Meet I Am Roze, the soul singer using their incredible voice to tackle tough topics

I Am Roze might not be a household name just yet, but the accolades that already greet the Louisiana soul singer suggest they’re on the path to making waves. A duet on Jools Holland with Nitin Sawhney saw the ivory-tinkling host say it was the best performance in recent memory. Similarly, Fred again.. sampled their voice for two album tracks and Wu-Tang legend Ghostface Killah even requested to rap one of Roze’s songs.

It’s all a reflection of what Roze does so well, drawing listeners in with stop-you-in-your-tracks vocal power, before hitting you in the gut with the timeliest of messages. This is displayed only too clearly on their latest EP Social Commentary, which utilises the singer’s voice to offer sage observations on financial greed and their own experiences of suicidal ideations.

Their own journey is ripe for inspiration too, after experiencing homelessness in Louisiana after Hurricane Laura and leaving the US for England because of an inability to live life authentically as a non-binary person in the Deep South.

Now, I Am Roze is on the way to becoming a voice that will immediately demand your attention.

We’re speaking in the run-up to the release of your new EP Social Commentary. What have you aimed to show with it?

I’m just ready for it to be out and I’m ready to hopefully soften some hardened hearts and wake some people up and get people thinking in ways they didn’t do previously.

With all of my songs, my goal is to make you feel something, so it could be dealing with emotions that you’ve been hiding from, or it could be, you know, feeling something new that gives you a greater understanding of something else.

But with this project specifically, I wanted to just draw more attention to what’s going on in the world. It’s hard to pay attention to what’s going on just because a lot of it is so heavy, but you do have to think about it, you do have to process it. I feel like a lot of people forget even though heavy things might not be happening to you yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t come to your doorstep.

Have you experienced that yourself? I know you’ve spoken before about leaving the US for England because, as a non-binary person in the Deep South of America, you felt the weight of the political climate.

Yeah, when I left I didn’t know what scale we were gonna be at, I didn’t think it would get this bad. But I knew things were gonna be far from great and that I needed to go cause I can’t help you if I’m also trapped. The world doesn’t exist for the anxiety I feel for my trans family and for my Black family and all my people of colour.

It’s not looking great in the US. It’s extremely scary, and I think one problem with the education system in the US right now is that they are trying to wash certain things.

And you left before Trump signed the executive orders to target trans people on his first day in office. Things are getting even worse…

For a while I had a feeling of OK, I’m out, I can breathe, I’m no longer directly in the impact zone. But you feel the weight of the animosity, the anger, the hate in his body and all of the executive orders. Who are you helping? The president is supposed to be serving other people. But you’re serving yourself and people like you.

The EP is called Social Commentary. Does that outward-looking gaze fit into the themes of the songs?

Each song is a commentary on a different topic. ‘Think For Yourself’ is a commentary on celebrity culture, while ‘I Hate You’ is a commentary on the wealthy upper class that have the means and the ability to do something but they don’t and they just hoard the wealth.

There’s ‘Peace or Selfishness’ too which deals with suicidal ideation and the weight of feeling like I don’t want to go on, but there are people who are actively fighting to be alive.

I ended up with my cover of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ by Sam Cooke too, because it was a nice way of saying that things are rough, but they have to get worse to get better, and eventually a change will come.

Looking back at the start of your career, you had a period where you were homeless after Hurricane Laura hit. How did you decide then that music was the path to follow?

When I was in high school initially I wanted to go to university for computer science and technology, but I found out how much math there was in that and I didn’t like math enough! But I’ve always loved music since I could breathe and I figured out that I was gonna do music for the rest of my life. So I’ve got some covers on my Macbook that will never see the light of day.

I’d dropped out of university when the hurricane hit and I needed to figure out what to do with my life, and when we eventually moved into a new house I ended up streaming constantly on TikTok. That was great because it allowed me to think for the first time that people did want to listen to my music. A year later I met my manager who found me on a TikTok live stream and ever since then it’s just been up and up.

What was it like to have Fred again.. using you as a sample?

That was insane because I didn’t even know who Fred again was at the time. I wasn’t well versed. But it was so amazing to know that even in the midst of my struggle, my talent was still being seen and people were appreciating it. So to be able to be a part of that record was truly a blessing.

Who are your big influences and inspirations?

Vocally, I grew up on a lot of Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Boyz II Men and Brandy. A lot of late 80s/90s artists. But my songwriting has been influenced by some more recent artists like Hozier and Ethel Cain and also just my experiences in life.

Is there any moments of adjusting to life in the UK that you’ve found to be ripe for new material?

I live in Eastbourne and I love it there. I’ve been writing a lot of love songs so we’ve got some of that on the way and I have some heartbreak songs. It’s exciting.