Tickets are now available for Rosie H Sullivan at The Grace!
Growing up on the remote Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, music and nature were the two binding forces in Sullivan’s childhood. With a musical diet ranging from Joni Mitchell to Genesis and stunning landscapes from which to draw inspiration, the now 21 year old was already writing music before her teens.
Sullivan’s break came in 2021 with the release of debut single ‘So It Is’, a gorgeously simplistic song released in demo form that has since gone on to pass 500,000 streams on Spotify. “I wrote it and then a couple of days after I recorded a demo in my garden, and that’s what you hear on the record,” she says, with the instinctive and powerful first take harnessing more beauty and connection than a polished studio version. As will soon become known about Sullivan, the intimacy and stark vulnerability of her songs in their embryonic forms can often prove the most powerful.
While a lot of her first songs were inspired by her childhood home of Lewis – the coordinates of the local beach, where a lot of her adolescent soul-searching was done, are tattooed on her arm – debut EP ‘123 Degrees East’ tracks the year after she and her family moved off the island in the summer of 2020, and the time of intense change that followed. Leaving the island and going through heartbreak simultaneously, a period of introspection followed, one that allowed her to come to terms with these new feelings and experiences.
Now back with a new collection of songs that augment the themes from the debut record; Sullivan shows on new track ‘Fragments’ why she is regarded as one of Scotland’s most promising up and coming songwriters. She and producer Ross Hamilton (Seafret, Izzy Bizu, Isobel Campbell) have introduced more textures and fuller arrangements creating deeper subtly that contrast the shimmering lush soundscapes.
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