.

I think it’s definitely possible for a song to contradict the project it's a part of… it can also get lost in it … it’s fun to play with that and I'm sure some choices don’t work for everyone but I also like that that’s kind of the deal … you can be having a perfect day and then you get a flat tire …

Sometimes life throws surprises at you and I like that music can do the same.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

There are definitely words that sound better to sing than others … I even feel like my accent is up for grabs sometimes!

Some words are more romantic when softened, and if that’s what I want from the feeling of the song it makes sense to soften them, even at the cost of my accent on that word. There are also certain sounds which don’t record well, like an ‘s’ sound, so they get softened which can sound like an accent change too. And sometimes to go against the grain and harden a word can be very effective.

I don’t often sing covers, mainly because it doesn’t really interest me but when I do I guess I have to put on the clothes of another writer for a moment and find myself within them. You have to find a place of resonance between you and the song otherwise it will sound like a lie.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

I once had a person come up to me and tell me they thought a song was about depression and it caught me off guard because the song really wasn’t written from that space but it amazed me how much people put of themselves in songs.

With my song “Irish Eyes” I was honestly so taken by surprise by how many people took it and felt it was about them because it felt so specific to me when I wrote it.



What I didn’t realise is that people just took the feeling of celebrating heritage from the song, the details didn’t matter to them and I love that, the song transcended itself!

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing song lyrics or poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Yes it’s very different. Of course a great cup of tea is a precious thing but being an artist and living that life is far more complicated and costly.

It’s not a simple thing to write a song, and even harder to write one that people connect with. You have to spend your life with your eyes open, you have to be prepared to examine yourself, each flaw and failing, each high point and low point ... Nothing can be off the table. A wound is kept raw every time you sing about it, it is on your canvas forever so that you can turn to it in your work for truth.

Not to say we’re all saints who never dip into normal day to day things … I've binged my fair share of Love is Blind and got lost on reels. But in general writing a song is the bringing together of years and years of work, most of which is invisible and that’s where the magic is.