Tell Me It's A Dream

‘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 soloproject 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,