Lucy Rose (UK)
Something’s changing in Lucy Rose. After two albums of feeling her way through the densely-populated landscape of contemporary singer-songwriter music and emerging as a rising UK star, she chose to head off on an unusual tour.
She offered her fans in Latin America a deal: “If you book me a gig, I’ll come and stay.” It was a loco demente plan, but the outcome was far more fruitful and inspiring than could have been imagined. For two months, Rose, her guitar, and her backpack toured Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico. She played free shows and stayed with fans, “falling back in love with making music” along the way. The documentary of her experience there – fans blocking the street outside a gig above a launderette, trying to sleep on endless inter-city bus rides, connecting with a friend-fan who tells her, “For me, music is God,” living with families in out-of-the-way towns, and being overwhelmed by the kindness and faith in music of those she met – is deeply moving. “Music is actually more than music for most people in the world,” Rose says. “Lots of my friends and family won’t have that connection to music like the people I met, but to them, it’s more than just having background music when you’re cooking; it’s saved them in some sort of way.” This trip resulted in her astonishingly assured third album, Something’s Changing, a delicious, soulful thing of mellifluous, rolling, natural beauty.
With a new partnership with Communion Records and an exciting new band for touring, Lucy Rose is as revitalized as it gets. If Something’s Changing does the job it should do, she’ll finally get the recognition she deserves as one of the UK’s best songwriters and a true believer in the power of music. “Maybe this album doesn’t fit into the bigger picture,” she says. “But maybe I’m okay with that. I think I just wanted to put out something positive into the world. I feel like hopefully, it will make people feel better.” It will.