On the Rise
Rosie Darling

It’s a skill that she’s garnered doing a myriad of writing sessions, meeting anyone and everyone and learning about their story as a writing experiment. “I’ll write down ideas and bring them to a session, sometimes they aren’t even for my artist project but they’ve helped me come into my own and hit my stride as a songwriter.”

Originally from just outside of Boston, Darling speaks from her newfound home in Los Angeles. It’s the place where she released her debut EP Coping in 2021 and the city that inspired last year’s EP, Golden Age, a collection of songs that chronicled her desire for connection in such a big place. Both EP’s represent Darling’s knack for storytelling, peeling back the layers of her psyche to help process her emotions and reflect on past experiences.

“After growing up outside of Boston, I went to college in North Carolina and immediately moved to Los Angeles,” explains Darling. “I wrote songs throughout middle and high school, but it was never professional. It wasn’t until I got to LA when I realised that I compartmentalised the two — my family is in Boston and that’s where I go to visit, but there’s no professional tie there. I’m a West Coast person now.”

As a self-declared “West Coast” person now, it makes sense that the first song that would mark her artistic career would be named after the city she’d move to — “L.A.” — a collaboration with OKO. “I still love that song,” Darling reflects. “It was a mix between pop and EDM, which are still the two main genres that I write in whether it’s for my own project or a collaboration. After it [L.A.] came out, I started doing more sessions and realised the more I did, the better practice I would have. My writing developed and it became more of a skill that I had to learn and get better at.”

Naming Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams as two of the lyricists that resonate deeply with her, Darling notes the importance of “balancing between conversational and deeper, more metaphorical lyrics.” It’s a trick that Darling, like Swift and Abrams, does with ease. After the release of Coping, Darling found listeners that didn’t just listen to her music passively but feverishly indulged in it. The result was the title track’s lead single “Coping” garnering 56M+ Spotify streams and the EP amassing over 100 million streams across the globe.

But when asked whether she views her songs and EPs as chapters in her life, as her aforementioned songwriting idols do, Darling hesitates. “I go back and forth on this because I definitely get inspired by certain things that happen in my real life, but I also know how to tell a story and write a pop song. With Coping being my first project I wanted to make sure it had all the right songs on it to appeal to everyone, but with Golden Age each song had its own world and each song sounded varied and different.”

A lot of the music Darling is working on now is for her forthcoming debut album, something she unveils that is more “organic” in terms of songwriting and production, mentioning using real instruments rather than the computer and getting back to basics.

“I’ve done a few projects so it makes sense, but I wasn’t really planning on writing an album, it just kind of happened,” states Darling. “A lot of it is definitely sad music, but it's really personal. “Lost On You” is about grieving a relationship, but a lot of the songs are a lot poppier. I’m only just finishing up recording it [the album] now, but all of the themes are coming together.”

With the creation of this album, something that has surprised Darling is her approach. When she once would approach songwriting as something slightly formulaic (“I’m used to writing songs by saying ‘Okay, let’s write a break-up song’ and then doing that”), now she’s doing it solely for herself and what she’s experiencing.

“I know a byproduct of me releasing this music will be that people will relate to it and the songs will resonate, but at the end of the day I wasn’t really thinking about that. It’s been healing for me to write and record these songs as a way to process some of my feelings. I love storytelling and songwriting because of the creative aspect to it, but I wasn’t aware how much I’d see songwriting as its own version of therapy.”

The beauty of being a songwriter is that you never know exactly when a song is going to hit you. For Darling, there was one in particular that came out of nowhere during writing that terrified her to the point where she was afraid to record it. “I’ve noticed that, when writing, I’m not scared of it then, but it’s hard recording it. It’s because it means so much to me and I want the take to be perfect; to capture the same feelings I felt when I wrote it or experienced it. I think doing an album versus an EP you have more time to showcase different ways that you sing. We've had more time to experiment with that stuff versus just writing a song and listening to the demo. Like with songwriting, it’s become more about the whole journey from start to finish.”

Darling already feels as though she’s experienced a lot in 2023 after a supporting slot with rising pop artist Ashley Kutcher on tour in America (“It was such a safe environment for my very first tour”) and releasing both “Lost On You” and “Nail In The Coffin ft. Boy In Space” (“That was definitely an emotional one”). Now she’s looking forward to her next big dream: releasing her debut full-length project. “All I’m thinking about now is finishing this album, getting it exactly how I want it, and letting go of any expectations of it. I just can’t wait to have a completed full-length project that I am proud of out in the world.”