Let's Eat Grandma's Rosa Walton talks collaboration, big ambitions, and debut solo album 'Tell Me It's A Dream' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“I guess now it’s… what is it? Is it 2026 now? Yeah, 2026,” ponders Rosa Walton, before giving a hoot of laughter at her own scatterbrained question. Bedecked in a bright pink blouse and matching tinted sunnies, she logs on to DIY’s video call like sunshine incarnate, but slightly bemoaning her fellow beams amid the stickiness of May’s heatwave. Anyone even vaguely familiar with her - most likely thanks to her 50% stake in avant-garde weirdo-pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma - will be unsurprised to hear there’s an inherent sense of whimsy about her, a lightness and curiosity that’s instantly affable but belies a deep thoughtfulness. She seems to track thoughts like plane trails through the sky, finding shapes in their fumes before they fade back into the atmosphere and she asks, semi-sheepishly, “Sorry, what was the question?”.

Having ascertained the current year, she picks back up, reflecting on just how long her imminent solo debut has been in the works. “I knew that I wanted to make a record after writing the first song,” Rosa says, noting that it was back in lockdown that she initially “had more time on [her] hands to write more songs.” A punchy, irrepressible anthem, that first effort - eventual lead single ‘Sorry Anyway’, written with producer Sam E. Yamaha - became “quite an anchor to come back to for the rest of the record”; while the LP’s other eight tracks have been reworked myriad times since their 2020 conception, that song stayed steadfast, “exactly true to how it was when we wrote it.”

Something of a mission statement in more ways than one, ‘Sorry Anyway’ encapsulates both the sound and overarching ethos of the wider Rosa Walton project: it’s a blueprint for her brand of effervescent, euphoric synth-pop, but also encodes the warm embrace of collaboration and a safe place to land. Anchors, you sense, are important to Rosa - while ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is a record self-professedly inspired by having her head in the clouds, it’s also full of familiarity, covered in the fingerprints of the friendly presences that prevent her from floating entirely away.

She’s still with Let’s Eat Grandma’s label, Transgressive, and created ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ alongside David Wrench - the band’s two-time producer and now a firm friend, with whom Rosa frequently attends pub quizzes (“weirdly, we’re both very bad at the music round…”). Her artistic other half, Jenny Hollingworth, hasn’t gone anywhere either; she released a debut album of her own as Jenny On Holiday back in January, but the pair are still thick as thieves, and Rosa tapped her teenage bestie as a sounding board (and vocalist, on the soaring ditty ‘Prettier Things’) throughout the recording process.

“I’m someone who gets very easily disoriented; if I hadn’t had any of those people involved, I would be… God knows,” she laughs. “I would be very confused about who I was as a person. And also, the songs are going to end up better if the people I work with know me so well that I can completely be myself around them. The album is about sharing personality [to] the fullest, and having people that get me and my ways was a really important part of being able to dig deep into myself to bring that out.”

“The album is about sharing personality [to] the fullest.”

Having formed Let’s Eat Grandma with Hollingworth aged just 13 (their third and most recent album, ‘Two Ribbons’, came out in 2022), Rosa stepped up to the solo plate with not only over a decade of skin in the game, but also a steely quiet confidence - in her abilities, yes, but even more so in herself. “I guess I feel like I don’t really have anything to prove at this point,” she muses. “In the early days of the band, me and Jenny would be madly darting around the stage playing, like, a million keyboards, and a glockenspiel here and there, and a mandolin. Which is really cool and we will do that again,” she grins, “however [this time] I didn’t need to prove that I can play a glockenspiel.

“Me and Jenny were SO young, and we were girls… which we still are, but we’re less young now.” Rosa pauses; her giggle is infectious. “We’re still on the younger side, but that’s very different from being a 14-year-old girl playing music on stage and having men [say] ‘ooh, there must be some Older Man behind this’. Then I’d be thinking: ‘oh god, well we’re gonna have to show them that that’s not the case!’. We sort of had our work cut out.” Shrugging off any lingering sense of imposter syndrome or indignant point-proving, Rosa was able to approach ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ with a secure sense of playing to her strengths: “the musicians I’ve worked with for this record are obviously miles better than I can be, technically, on these instruments. So why wouldn’t I make the most out of maximising their skills? That’s quite a development for me as an artist, as well - I’m able to put trust in these people.”

“To be able to fully appreciate and express that joy and happiness, you kind of have to have seen the other side of it as well.”

Here, then, Rosa’s innate ambition lies less in experimental expectation-defying, and more in the thematic bones of the record - a record which speaks of unequivocal self-acceptance and unbounded imagination. “I don’t think I’m crazy / I just still believe in the amazing” goes ‘Prettier Things’; “And you can do whatever you want” proclaims wonderfully uncynical closer ‘Romance Is Dead On’ (a track so buoyant, it practically transposes you into the pivotal scene of a plucky-outcast-made-good rom com).

“I guess being able to put your mind to it and then achieve whatever you want is quite a cool [message] of this record,” she smiles, explaining that her own outlook favours tenacity over specific, tangible goals. “When me and Jenny started the band, obviously we could both write a song, but we weren’t child prodigies - we just worked at it. I could barely sing in tune when I started; Jenny could, she always got better [scores] than me on SingStar!”

And it’s this refusal to be squashed, this defiant, uncompromising sort of joy, that lies at the heart of ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’. It’s a record thoroughly imbued with optimism, but one that somehow never strays into being shallow or trite; like ‘80s and ‘90s greats like The Cure or The Cranberries, it understands that light and shadow are symbiotic, and the former should be treated with just as much reverence as the latter. “To be able to fully appreciate and express that joy and happiness, you kind of have to have seen the other side of it as well,” Rosa affirms. “What do people say? The happiest people have always been through the most?” But, she explains, “when we were making this record we just had such a laugh, constantly. It’s how you get through; you laugh at the funny things, and you laugh at the disasters too.”

‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’, then, “is about being able to condense all of these different things into one; everything about life is just so chaotic, and writing songs is actually a thing that makes sense. It’s weirdly the thing I find easiest; it’s the rest of life which is quite complicated.”

Spicing Things Up

Rosa recalls one particularly memorable morning recording ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ in Wales’
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“We had this unbearably hot chilli sauce called Mr Naga, and I was basically trying to prove a point of how much spice I could take. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast every day and we'd all have the tiniest bit on the edge of our plate, but [one day] I said ‘nah, I can eat more than that’. Straight after breakfast, we went into tracking ‘Heart To Heartbreak’; it’s got all its instruments tracked at once, and I was playing keys and singing, so basically I had to be really on it.

“We got about halfway through one take - we’d maybe done five - and I was thinking: ‘everyone’s really locked in, this is the BEST take’. Then I thought: ‘oh God, I’m gonna throw up’. I somehow managed to make it to the end of the song - ‘I cannot ruin this!’ - and then threw up immediately after. And that’s the take we used!

‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is out now via Transgressive.

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