Longitude Special: Lucy Rose comes to Dublin

“I haven’t played a huge amount in Ireland so I’m really looking forward to Longitude,” declares singer-songwriter Lucy Rose. “I’ve played Whelan’s quite a few times, but that’s about it. I feel like I’ll only ever play Whelan’s. It’s like I’ve made a decision and I’m just gonna play Whelan’s forever! It’s such a cool little venue.”

With her alt-folk inspired third album, Something’s Changing, due to drop later this month, the Warwickshire-born 28-year-old has a busy summer ahead.

“I’m playing quite a few festivals this year,” she explains. “I’m actually just back from Glastonbury, which was as brilliant as ever. I really love Latitude and I really love Bestival, so I’m doing both of those which I’m really excited about. Then I’ve got some other ones like Godiva Festival in Coventry, which is always really fun. I think that one is free entry, which is nice.”

As it happens, Lucy Rose is a big fan of free music. When she finished touring her acclaimed second album, Work It Out, she noticed a steady stream of tweets reaching her from Latin America, as well as the unlikely statistic that her music’s most listened to city on Spotify was Mexico City.

It gave birth to the seed of an idea that soon came to fruition. She offered her fans over there a deal via Twitter: “If you book me a gig, and give me a place to stay, I’ll come and play for free.”

For two months last year, the singer, her guitar and her backpack toured Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico, playing free shows, staying with fans, and “falling back in love with music”.

When Something’s Changing is released, she’ll be playing a global cinema tour to showcase both the album and a companion documentary film about her adventures in Latin America.

“It’s only 20 minutes long, but I’m really happy with it,” she explains. “It tells the story about the trip around Latin America, about the eight weeks that I spent living there and getting to know the fans, where I booked my own gigs, and how amazingly lucky I found myself when I discovered that I had all of these strangers on the other side of the world who cared so much about my music, and about me. They wanted to show me around and let me have one of the greatest experiences of my life.

“It was all down to all of them,” she continues. “It was a sort of time where I was unsure whether actually anyone even wanted these songs that I had written. That tour gave me that confidence that, yeah, people did want them and people were listening. It’s just I’d never met them.” Her Latin American tour had a major influence on her approach to recording her third album.

“Yeah, each album has been a totally different experience but this one is very different,” she laughs. “I got to a point where I came back from the trip and I had no managers. I was managing myself, I didn’t have a booking agent, and I didn’t have a label. So I decided to just not have any of them and go back to basics. So that’s really what the new record is about – going back to basics. The trip gave me confidence to do things like record in one take… and the songs came more easily.”

Something’s Changing is released on July 16 on Communion Records.