Rosa Mystica calls her music: “dreamy, melancholic rock n’ roll.” The LA based singer-songwriter envisioned a musical and aesthetic world of 70’s psychedelic rock, mixed with 90’s shoe-gaze and brit-pop/post brit-pop sensibilities.
The twenty-six-year old Connecticut native, has been honing her craft as a singer, lyricist, and pianist since she was twelve years old. She is drawn to the ear grabbing melodies from bands like Oasis, and the hazy, layered, and minor electric guitar sounds of bands like Doves and Radiohead. The idea for her debut single was inspired by her own experiences with “fallen musical men”, and the groupie culture of the late 60’s/70’s. The name and concept for her debut single, “Holding Roses” was also inspired by the somewhat obscure Twin Peaks song.
She loved the way “holding roses in my hands” sounded, and she also resonated with the image of holding roses for someone who couldn’t care less about this quintessential gesture of love. She has an obsession with guitar solos that feel like a “stream of consciousness.”
She notes that this is an integral element in her music, and wants her listeners to feel a sense of getting lost in the music while “driving with the windows down” feeling. Her aim is to blend bluesy, psychedelic, electric guitar from the 70’s, with a more soft and dreamy melodic vocal line, reminiscent of bands such as Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins. Ultimately, her intention is to blend both masculine and feminine energy into her music, and find her place as an intuitive woman in the alternative rock world.
She states that she has “long resonated with singer-songwriters such as Jeff Buckley and Bruce Springsteen, who mastered the art of creating music that has a strong feeling of nostalgia for someone or something unnamable and lost.” Likewise, at her very core, she identifies most as a singer-songwriter with a desire to create music with that same sense of “longing and yearning” behind it. You can now stream her debut single, “Holding Roses”, on all music platforms.
“I was definitely inspired by grunge and the idea of a neo-psychedelic wall of sound,” Rosa says of the track. “I wanted it to sound dark and hypnotic; also kind of raw, but with more direct and simple pop-like melodies and lyrics reminiscent of 90’s Britpop bands like Ride and Oasis. At the heart of all my music, I feel, is a strong sense of song-writing and story-telling. My vision for this song was to juxtapose these deeper story-like lyrics, with a more raw rock n’ roll inspired soundscape. I wanted it to feel like a balance of structure and stream of consciousness, especially in places like the outro of the song. I wanted it to feel really free.”
