Madeleine Rose calls “Strangers” her “debut single”, but the second you hear her voice, you will think, “That’s got to be a lie. She sounds like she’s had a long and storied career as a singer-songwriter.” And you would be sort of right. Rose graduated from Boston’s very own Berklee College of Music, from which she went on to perform with a merry band of musicians as Maddie Jay and the pH Collective. This all came after a childhood full of sharpening her musical skills and honing her voice.
And then, a fermata of silence. In a TikTok, in front of a picture of her younger self, Rose wrote a caption: “I stopped making music after college, thinking I wasn’t good enough.” She goes on: “8 years later, I’m reconnecting with young me, who just wanted to sing and create.”
Therefore, we get “Strangers”, not a debut but a powerful return to releasing music for the Los Angeles songwriter, whose vocals carry over masterful co-production from fellow LA-based musician and producer Jaye Locke. Rose’s harmonized vocals take on colorful beauty when layered with each other.
Rose says the track describes drifting away from a once-important relationship, or “that strange shift when someone who once knew you so deeply… slowly becomes unfamiliar again as your lives move in different directions.” While one might imagine that relationship with a person, the song could easily be about Rose’s relationship with music, which broke apart in the years following college and her stint with the pH Collective.
But now she comes back to the musical realm with a brand new single and renewed confidence in “Strangers”. Hopefully we get more music from Madeleine Rose soon, in order to get to know her a little better this time around. Take a listen to “Strangers” below.
Written by Will Sisskind
