Rosa Walton is a 26-year-old musician best known as one half of Let’s Eat Grandma, the art-pop project she’s helmed alongside Jenny Hollingworth since they were teenagers. This year, they’ve both come out with solo albums: our first Artist Spotlight of 2026 was with Hollingworth, who named her project Jenny on Holiday as a reference to her time away from LEG. In Walton’s case, it’s more the title of her record that alludes to their band, encapsulating the life it’s afforded them: Tell Me It’s a Dream. After being featured on Jenny on Holiday’s Quicksand Heart, Walton enlists her on ‘Prettier Things’, singing, “Oh, you and me/ We breathe everything in.” A lighthearted magnetism permeates Tell Me It’s a Dream, which was far from a solitary effort: working with producer and longtime collaborator David Wrench, as well as a band including guitarist John Victor, bassist Kam Khan, and drummer Elena Costa, Walton crafted a lean, guitar-forward record that still reaches some ethereal places. “I said stop decorating the meaning,” she sings on ‘Heart to Heartbreak’, “Some things really are as they are.” Doesn’t mean they can’t be pretty exquisite. 

We caught up with Rosa Walton for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about being inspired by the seasons, the process behind Tell Me It’s a Dream, strengthening her voice, and more.

With the timing of the album’s release, I’m thinking of the line, “There’s something kind of bursting inside of me that feels like a summer just begun.” I wonder if there’s a burst of creativity that you associate with the summer, or if you’re affected by seasons more broadly.

In general, I’m someone who’s hugely affected by seasons. When I’m writing songs, definitely that feeds into it: having different seasons for different songs, or writing about the current season. For example, yeah, ‘Wave Machine’ is hugely a summer song, and ‘July’, obviously,  was written in July. I wrote those songs in the summer, and I wanted to capture that feeling; in ‘Wave Machine’ particularly, of feeling like you’re on the beach and everything feels quite endless in the way that it can do in summer. And then there’s ‘Taking the Roof Down’, which is a Christmas song, so that’s a winter song. Most of my songs, in fact, if you were to say a song, I’d say the season. ‘Sorry Anyway’ is a spring song. I wrote those songs in those times, because seasons kind of cut to the core of feelings. Even if you don’t say it obviously in a metaphor, there’s still certain feelings linked to certain seasons. 

I think there’s a couple of references to Christmas specifically, which made me think of the New Year as a theme in the Let’s Eat Grandma catalog. Something we talked about with Jenny was the relationship between home – the place where you build your dreams up, essentially – and the holiday season.

That’s totally what ‘Taking the Roof Down’ is about. Christmas as a metaphor is, how I could capture that feeling of, when you’re a kid, and it’s Christmas, and you feel that warm feeling inside, that excitement, and that spark. In ‘Halfway Round the World’, when I say “a spark from all the Christmases,” it’s about being able to capture that feeling of family and warmth, and the excitement of getting out of bed on Christmas Day as a kid. Even in that song, which I don’t view as being a winter song, you can have that at any point. Also, when Christmas comes around, I really like festive things, I love Christmas lights and everything to do with Christmas. Not Christmas Day, I could take it or leave it. It’s just about that magical feeling that you get in the build-up to Christmas. 

A phrase I singled out from ‘When Will It All Reveal’ is “wrapped up in family,” which can have both postive and negative connotatoins. For you, what’s the feeling of returning home like now? 

There’s two songs that are kind of mainly about that, ‘Taking the Roof Down’ and ‘Prettier Things’. That’s a really good question and I know the feeling, and the feeling itself is quite abstract, but it’s the ability to step out of your life and reset. I’m definitely also someone that thinks a lot about memories in the way that sometimes being in a place brings back memories, and it’s almost like I feel the memory so strongly that I’m inside the memory. I get that through listening to music, or if I go back home; certain places do that. Going home isn’t a huge theme of this record, so maybe that’s why it was quite difficult to answer.

You mentioned ‘Prettier Things’, which is a song that Jenny sings on, and I feel like you were both quite intentional about which songs to feature each other on your solo records. Those songs are at least in part reflective of what you’ve gone through together. I wonder if you can speak to your memory of singing on ‘Quicksand Heart’ and your decision to have Jenny sing on ‘Prettier Things’.

With ‘Prettier Things’, it really made sense for her to be on it, because it’s about me and Jenny – it’s about us being like dragonflies flying around in a magical garden that we’ve discovered together, and it made sense then to have her voice coming in and weaving in with mine. And what her voice brings to the song is a whole other element. She’s an incredible vocalist, and it’s just something special about having her involved in that. And same with her record, I went to a lot of her studio sessions, and sometimes I’d just be there just to hang out on the sofa, trying to say the right level of things. Because I didn’t want to interfere, but like, “I’ve got suggestions.” [laughs] I think she found that quite supportive, and it just created a nice atmosphere. Whenever there was a line that needed a backup, I was just there, so might as well.

What was that dynamic like with Jenny while making Tell Me It’s a Dream? 

My record was more collaborative with the band, so I guess I had other people that I was doing that with, and I wanted to bring her in for that song. Me and Jenny are best friends, and we do everything together. It might be easy for people to have an idea that that isn’t the case now, but it is. We just hang out all the time.

