Anna Rose in Bloom

annarose

Since her formative years, Anna Rose has a strong passion for music. At time when many of us were learning our ABC’s and enjoying our coloring books, the New York native was learning how to play piano. She started when she was 5, when she received a guitar from an older cousin that was brought to a holiday family gift exchange. “I just picked it up,” Rose says.  “My cousin taught me a G-chord. Though she’s honed her craft to where she now plays piano, she’s always had an unwavering love for the axe. “At the time I was taking piano lessons — my parents had started me at some ridiculously young age. But the guitar, yeah, I just loved it.  From the beginning, I was a guitar head,” recalls Rose.

Though she may have learned how to play a G-chord from her cousin, art has always been in Rose’s blood. Her mother was a ballet dancer and her father is Academy Award winner Alan Menken, who has composed the score for films such as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. It was through her parents’ influences that she was introduced to the music that shapes who she is today. Counting Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Tom Waits as influences, it’s not difficult to hear them in her music.

With the recent release of her first full-length album, Nomad, the 25-year-old shows great promise that would make her influences proud.  Combining elements of rock’s sprawling sonic realms along with folk’s gentler sensibilities, she delivers performances on it that reveal an incredible amount of songwriting chops for a debut album. Her voice is lucid yet, at the same time, rousing, which for a debut album shows great maturity and promise of what’s to come.

If Anna Rose can continue to demonstrate the greatness she’s shown already, then don’t be surprised to be hearing from her in the very near future. With musical chops and songwriting that will only mature with experience, she has the potential to be a fixture on the music scene for years to come.