Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer’s uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. “I make music to help myself get through things,” she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it’s a journey that’s still ongoing. “If I’m going to leave anything behind, it’s going to be getting people back to themselves,” she says. “As I get back to myself, it’s a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be.”
You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose’s upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic “Fight Club.” Over the track’s simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, “I don’t need no one else to show me the way.” She describes the song as a “breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks.” Therein lies Baby Rose’s strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. “I’m not just a singer with a unique voice,” she says. “I’m somebody that has something to say.”
Growing up in Washington DC, the artist born Jasmine Rose Wilson first realized the power of her voice by reading aloud original poems at family gatherings. Despite being bullied for her lower vocal register throughout her childhood and teen years, she ultimately found comfort in songwriting and singing while playing her piano, inspired by the likes of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Janis Joplin—strong women who also possessed unique voices. She moved to Fayetteville, N.C for middle and high school.
In 2013, Rose moved to Atlanta for college and quickly became immersed in the city’s music scene and which also nourished the gift inside of her. With the release of her seminal projects, From Dusk Til Dawn and To Myself, Rose earned early co-signs from SZA, J. Cole, James Blake, Kehlani, and LeBron James to name a few. Her explosive To Myself project saw Rose channeling immense grief into a body of work that revealed her gift for soul-baring and universally relatable songwriting. The project received large critical acclaim from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vogue, NPR, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Complex, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE and many more. Rose’s meteoric rise birthed a one-of-a-kind, stirring NPR Tiny Desk performance, a sold-out headlining worldwide tour and major placements on HBO’s ‘Insecure’ and Kenya Barris’ award-winning ‘Grownish’. In late 2020, Baby Rose made her late night TV debut with an arresting performance of her breakout song “Show You” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Additionally, Rose was featured on Cole’s Dreamville compilation, Revenge of the Dreamers III (“Self-Love”), after finding her way into a studio, sitting at the piano, and grabbing the attention of J. Cole by writing and producing records for the album. “I just felt, after living in Fayetteville, NC as well for so long, I deserved to be there,” she says.
In the years since releasing To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It’s a subtle merging of new sounds—stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads—, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It’s also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover—and love—who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She’s nowhere near done writing her story.
“I think as long as I’m being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding,” she says. “I don’t want to be the type that doesn’t take risks because I’m afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."