She also worked with a different producer for her record, and you decided to co-produce Tell Me It’s a Dream with David Wrench, who worked on the last two Let’s Eat Grandma records. I’m curious what made it feel natural for you to go in that direction.

Me and David are very close friends, and I just wouldn’t really have wanted to work with anyone else because it goes without saying he’s an incredible producer and mixer. I just feel so comfortable around him to be exactly the way I am, and a lot of the record was based around that, and us just being in his studio and having a really fun time. I can’t imagine not working with anyone else, really. 

Early on in the songwriting, was it mostly a solitary process? What was that phase of the record like for you? 

Some of the songs I started writing with Sam E. Yamaha. A lot of them were synth-pop songs, and then I developed them by myself. I rewrote a lot of the vocals, and I rewrote all of the lyrics, and over time, reworked them into guitar songs, basically. A couple of the others I just wrote by myself. 

In the trajectory of the record, I feel like a lot of the guitar songs are in the first half, and then it gradually gets more ethereal. I’m thinking of the electronics on ‘When Will It All Reveal’ and the strings on ‘Halfway Round the World’. Were these written into the demos?

To be honest, the sequencing of the record is something that I always do right at the end. It’s the final thing to do, and I don’t put an awful lot of thought into it. It felt natural to have the songs in that order. I’d written all the strings on ‘Halfway Round the World’ already in the demo, all of the choirs and the organs. We tracked the bass and drums and guitar all together, and then quite a lot of the extra bits that I had in the demos were more synth-based sounds and small details. In a track like ‘July’, for example, that’s an outlier, because we kept a lot of those from the demo. That was just such an important feature of that song, whereas for the rest of them, we built the sounds again from scratch, and we wanted to keep it really organic doing that. 

With all of the other small production details that I had before the demo, I think what I wanted to do in the studio is strip it back to only having parts that were completely necessary, because that was how I wanted the record to sound, with it being guitar songs, but putting as many of the synths as possible on guitars. Only having the most parts — drums, guitar, bass, and a key part – because I wanted the songs to be good enough at the core to not have to hide behind production details. But then, of course, there’s always room for some nice production details, like in ‘July’, so it’s getting that balance. With Let’s Eat Grandma, it was definitely very focused around the little details that I’d done in the demo of this little sparkle sound here, or this there, which works so well for that type of more in-the-box synth-pop I wanted to go in a different direction for this project.

One of my favorite parts on the record, both lyrically and vocally, is the second verse of ‘Sorry Anyway’, when you reach a higher register as you sing about thunderbolts and rain. How was your relationship to your voice affected by working on this record?

Yeah, I think I’ve definitely expanded what I can do with my voice, and that even began in the process of writing songs. But I think my voice has gotten stronger since practicing, because I then needed to sing live these melodies that I wrote that were pretty high. But it was important for me to write those melodies because that was what I wanted to express in the ethereal side. I think I can say more now I’ve got more of a range; you can set the lyrics off better, and that’s all tied together. Singing in the studio and preparing it for live, when it’s a solo project and I’m the only vocalist, it does change the way that I view my voice, because that’s the voice. [laughs] But I really enjoy doing my scales every morning.

Is that a habit you picked up recently, or have you been doing it for years?

No, I decided that recently. I never really rehearsed ever before in my life until now. I never practiced the guitar, I’d never really done things to improve my voice. I actually Googled “how to sing” a couple of weeks ago for a gig. [laughs] Like, how to breathe? I don’t know those things, but I decided that it might be a good time to learn, and you have to breathe from your stomach, from low down, I found. I wasn’t doing that, but now I am.

How are you finding it?

Oh, it’s so much easier! It’s changed the game. I’m the vocalist, so I gotta breathe from the stomach. Before I thought that that was all a waste of time. I thought, “Why would I be singing scales when I can write another song?” Because obviously I love writing songs, and so I just want to do that. And then I thought, you can do other things when you’re singing. You can clean. [laughs] That’s quite nice, because it means you can do it alongside other stuff. But it makes you feel like you’re sort of ready. 

What’s your favorite song to sing from the record at the moment?

I really like singing them all in different ways. I like singing ‘Wave Machine’, just because there’s so many different feelings in that song at once that it’s just quite fun to sing.

Are there any songs that feel different to sing now, or have taken on a new meaning to you?

Maybe ‘Halfway Round the World’. It always felt like a quite timeless, nostalgic song to me, so it’s quite interesting singing it now, because it’s almost like I captured that feeling that I wanted to capture in a way which is so true to myself, that I can connect to that song now, still, in different ways. A lot of that song was written about a time when I was on tour as well, and two of the members of the band, Elena [Costa] and Kam [Khan], who play bass and drums, were on that tour as well, so they were there for that. And now they’re gonna be playing that with me in my upcoming shows, and that’s quite special. It captured a time then, and now, three years later, that song is being performed. But it’s not even nostalgic; it’s more like a through flow.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Rosa Walton’s Tell Me It’s a Dream is out now via Trasgressive.