“My whole life just seemed like a cloud of fog,” Rosie Carney states frankly on her website, sharing explicit details about the pain she’s experienced: bullying, sexual assaults, an eating disorder, being dropped from a major label at the age of seventeen. Now twenty, it’s no wonder Carney, who hails from Ireland, has such a haunting voice. But on her single “Awake Me,” lyrics like “I’ve been a fool for more than half of my life, I’ve tried to hide/ Awake me,” seem to show that she is confronting and overcoming her past. Not that she needs to claim any great sorrow to be taken seriously as a singer – she’s able to express multitudes even when her voice hovers close to a whisper, and create mountains of tension just by lingering on a pause. All that accompanies her voice are simple, repetitive guitar arpeggios, but as her voice ascends higher and higher in spirals toward the end of the song, it’s easy to imagine her leaving behind the fog, the bullies, the stigma of mental illness – everything.
Find some release and resolve in the gorgeous track below:
