After recommending Olive Jones’ For Mary, we asked her to return the favour: which album would she pass on to us?
Her answer was Rosie Lowe’s Lover, Other. We had never listened to Rosie, so we pressed play.
A few minutes later, “Mood to Make Love” gave us one of those lovely ah, we get it moments. Rosie’s voice creates an immediate sense of intimacy, and the lyrics made it clear why this recommendation could only have come from Olive.
“Gratitudes” brought that feeling back later in the album. Rosie wrote it around her morning practice of naming the things she is grateful for, over a beat made with D’Monk in about fifteen minutes before they left a Berlin studio.
“This Before” turns towards a relationship that continues to show up after many years. Then there is “Lay Me,” with its incredible, off-grid groove. The song grew from a phone recording of Harvey Grant playing piano. Rosie chopped it up and started writing while dinner was nearly ready, keeping the lazy movement of the original recording.
There is plenty to love in Lover, Other without knowing anything about its creation. What we didn’t understand at first was how much the album was carrying.
Rosie made it during a period when she was thinking about age, love and death. She had lost friends, including one to suicide. “Sundown” was written days after the death of someone close to her. She divided the song between the beginning and end of the album, recording vocals in places with their own natural echo, including a chapel in Florence and her gutted flat.
The journey runs from sundown to sundown.
Knowing that changed the album for us. Between the two parts of “Sundown,” Rosie moves through attraction, anxious thoughts, rest, gratitude, the need for space and the comfort of lasting love. Grief is there from the opening seconds and slowly changes shape.
This is also our only real reservation. The lyrics reveal parts of the story, but the full emotional weight of Lover, Other can pass unnoticed if you don’t know what was happening in Rosie’s life. We enjoyed the album before researching it. Afterwards, it felt much bigger.
Rosie recorded much of the music with a portable setup while travelling through Spain, Berlin, Florence, London and Devon. Rain, wind, conversations and the sound of the rooms found their way into the recordings. Some vocals are early takes.
That gives Lover, Other a rare quality. It feels carefully made without sounding cleaned up. You can hear life leaking into it.
We hear something similar in Olive Jones. Both artists can take a difficult feeling and turn it into music that remains generous. That may be why Olive thought we should hear Rosie Lowe.
We can’t know for sure; she only gave us the album. But once “Mood to Make Love” started, the connection was already there. Learning the story behind Lover, Other only made it clearer.
Olive opened the door to an artist we had somehow missed, and we came back with an entire body of work to explore.
She was right.
Listen where you listen:
