Lucy Rose says new album is “an acceptance that some people are going to like what I’m doing”

In the new, July issue of DIY (out tomorrow, Wednesday 24th June), Lucy Rose explains how a gig faraway - in Salt Lake City - inspired her new album.

“We played in this sort of corrugated iron hut,” she tells Sarah Jamieson in the new issue. “There were maybe only fifty people there but afterwards, I said, ‘I’ve got some merch, I’ll be at the van’ because there was nowhere to sell merch in that corrugated iron box. I remember I was outside,” she reminisces, “and everybody that had come to the gig, all fifty people, were all outside chatting about the record. There were people even who’d talk to me a bit more deeply about what the record actually meant to them and then I’d feel so lucky. First you’re playing but then you’re actually meeting people who are coming to gigs to talk about [the album] and I found that all very inspiring for writing. I guess it was a confidence I had never had before, with the first record. It was an acceptance that some people are going to like what I’m doing and it helped me a lot.”

Her second effort ‘Work It Out’ therefore primarily came to life in the back of Rose’s van. After grappling with technology, and setting her acoustic guitar aside - “I’d drive my band mad if I was trying to play an acoustic guitar in the van for ten hours straight!” - she soon found there was more room for musical experimentation than she had perhaps anticipated. Take lead single ‘Our Eyes’ with its almost tropical-feeling synths, or the layered introduction of ‘Cover Up’, which sees Rose stepping into completely new territory. “I wish I could say that it was a conscious decision to go in this direction and do this,” she admits, “but it just kinda happened. A lot of the songs are a bit different on the album because they were just written as random times over the last three years. Some songs have just turned out the way they have, but each song was treated individually.

Photo: Emma Swann / DIY. Read the full Lucy Rose interview in the July issue of DIY, out Wednesday 24th June.