On her transformative album ‘There Is No Ship,’ Rose Betts confronts grief, heritage and private development by intricate manufacturing and soul-baring songwriting.
Stream: “Six” – Rose Betts
Rose Betts makes music the way in which an awesome architect builds a cathedral – layer by layer, creating sanctuaries that encourage awe and a fleeting sense of one thing sacred.
“After I sing, it’s like constructing one thing within the room that modifications the environment,” she says. “Individuals really feel it, after which the second’s gone. You possibly can hear the way it feels, you possibly can see it. It goes by them; their physique is experiencing it.”
Betts captures that fleeting but highly effective presence on her sophomore album There Is No Ship, an 11-track emotional journey by reminiscence, loss and legacy. From the ethereal opening notes of “Six” to the burden of the title observe, she weaves intricate tapestries finely stitched along with textured storytelling.
Her voice shape-shifts from delicate and ethereal to dynamic and commanding – typically throughout the identical track. On the title observe, Betts’ vocals rise and fall, like a riptide pulling listeners into one thing that feels deeply private but historical.
Respectfully drawing on her Irish heritage by her mom’s lineage, Betts layers the report with modal harmonies, fiddle traces and a story custom that offers even its lightest moments a way of depth.
The seemingly playful tracks “You By no means Seemed Again” and “Doodles” carry painful little pokes of sorrow and introspection. In “Doodles,” she sings with a raised glass and a slight ache: “And it’s one for the instances once I allow them to win / One for the sunshine that I let him dim.”
Loss has performed a key position in shaping this album, she says: “Final yr introduced loads of demise – a household pal, our canine, even simply… the environment. One thing shifted.”
That sense of impermanence and fragility permeates the report.
“Take This Physique Dwelling,” written for her estranged grandfather, affords a fancy and compassionate farewell. Framed by the standard Irish blessing, it’s a second of poetic closure: “Could your hardened coronary heart be woken / by the gentle and distant track / Of all you left right here unstated / all of the shards we preserve stepping on.”
Her grandfather was emotionally distant from her mom. His passing stirred up conflicted emotions of grief, but in addition an odd sort of peace. That thread continues in “My Funeral Track” and “Save Me a Seat” – the latter of which Betts contemplates mortality with moments of levity, just like the quietly surreal realization of discovering her first gray hair at 22.
All through the album, Betts, who was a co-producer, creates lush, layered items that reveal one thing totally different with every pay attention.
The result’s an album that feels wealthy and emotionally resonant. Every observe is a world, rigorously constructed, then let go – identical to the fleeting “buildings” Betts creates when she sings.
“I received a excessive once I first began writing songs,” she says. “I’ve been serious about that little woman loads; I’ve been attempting to get again to that woman who wrote for herself. There’s one thing undisturbed and ideal about that world.”
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© Catie Laffoon
an album by Rose Betts
