In The Mood For Love: Rosie Lowe Interviewed

There’s a track on Rosie Lowe’s forthcoming album, ‘Lover, Other’, that is one of the most vividly-rendered portraits of Sunday melancholy I’ve ever heard. ‘Out Of You’, positioned towards the latter half of the record, is private torment filtered through a fluttering ambient coda. Lowe’s supple harmonic lines, pirouetting horns, and a cloudburst of rainfall suspends you in air, with no sense of grounding or tether to the real world. “Look at the mess I made, I’m trying my best, In my head, no it’s you,” a multi-tracked Lowe sings to a lover adrift; a distant despatch that could also be a self-regulated pledge for inner peace. 

In many ways, compared to Lowe’s debut album, ‘Control’, and 2019 follow-up, ‘YU’, the roads to ‘Lover, Other’s’ centre are hazier. For the first time in her career, Lowe resisted the patina of perfectionism. Seeking respite from her hub in London which coloured an early exploration of club-skewed nocturnes with electronic mavens like FaltyDL, Machinedrum and Lil Silva, Lowe took detours to Florence, Berlin, Devon, and the sleepy village of Madremanya in Spain, with nothing but a “mini studio-setup in a suitcase”. From the seeds of spontaneity, real-life experience and connection, Lowe began to formulate her most complete, and confounding, work to date. 

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“When you’re a singer, there’s a focus on the lead line. This chapter was about finding ways to free myself from the clutches of an idea of a perfect vocal – a perfect song,” the Devon-born singer tells me from her base in Deptford, London on a warm Monday morning. “I didn’t want to fall into the habit of having to edit and refine too much. I’ve struggled with meticulousness in the past, and I don’t think that’s necessarily conducive with creative freedom.” 

Lowe first got a taste of that edifying freedom when working on her pandemic-era collaborative album with pianist and sound artist, Duval Timothy. ‘Son’, a choral, chordal suite of songs centring the voice as both a textural and narratorial device, was recorded between London and Sierra Leone. During that process, Lowe returned to the source of her music training. “Using my voice as an instrument was what I did fresh out of uni ten years ago,” Lowe says. Now an independently-signed artist, having moved to indie imprint Blue Flowers in 2020, Lowe is no longer bound by label pressure: she’s creating on her own terms. “With the project with Duval and this album, it all feels full circle,” she adds. “It felt like the right time to try new things. I wanted to exercise my creative autonomy, bring collaborators into my orbit when I felt it was required, and really lean into the production side of things.” 

Lowe’s voice – spliced, stratified, harmonised – is her muse on ‘Lover, Other’, a protagonist in its own story brought to life on sun-drenched bossa and samba rhythms, shadowy RnB interludes and serrated electro-clash experiments. “On certain tracks, the vocals felt too clean or accurate, and I didn’t want that. I wanted my vocals to be off-the-cuff and free. I recorded to tape so I couldn’t edit the vocals; I switched off the computer and recorded straight into the sampler,” Lowe explains. 

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The collaged feel of ‘Lover, Other’ is fundamentally shaped by the ways in which Lowe embraced sample culture. Armed with a SP-120, Lowe and a cadre of close collaborators sampled obscure vinyl finds; like on the molten ‘In The Morning’, which repurposed a track by Japanese multi-instrumentalist Makoto Matsushita, who personally approved Lowe’s interpretation of his nostalgia-soaked original. On ‘Lover, Other’, Lowe honours the art of a recontextualised sample; as an augmentation, an archival activity, and a way of accessing memory. “I think conversations about sampling are important,” Lowe says. “I write songs from scratch and I sample. The authenticity is still the same. Music is recyclable by its very nature. Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari’ sampled The Beatles – the reference is clear, yet he made it his own. Frank knew his cultural references and that’s so cool.”

Together these songs constitute an entire ecosystem of polarities. This is Lowe’s most quietly subversive enterprise surveying what the prime of one’s life means and offers up. The sybaritic ‘Mood To Make Love’ and its metronome-like motion acknowledges “the other side of desire”. Elsewhere Lowe is hardened, weathered down and downcast, grappling with the finite time we have on this earthly plane: the hymnal opener, ‘Sundown’, is a heart-rending tribute to a friend who took his own life during the Covid pandemic. “’Sundown’ is a really important track to me,” Lowe shares. “I’d just found out my friend Steve had passed, two days later I recorded this track and it all poured out of me. It was a heavy but cathartic moment in terms of processing what had happened.” 

Ultimately, ‘Lover, Other’ is about transitions. About honouring departed friends and real-time relationships; about deriving strength from within and overcoming. Lowe is tender and susceptible in the lead and background, her voice cracking with feeling in songs that gesture towards an uncertain future. The symphonic, Disney-inspired feel of ‘Lover, Other’ gives Lowe’s interiority a bigger stage to project its iridescent light – an enchanting tale not just to be listened to but immersed in. It’s this energy exchange Lowe is most looking forward to experiencing in the coming months.

“I love that music can make you feel less lonely. This album is not always uplifting, and it might put you in your feels but I’d hate for people to switch it off and be crying. This is a late evening summer album. I hope it gives you a sonic hug.” 

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