Baby Rose Talks New Music, Touring With Olivia Dean

Baby Rose is currently playing arenas as an opening act for British pop phenomenon Olivia Dean, but a few days before starting that run, she still had one last thing to take care of. “I’m popping out for BadBadNotGood — they’re having a show on a boat,” she says when she logs onto Zoom from her L.A. home. The Toronto jazz band backed her on 2024’s sleepy yet soulfully crushing “One Last Dance,” and she was returning the favor. “The first day we met, I’m like, ‘Let me just throw them for a loop, let’s do a country song.’ I didn’t even have a chance to write it down. I was just emoting.”

She brought the same spontaneity to her latest album, Yearnalism. “Nine out of the 12 songs on this record were all done in the last 30 minutes to an hour of a session,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Damn, that’s crazy.’ As far as the conception, the idea, and the writing of the song, the meat and potatoes, it was created in that last bit of time, where it’s like, ‘Let’s just try it one more time.’”

Baby Rose, born Jasmine Rose Wilson, has always been in tune with her emotions. Astrologically, she’s a Cancer moon, which is said to reflect a person’s keen intuition and emotive nature. Yet, signs aside, Rose seems to be leaning more confidently into her true self-expression, both in her personal life and in her creative work. “There’s something to the uncertainty and surrender in my performance, that has that secret sauce in there,” she says. “I have more awareness of what’s going on in my creation process. I really understand the format of less is more, and simplicity is key, and following that gut feeling. That’s the same gut feeling I had when I made [my first album] All To Myself, and I was lit off the damn mimosas!” 

Yearnalism started to come together last June in London alongside producer Miles C. James, whom she considers a guru. “Usually when I go into a session with somebody for the first time, we’re just kind of like, ‘Let’s just try some stuff.’ He was like, ‘Nah, I want to know who you are.’” While microdosing on shrooms, Rose and James listed intentions on a white board, from big concepts like God and the state of the world to more personal ideas about Rose’s individuality, being a wounded warrior, and her mother’s new house. Though they crafted the concept of six songs via voice memos, that first session wasn’t recorded. “He didn’t want to, and that was very hard for me to unlearn,” she says. “I’m always like, I’m leaving with something. I do really well under pressure, I can knock out something that I can play anywhere. But one of those songs, at the very last 30 minutes, was ‘Sunday.’” 

That nearly five-minute ballad sounds like a modern day juke-joint hymn on a lazy Sabbath afternoon. “Sunday, it was made for smiling/It was made for listening and dancing in my kitchen/Going to start a new beginning,” she sings over an acoustic guitar. Rose says the song was inspired by her mother’s sun room, an area of both refuge and rejuvenation. “The sun room in my mom’s house is like my ideal happy place. One of my greatest accomplishments with music is just being able to help her get that crib. Being in that sun room, going into that space, is where I feel like all of the problems just wash away, and I want the music to feel like that too.” 

The album is filled with a mix of genres, giving nuance to Rose’s taste. Her opening track, “When I’m Gone,” about being finally done in a relationship, is a blend of pop and soft rock, with a chorus proclaiming “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.” Other standouts are the poppy yet country-tinged “But, Nvm,” and “Is This Love,” featuring Elmiene, which makes one yearn to slow dance with the one they love. Her sultry and harmonic single “Friends Again,” featuring Leon Thomas — whom she collaborated with on Mutt, which won a Grammy for Best R&B Album — is about friends who get intimate in a moment of weakness. Yet it’s “Better” that gets most clearly to the thesis of the project. This is not your average love song about falling in love and its complications; it deals in all aspects of love’s stages and contradictions, such as desiring companionship and the feeling of being understood in your totality by another human, yet having the inner knowledge that the only way to truly fulfil that urge is to choose yourself. 

“I kind of had a full spectrum of ideas,” says Rose. “’Friends Again’ is just mess and yearning for what you can’t have externally, whereas ‘Sunday’ was yearning for a true sense of peace and understanding that I can start over anytime and come back home to me. Every song in the middle was easily filled in from there, because I knew the yin and the yang.” 

