Rosa Walton

‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is both the title of Rosa Walton’s bright, brilliant, sky-reaching debut solo album, but also, says the 26-year-old musician best known as one half of Let’s Eat Grandma, “kind of like the title of my life”. “It’s about being really ambitious, and seeing enhanced beauty in the world, and knowing that seeing things in that way isn’t unrealistic,” she continues. “It’s about striving for that ultimate freedom.”

Having formed the symbiotic experimental pop duo with best friend Jenny Hollingworth aged 13, releasing debut album ‘I, Gemini’ at just 17, followed by two further critically-revered and boundary-pushing LPs - 2018’s ‘I’m All Ears’ (co-produced by the late, great SOPHIE), and 2022’s ‘Two Ribbons’, Walton’s capacity to dream big has already taken her to giddy heights. Two halves of an alchemical whole, the pair remain thick as thieves. “Me and Jenny still go to parties wearing matching coats; we're still a dynamic duo,” Walton laughs. But by the end of touring ‘Two Ribbons’ explorations in different creative directions were in order.

If an acclaimed band member stepping into their own spotlight sometimes carries certain connotations, then Walton’s debut is decidedly, pointedly not that. “The idea of doing a solo project was never, ‘Oh, look at me, I want to be a star all by myself’. It was never that, at all,” she notes. Instead, ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is fuelled by the polar opposite spirit - an album that started off purely as extra-curricular catharsis, that’s now taken on a rich new life buoyed hugely by the people and places that have helped will it into existence.

Walton has always been “someone who needs to write constantly”. She’s already achieved notable success outside on her own, clocking up an enormous 360 million streams on Spotify alone for ‘I Really Want To Stay At Your House’ - the 2023 track she wrote for anime series and videogame Cyberpunk 2077 - and collaborating with NATURE on last year’s ‘This Isn’t It’ as part of a groundbreaking conservation initiative. Over the years, meanwhile, she’s learnt how to cut out the outside noise of expectation and create just for the joy of creating. “As time’s gone on, I’ve been writing just to keep sanity and process the world as opposed to even thinking about the fact that it's going to be released,” she explains.

The songs that would go on to form ‘Tell Me It’s a Dream’ began in this way. Many were started during lockdown with Sam E Yamaha; over the subsequent years, Walton would return to the demos, rewriting vocal parts and lyrics, and sometimes switching up the instruments they were based around entirely.

She found that the music coming out felt like something notably separate to her work with the band. “My vocal style had completely shifted without me intending it to. I was writing these songs and it was just coming out quite differently - slightly more ethereal and in a higher register,” she explains. “I just felt like I was channeling something different.”

The album is very much Walton’s, but it’s also tied up in a collaborative outlook that helped shape its direction even further. Having worked on the last two LEG records, producing ‘Two Ribbons’ alongside the band and becoming a great friend along the way, Walton co-produced ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ once more with David Wrench (Frank Ocean, Jamie XX, FKA twigs), bringing in a trusted group of musicians - guitarist John Victor, bassist Kam Khan and drummer Elena Costa - to help realise her vision of a fuller band sound, captured live and energetically. Jenny also contributed vocals to the gorgeous interplay of ‘Prettier Things’, while her manager, Tim Dellow of Transgressive Records, would play her songs by The Pretenders and bands from decades past; tracks that would go on to massively shape the scale and ambition of Walton’s songwriting. As she notes, “If you can't have your inspiration as some of the best songs ever written, then what's the point? You've got to aim high.”

Walton continues: “The record has really been about this group of people, and one of the key principles of it has been in feeling so supported and having such good fun with them making it. David’s studio is probably one of the places I feel most comfortable in the world. It's all very interwoven - my life and my record and the people that are involved, who are the closest people to me.”

Recorded in a joyful stay at Wales’ residential StudiOwz, ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ rings with the audible fizz of friends hanging out and having fun. Though many of its lyrics began during a complicated time for Walton, the record itself is a testament to choosing life and pleasure and the people that make it all worthwhile. “A lot of the record is about stretching outwards and [acknowledging] how far love can take you; about expressing how I feel about the people I love through music in ways that words can't,” she says. “It was important to capture that lightness from the recording, because that spirit is in a lot of the songs.”

Frequently euphoric and brightly emotional, the songs themselves aim heavenwards. ‘Heart To Heartbreak’ cracks through the clouds of a break up, taking influence from emotionally-rich bands like The Cure and Prefab Sprout to translate the feeling at its core. “This is a song about feeling like everything in your life has shattered but realising that relationship was holding you back and the world is opening up,” she says. “I wanted this song to feel really visual, like things are starting to sparkle and look colourful again.”

Walton’s writing is based in this very visual language, with references to the sky and the natural world embodying the record with a hope and purity. She describes “reach[ing] to forever with you” on ‘Taking The Roof Down’, as the song imagines the ceiling literally flying off into the sky. The wide-eyed, heartfelt ‘Halfway Round The World’, meanwhile, pictures the arc of a burgeoning relationship “as being like a light weaving just above the ground”. “A lot is to do with light. I view these songs as being on a high-up plain,” Walton continues. “My reality a lot of the time is of walking around with my head in the clouds so that, to me, is normal.’

Beneath the dreaming, however, there is also determination. The cheekier, hooky ‘Sorry Anyway’ acts as an anthem for accepting yourself in your entirety. As Walton sings: “If you want the lightning / There’s gonna be thunderbolts and rain”. Meanwhile, closer ‘Romance Is Dead On’ finishes the record at a punctuation mark in her journey: still figuring things out - as we all are, forever - but with some important, learned wisdom gained along the way. On the track, Wrench sings backing vocals, repeating its central lesson - “Sometimes baby, we live and we learn / And sometimes we just live” - in a poignant expression of the record’s creation as a whole. “As an older person who's been quite a figure of guidance to me, I find it quite special that he’s singing those words because it's almost like that's the attitude that he's given me,” Walton smiles.

An album full of light and magic, born from the purist, most uncalculated of intentions, ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is an inspiring clarion call to listen to your own. As Walton says: “I think a lot of the attitude in the songs is about being ambitious in life and following your dreams. And so that's what I intend to do.”