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Interview by Carol Wright | Photos Courtesy of LPR Agency

We got to chat with singer/songwriter Nana M. Rose about her EP Morning Drops & Lemon Seeds and what advice she has for aspiring singers.

Did you always see yourself pursuing a career in music?

No, I actually never thought I would, funnily enough! I have always loved music but I never pictured myself in a career in music because I didn’t think I was particularly good at anything until I was 15 years old. I fell in love with artists like Lianne la Havas and Matt Corby and Adele, who use their voice in such a rich and colourful and big way, that I just instantly knew: I want to be able to sing like that! That’s when my parents gifted me singing lessons because they actually thought what they heard through my bedroom door sounded good and that’s when I started discovering my voice. After gaining some confidence from this, I performed at an annual arts festival in my high school. I got such lovely responses and I just kept singing and playing in school bands from then on. After a year or two, I felt: ‘hey, I might actually be able to do this, and I decided to go for it!’

(Sidebar I love your song “4 Am”) Tell our readers a bit about the creative process behind that song. What inspired the sound?

Thank you so much! I am so happy that you like that one. Well, I absolutely love to go out dancing, and what I love most about it, is to close my eyes and surrender my body to the music. I actually process experiences and feelings this way. I have always wanted to write a song about that feeling, so when my producer (Louis Souyave) sent me an instrumental he made I instantly knew that that was the exact vibe I had been looking for to write this on. It had such a good balance between the sadness, and the grief you can feel, but also the happy and hopeful feelings you get while dancing your sadness away. I wrote the melody and the lyrics to this track, and after we laid this down, we added many more textures to it to make it as dreamy as we could, like the beautiful string parts by Nadine Dekker, lots of vocal harmonies, and extra synth parts.

Right now a lot of people can relate to what you sing about in “4 Am.” Was the pandemic and lockdown heavy inspiration for the lyrics?

Well, we wrote this song at the very beginning of the first lockdown, when I could still feel a light hangover from the last party I went to. But now, a year later, the meaning of the song has really deepened for me. With the pandemic not letting us go out and connect to other people through dancing, I have found myself really missing this. The line “I close my eyes and imagine I’ll dance with you’’ means so much more to me now. 

Did you write each song on Morning Drops & Lemon Seeds specifically for the EP or were some written previously and then added in as the EP came together?

For me, writing songs is always an organic process. I write when I feel like I want to get something off my chest, so I never wrote the songs specifically to be bundled in one EP. But, as they all come from the same period of time, I do really feel that the songs are all really connected and it made a lot of sense to put them on one EP. In the last few years, I have been going through a process of self-reinvention: what parts of me are really me, and what parts have I thought myself to be, or have my surroundings taught me to be? I feel these questions are part of every song on the EP. 

Who are some musicians you look up to?

As I mentioned, my first inspirations are Lianne la Havas, Matt Corby, and Adele, but lately, I have also fallen in love with Celeste, Rachel Chinouriri, and Baby Rose. I think the main element of the artists I love is that they know how to build a sonic and visual world you can wander away in and that they all have a very unique, authentic voice that I feel at home with. 

What advice do you have for aspiring singers?

Always remember why you want to be a singer and why you decided you want to be in music. I feel like sometimes it’s really easy to get lost in the daily thing of it all and get distracted by what’s “hot” now, but at the end of the day, it’s about being your own authentic voice and doing it because you love it, and that’s what’s gonna make you stand out. For me for example, I wanted to be in music because I am in love with emotions. I love how they can swoop you away and make you feel alive. When I first went to a music festival I was blown away by the ability of music to sweep up an entire crowd, and minutes later make the entire crowd weep. It’s so beautiful when that happens. That’s what I want to give other people too. The ability to let people reach their deepest emotions. But sometimes I tend to forget about this because of all these distractions that are there in daily life and I get lost in doubt about how I should sound, while when I find the way to just listen to myself and I dive into my feelings, I’ll always find what I want to say.