Rose has aimed to secure that same feeling of balance in her own personal life experience. At 31, Rose is at a stage in her life where she is doing “self-study.” When we last spoke, for her Rolling Stone Future 25 feature in 2023, she was fresh off the heels of her debut album, which she put together by way of a back-up drive after an ex hacked into her private accounts and deleted all of her music. On her third project, she seems more focused in her grounding and internal habitat. 

“I’m realizing how important it is to be centered within, you know what I mean?” she says. “I’ve done a lot of work on my own individual growth, and self-study. I’m trying to see where are the moments where I feel like I blame somebody else for making me feel a way, and how can I investigate that a little bit more. Am I holding this knife, am I hurting myself?” 

In creating Yearnalism, whose name was inspired by a meme about “majoring in yearnalism,” Rose wasn’t always quite sure of the direction in which she wanted to create. But like everything in her life, from deleted songs to sneaking into J.Cole’s Dreamville camp, she learned to trust the process. “It gets better,” she says. “The people you meet along the way, almost like a game of Pokémon or the story of The Alchemist, whatever we are looking for is looking for us too.” 

Growing up with her maternal lineage, between Washington, D.C., and Fayetteville, North Carolina, Rose struggled with understanding and embodying her own energy. “My dad, love him dearly, but his birthday is the day after mine, and [growing up] he was very much like, ‘You’re a Leo, you are strong, you are a lion!’And I’m like, “OK, sure…’” Rose says. “I’ve always felt I had to know how to fix things, and I’m the leader, and whatever, but after learning that I have ADHD and anxiety — which is new information, because I learned this year — that made my heart soften so much. I thought about little me being in class and feeling like I should automatically know and have things down, but I was struggling to always keep up and do all of the things.” 

Rose went on to learn that she cannot handle ADHD medication due to the way it makes her anxiety spike. She’s been leaning more into meditation and community, one of her favorite parts of the process. In the beginning of this year, Rose and her mother, who is also her manager, went on a four-day meditation camp hosted by SZA, which started off with 30 people and ended with about eight, including Rose, her mother, her friend Bianco, Doechii​​, and Lizzo. “This was a real ninja warrior thing,” she says. “It was definitely work, but it was worth it.” 

White building Yearnalism, she and her crew spent a nearly two-week camp of their own at the 64 Sound studio in Los Angeles. “The studio was like an ideal grandpa’s basement. It was extremely cozy with all the retro gear that I loved and needed,” Rose says. “I would go to the B room and write with Chloe [George} and then pop into the A room, to see what’s going on with the wrecking crew.” Working Nashville-style, with sessions from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., the crew would grab coffee together every morning, and each night, Rose ordered food for everyone so they could eat as a group. “Breaking bread together, it just felt like family. Vince [Staples] came through a couple times to talk about life, and he was creating his album at the time. It was one of those beautiful things that I really enjoyed. We all had fun.” 

It was during this time, in the midst of making “Better,” that she found out she was going to open for Olivia Dean. “I was ecstatic, like crying,” she says. Her mother had always said that she would perform in arenas one day: “I used to get mad at my mom, because she was saying this while I was performing at 250- to 500-cap venues. It was too much pressure.” But now she felt ready. She happened to be recording that day with Grammy-nominated producer Alissia Benveniste. “She’s been saying for years, ‘I don’t want to make a vibe, I want to make something really big.’ That day she came in, knew what she wanted to do, and it came together so seamlessly. I was like, ‘Think arenas, think huge arenas!’” 

As her career continues to grow, Rose embodies the essence of her name, which is both her stage name and her middle name deriving from her grandmother: a symbol of beauty, love, and emotion that is layered and often complex. “I feel like that re-parenting and that self-study is so important at any age,” she says. “I’ve been able to look back and investigate, and be like, ‘Oh, this is where that came from. I can let this go.’ I don’t have to hold the world. I don’t have to know all the answers. I don’t have to be the leader of all of the things. I don’t need to do that. It’s a beautiful thing.”