Rose Betts on her Irish heritage: “It’s a proper little melting pot”

Once you hear her music, there's no doubt that Rose Betts has Ireland in her blood.

The English-born, U.S-based artist speaks with an air of whimsy as she explains her family heritage, which served as the inspiration for her album There Is No Ship.

“I feel very lucky to have a whole mix of the Irish side, and then the English side, and then a bit of German from my German grandmother on my dad’s side,” Betts says with pride. “It’s a proper little melting pot—like most Americans, really!”

Our conversation is sprinkled with “oohs” and “ahs,” even as she’s “just a bit discombobulated with everywhere she’s been.” Betts has had a busy winter promoting the deluxe version of There Is No Ship on tour with the 502s, yet her energy still sparkles bright. On January 22, she’ll embark on her own headline tour through Ireland and the UK.

With nearly 500,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram, it’s clear I’m not the only one Betts has won over. I speak with Betts as she travels through Switzerland en route to her next tour stop.

Named for a line from The Lord of the Rings, There Is No Ship features sweeping, atmospheric soundscapes that’d be right at home in the fantasy series. But there are also cheery folk melodies and poppier sounds peppered throughout the album, showcasing a unique melting pot of genre and sound.

That variety is on par for Betts, who first rose to fame through shortform content and now finds herself writing songs for television and film.  On her songwriting efforts for Netflix series Red Moon, she gushes, “I always sing it at my shows. It’s really ethereal and Celtic and gorgeous.”

The song, titled ‘The Land We Breathe’, was commissioned by director Zach Snyder, and Betts created it with a specific pivotal scene in mind. She appreciates how a collaboration can coax her out of her compositional comfort zone.

“I love the fact that you write things that you would never have written if you write them for other projects. They sort of surprise you.”

Despite her solid entrenchment in the industry, Betts still feels amazed by the scope of her reach.

“Every now and then, you’ll get a video [on TikTok] of someone who’s playing ‘Irish Eyes’ to their child and it’s just like, this is so magical, I can’t believe this.”

‘Irish Eyes’ refers to Betts’s viral 2023 single, which has amassed over 28 million Spotify streams as of mid-January. For her deluxe album, Betts recorded a new version of the song, this time in a lower key with a gentle acoustic production. These subtle touches imbue the tune with a new sense of clarity as she sings with pride: “I'm a map of the world and the ones before, one foot in sea and one on shore.”

Here, she refers to her Irish roots. “My grandfather is from Kilkenny, my grandmother is from Dublin,” she says. “They met in England at an Irish Centre dance…they just came over [to England], dirt poor immigrants, and began a family.”

It was Betts’s recent move to Los Angeles that inspired her curiosity about her family tree.

“In America, people are very interested in what their roots are, much more than we are in England,” Betts muses. “Leaving my roots and stretching that relationship between homeland and where you end up… it made me reflect on everything that made me what I am.”

Though she feels spiritually close to the power of her heritage, she’s simultaneously detached from it by nature of her immigration.

“I can’t vote in America, so I have no impact in that way,” Betts says. “I’m sort of a bystander to that, and, in the same way, I’m absent for everything that’s happening in England and the UK… it’s a numbing experience.”

Unmoored from the home she knows, Betts has chosen to focus her musical energies across the sea. Much of There Is No Ship serves as an homage to the lilting harmonies and fiddle- and pipe-heavy instrumentation of traditional Irish melodies. While Betts loves the classic Celtic sound, she can’t put her finger on her own specific references.

Instead, she cites her childhood for bestowing her with an understanding of Irish music.

“Growing up around my grandparents and the music we were bathed in, somehow, unconsciously, it’s given me the groundwork inside of myself,” she says of the album’s inspiration. “As soon as I went, ‘Ok, I’m going to embrace Irish tradition,’ it all sort of came… it just was in me somewhere, and that’s probably from what I grew up listening to with my family.”

In addition to being self-written, Betts takes pride in helping to produce her own music.

“The production is always a collaboration, but I’m always involved in every single step of it, and in the room every day.” On There Is No Ship, her co-producers include Sean Cook (Shaboozey), Mark Siegel, Cooper Folden, and J-Remy.

But there’s something about the solace of writing for Betts that pushes her to favor it “100 percent” over the production process.

“I always prefer the writing because I love being on my own with that,” she says. “There’s something about that feeling when you’ve finished a song. You feel like you’re walking on air a bit. It’s like, ‘Oh! I did it! I made something happen out of nothing.’”

The song on the album that gave her the greatest walking-on-air feeling? ‘Save Me a Seat’, a mid-album meditative waltz that builds into a battle cry.

“I really, really wanted to write a song about aging,” she emphasizes. ‘Save Me a Seat’, which begins with the discovery of Betts’s first grey hair, eventually makes peace with the passage of time. “Often, when you really want to write a song about something, it’s like you’re pushing something that’s harder to realise.” Her successful realization of this vision made for an “oh, yeah!” moment.

On the other hand, ‘Come Away’ was “a nightmare” for Betts to write.

“I had the kind of riff of the chorus in my mind, just going around and around and around, and I had no idea what the verse was, and I couldn’t figure out what the song was about, but I just had this sticky, hooky melody,” Betts says with a laugh. “I think it took about three months of me going slightly crazy, being like, ‘When is this song going to figure itself out? My god!’”

‘Come Away’ is no longer an albatross, but an asset: it’s been Betts’s favorite song to perform on tour with the 502s this winter. Its moody build gives Betts and longtime bassist Mel Underwood a chance to connect onstage.

“I think there’s something about the arrangement of the simplicity of me on guitar, her on bass, and then both of us singing vocals, harmony,” Betts says of the Celtic-tinged song. “It’s really lovely to play. There are other [songs] that are more well-known, that the audience can dance along to a bit more. But from our perspective, ‘Come Away’ always feels like a transition. It always feels like something happens in the room when we play that song.”

As we talk, Betts is in incredible spirits—her warmth and positive energy are palpable throughout our conversation. Betts’s online presence, too, is infallibly bright, which has helped make her little corner of the internet a welcome reprieve from social media’s littered negativity.

“You can stray into other fields when you suddenly have a platform. You suddenly feel responsible for stuff, and it can get quite complicated,” she says of navigating online fame. “I try to keep it very simple. It’s me, I’m a singer-songwriter, just here to share that. I’m not here to be anything else.”

By focusing on the human element, Betts reasons, artists can use their platforms for the greater good. And she speaks of her audience's humanity with an unbridled affection.

“I mean, if you see them at gigs, they’re so varied, and gorgeous, and lovely,” she says of her fanbase. “I’d be friends with all of them.”

Speaking of gigs, Betts is looking ahead to meeting fans at her upcoming Ireland and UK gigs with great anticipation. She’ll play Whelan’s in Dublin on January 24, smack-dab in the middle of her tour.

“When you go to gigs and you meet people that have found you through a TikTok video or they found you through Instagram or something, you realise that there are real, wonderful human beings at the end of these phones. There are people that are genuinely finding connection.”

Listen to There Is No Ship (Deluxe) below: