On the Rise: Jessy Rose

Jessy Rose is not in the business for pleasantries; he meets small talk with honesty. When I ask how he’s doing, rather than brushing off the question with a breezy – and largely untruthful – answer, instead, he says, “Right now, I’m the most content I’ve been in the last three years of my life.” Bathed in blue light, speckled with stars, he looks as though he has melted into the heavens – and all the while, he just can’t put down his guitar.

“Have you heard it, the whole thing?”, the 23-year old asks, looking down, unable to tear himself from the strings, mining every waking moment, it would seem, for a new sound. But then, he looks up: “What did you think about it?” The story goes that Rose had penned in excess of 200 songs for his six-act solo EP, Are You Home, but he shrugs, “It was way more than that.” I ask how many. “2,385,” he smirks, toying with trivial questions like a cat with a mouse under its paw.

The singer-songwriter cut his teeth fronting Irish rap fusionists Hare Squead, who were born of the asphalt jungles and bloody knees of Dublin’s skateparks, and, in only a handful of years, went on to experience a meteoric rise as Columbia signees, supporting Nas and Joey Bada$$, topping it all off with the ubiquitous GoldLink collaboration, “Herside Story”, which racked up a staggering 90 million streams. Hare Squead had the Midas touch, and they were barely out of their teens. But a year later, in 2017, Rose abruptly left the group, citing his deteriorating mental health as the reason. He sighs, “I was just in the middle of a spiritual warfare, I believe.”

Are You Home was a release that was never supposed to happen. Rose remembers, “I was nearly thinking to myself, ‘Yo, I’m never going to enter the music industry ever again, I’m done with music. For a period, I just wasn’t sure if it was ever going to work for me. Like, there was a lot of labels that were interested, and not interested, this and that… I guess I was a bit of a liability in a way,” he shrugs, “you know, because of my mental health and stuff. People did believe in my talent, but believing in me? That was another thing.”

The EP is a statement about the Jessy Rose we never truly met. The music, much like himself, is woven with contradictions. It’s a firm departure from the fizzy hip-hop beats and 24-karat RnB of Hare Squead. Hung in the suspended reality of gods and monsters, Rose’s lyrics read like finely-spun riddles. But at the core of that, of course, is the truth; a reality that cuts so deeply to the bone that Rose divert our gaze away from it. Music, for him, is “ventilation”, but the evasiveness he applies to his lyrics is something that can be felt just by talking to him. Instead, he leaves his work “up for interpretation” and turns to mirror on ourselves. To be direct would give away the game away – because otherwise, we might just stand a chance of knowing what’s going on in his mind.

When it comes to the personal origins of his music, he says simply, “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.” He appreciates being vague in his writing, because he believes that there is a wider scope for artistic value in interpretation. “What do you think “Judas” is about?” he challenges. Telling of the moon and angels, Rose personifies femininity, a divine “she” that leads him to the lions. It would be an easy assumption to believe it’s an open-and-shut story of a dizzying romance, but his question leads you to believe that there is much more beneath the surface. “I try to express things colourfully. I don’t know, I think it’s better that way. It’s more for the music nerds – for the average person, it will just go over their head, I guess.” So, what are they missing out on? He smiles, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

He considers Are You Home to be a “self-affirmation.” The question it poses runs deep, for Rose. “When I ask, ‘Are you home?’, I’m asking, ‘Are you finally comfortable in yourself? Are you ready for what you were put on this earth to do?’ I guess home is, like… self-love and acceptance. It’s a personification of a bunch of different stuff.” He shrugs, “My creative process is very abstract. It’s very weird.”

Much of Jessy Rose’s music is inspired by his lucid dreams. “I’ve always been a dreamer,” he says. “I’ve always taken advice from my dreams.” He developed an ability to control his dreams when he was around 20 years old, which coincided with the writing of Are You Home. “When I left the band, I started to become more spiritual, and I kind of isolated myself, in a way, so I could just come to terms with who I was.” The last track on the EP, “Selah”, started a nightmare, a grotesque, Picasso-like montage of melting faces, as a woman screamed the word. He woke up and started to research the fragmented images and words he could recall. The word “Selah” is biblical, and as he returned to the same dream, the more calming the ‘being’ became, until at last, he was “carried out of the storm.” But sometimes, he would wake up, and all he would have was a melody. He confesses, “Those melodies are my best, I think.”

Before he could talk, Rose could sing. His parents would sing and play piano at their church in his place of birth in Brussels, and as they chanted “amen, amen”, they noticed their six-month old son trying to babble the hymn’s chorus. “Church has always been a big part of my life,” he says. “I was always in choirs, at school. There wasn’t that much opportunity for me to express myself until I became a teenager and found out about YouTube, and all that stuff. Before that, though, church was the one place where I could perform and set my talent free. I consider myself as having Christian values, but like, I’m more of a new age Christian, in a sense, I guess, or something… I don’t know if I’m even comfortable talking about religion.” While he shies away from describing his music as being strictly religious in nature, his lyrics can draw on abstract, higher powers and cosmic significance just as readily as they draw on the reality of his life.

But “Set Free” is the closest admission we have to understanding what the last few years have been like for Rose after his departure from Hare Squead. It stands alone as a song that is surprisingly confrontational. “I was a refugee in a world that was mine / All the pressure got to me, and I lost my mind,” Rose sings over a dusky, percussive RnB beat. After leaving the band’s house, moving back home with his dad, the song’s origin came after he watched A Star is Born. After watching the film, which tackles the ephemerality of fame and artistic integrity, Rose started to demo the track in his dad’s bathroom. “The echo was really nice in there,” he remembers. “Every night, I’d just be in there for hours, writing and freestyling.”

The EP’s producer, Ben Esser, stumbled upon Rose’s work when he found a mixtape he released on SoundCloud called Rebirth. “I had my email address on my profile, so he hit me up saying he was a really big fan of my work. Out everyone who sent a message, he was the one who really stood out,” he explains. “He really fitted into my world, so I thought we could do some really cool stuff together.” Esser sent a smorgasbord of beats, from soul, to jazz and EDM, for Rose to experiment with. The first song they made together, “Paralised”, is a smooth, RnB cut which Rose had written about the feeling of being “stuck in awe, and greatness and beauty”, a play on words, fusing the concept of ‘paradise’ and being ‘paralysed.’ A year later, after testing their creative bond, they began recording “Set Free”, bringing in guitar virtuoso Beau Diako to execute the sound.

“When I listen to music that I like, I kind of get lost in it. I’m in a different world,” he says. “And that’s what I want to achieve: I want to build worlds with my music.” Total immersion, above all else, is what Rose wants a listener to experience. Striking out as a solo artist, particularly after a turbulent relationship with the music industry left him doubting if he wanted any part of it, was scary. “I was used to having my best friends with me,” he explains. “We were always together. And then, out of nowhere, it was like, ‘This is just me now. All me.’” His first session was with Love Ssega, formerly of Clean Bandit. “It was all suddenly my opinion, alone. It was so overwhelming at first. I had to relearn how to have confidence in myself. It was a process in being comfortable enough to say what I wanted to say.”

"I started to burn out because I had to be the life of the party, the happy one, and it just caught up with me.”

The feeling of being out of his depth is not an unfamiliar one. “You could own everything but the price is really cold / What is a rich man who does not possess a soul”, he writes on “Set Free”, drawing from his experience as a teenager reared under the hothouse lights of Columbia Records. “We were put into these sessions with these producers who’d had number one hits, and A-listers would be just walking up and down the halls,” he recalls. “But these were people I’d never seen before in real life, because I’m from Ireland and stuff. I’d only ever seen them on the music channel. Everyone on my Spotify, and stuff… suddenly I’m starting to see that they’re real people. But I just felt like, do I deserve to be among them? Am I as good as them? Am I as worthy as them to be here?”

It sounds like a textbook case of imposter syndrome – almost. “I guess it was something like that,” Rose says, “but we knew we were the shit. We were so confident that we were gonna do amazing things.” But when “Herside Story” and their 2016 EP Supernormal dropped, his world tipped on its axis. “My life changed within, like, a week. Because I was the frontman, most celebrities and people would follow me, and then I’d be the one to get invited to hang out with certain people. They were supporting me, but it made me feel really guilty.”

He felt himself becoming someone he didn’t like. “I just naturally became this, like, sex symbol,” he shifts uncomfortably. “I didn’t like the way I was looked at, and stuff. It really ruined my whole view of success and fame. For the most part, I enjoyed pretty much every moment of it. They were still the best years of my life, and I learned so much through that experience, but I just didn’t like the message I started to sing about.”

As if overnight, Rose started to feel the pressure mounting to simply function and get through the day. “Part of the image was being seen as very happy – always energetic, witty…” he explains. “If I’d show up to a studio session or a video shoot and keep to myself, everyone would always be asking, ‘What’s wrong with Jessy?’ I started to burn out because I had to be the life of the party, the happy one, and it just caught up with me.”

He went through a cycle of creating and deleting Instagram accounts, trying to find a projection of his image that he felt comfortable with. “I tried to make it really hard to find my account, so that when you looked up ‘Jessy Rose’ it wouldn’t show up,” he remembers. “I made a private account where I could be myself, just travelling and stuff, enjoying myself and taking a lot of random, weird pictures and stuff. I eventually made it public, but the small group of people who follow me, I know fuck with me – they’re genuine. It took me a long time to get the circle that I wanted.”

To find fame and willingly let it slip through his fingers was an enormous burden for an 18-year-old to carry, and he lives with the consequences of that decision every day. Did he feel like he’d lost a part of his youth? “Exactly!” he says enthusiastically. “Yeah, that did happen, a little bit. I feel like I didn’t get to grow up and experience everything.” He enrolled at BIMM in Dublin, studying his “dream course”, Commercial Modern Music. “I was a star in the school – it was great,” he says. “But then I had to leave all of a sudden because Hare Squead got a record deal. I didn’t get to experience a normal college life, and everything that came with that. I was just in all these crazy members-only clubs with a bunch of old people and stuff. I had to grow up in the music industry. I didn’t get to grow up on my own.”

But for Jessy Rose, there are no regrets. “All I ever wanted to do was be an artist,” he says, “so that face that I got to pursue my dreams… I should be more grateful for that.” And as for Lilo Blues and Tony Konstone, his Hare Squead counterparts and best friends, there is no love lost. “We still talk pretty much every day,” Rose adds. “They respect the fact that I was honest with them when I needed to step out. They were like, ‘Cool, man, do what you gotta do.’”

Before Hare Squead entered the frame, Jessy Rose was already making a name for himself in Ireland. It all started when he uploaded a video of him singing about a girl he liked in his class in secondary school when he was 12-years-old, which led to him tapping into the wave of cover artists breaking into the mainstream. Between joining projects that quickly dissolved, Rose was scouted to join a writing camp for The Saturdays which tried to reel him in with a distribution deal, which he ultimately turned down. But among those false starts, he met Lilo and Tony. His older brother showed him videos of Lilo rapping over the piano, but at the time, Rose was something of a lone wolf. What brought them together was their love of skating. “I saw a picture of them with their skateboards, which was crazy to me because there wasn’t that many black skaters in my area – I was always surrounded by white kids.”

"It’s about contentment; feeling comfortable in the way I express myself."

He left the suburbs of Dublin and ventured into the city to meet them, and their freestyles soon became concrete song-writing. They emerged as Hare Squead at an open mic, a small gathering of eight people in the audience – but one of those people became the manager they kept to this day.

When I ask if there is any hope for a reunion, Rose insists, as if underlining it twice, “Definitely, definitely, definitely. We’re already…” his voice trails off. “I can’t talk about it. Lilo and I are already collaborating on some production and writing for other artist. I met Tony through Lilo, so I was always really, really close to Lilo.” Having mixed one of Rose’s previous singles, “Last Week”, he remains very much in the picture. “We still jam out for hours, being geeks about music and stuff. It would make sense for us to work together again in the future – I would love that. If Hare Squead happened now, it would’ve been the best time. All of us are in a great place creatively and mentally. But it’s good that I’ve learned to express myself and fully be myself, too.”

Jessy Rose seems more certain of himself than ever, with a renewed sense of drive and direction. What’s striking is the sheer versatility of his talent which continues to defy your expectations. In his back catalogue, he even has entire rock album, getting lost in the character he was building. But when it comes to Are You Home – well, that was just for him. “I didn’t make it to do crazy numbers, or anything. I just made it out of love.” While he’s starting to shift his sights onto more commercially viable music, this much is clear: “I’m ready to re-enter the industry now.” At last, he seems to have found a sense of inner peace, independent of the artificiality of his major-label fame, leaning into something more fulfilling. “It’s about contentment; feeling comfortable in the way I express myself. If I can do things the way I want to do them, then that is enough.”