Singing Her Own Song

By Nica Lasater

Singer-songwriter and Elon University senior, Rosie Darling has never been one to follow expectations. She now has two singles and more on the way thanks to her out-of-the box work ethic.

From the beginning, her relationship with music has been organic, unstructured and mostly self-guided. It began early in her childhood, with inspiration from her dad and two older sisters.

“Growing up in a musical household, there was always music on or someone dancing and singing,” Darling said. “I’ve been singing my whole life, like literally my whole life,” she said.

From there, it was up to Darling to construct her own path. Being introverted, she didn’t follow the traditional routes that performers often take in middle and high school such as singing in the choir or performing in theater. Instead, she began writing music independently when she was 12 or 13.

“I didn’t like the outlets I had to pursue it,” Darling said. “I didn’t want to perform on stage and wear a costume. That just didn’t feel like me. That’s when I started playing guitar and singing.”

Darling did join one traditional organization in high school, a club known as Jazz Combo, that allowed her to make her debut for a live audience. However, like no one else in the club had done before her, she wrote and performed an original piece, a song titled “Thunder”.

“I brought it to the table as a junior and my teacher arranged it with a band and I performed an original song,” Darling said. “Which was honestly really cool and I think I might have been the only person to do that.”

Her music career has come a long way since her junior year in high school as Darling now collaborates with another university student who is quite literally an ocean away in Brighton, England. 19-year-old Matt Oakley, whose professional name is OKO, began working with Darling after discovering her on Instagram. “Oceans Away” was the first song they collaborated on.

“I joke around that I make all my friends from the internet which is bad, but also great,” Darling said. Having the same passion made 3,000 miles seem surmountable.

Their relationship quickly picked up speed after they released their first cover song together.

“It started with about a month of just emailing about once a week, but we didn’t know what to do and that was before we decided to do ‘Oceans Away’,” OKO explained. “After that, we started Skyping like three times a week just because we were working quite quickly and we had lots of decisions to make.”

The two now talk nearly every day and plan to continue their collaboration in the future to create a “cohesive sound” as Darling puts it.

“We’re both really excited about music and now we have this long list of stuff we’re gonna do,” she said. “It’s never ending, but it’s awesome. It’s exciting.”

Since the first cover they released, they’ve produced a song together called “L.A.” which appeared on Spotify in October and has already gotten more than 70,000 streams. Darling wrote the song while enrolled in the program Elon L.A. Darling explained that “L.A.” is her favorite song that her and OKO have produced.

“It’s a happy song and I’m not really good at writing happy songs,” she said.

While the song makes references to a romantic relationship, Darling explained that during her time spent in California, she didn’t have a relationship.

“I was just very in love with L.A.,” she said. “I was trying to get that down on paper and was like, ‘Okay, how can I write down this feeling that this city gives me?’”

This is a common source of inspiration for Darling who doesn’t really have any love experience.

“I would be a busy girl if I had all these experiences,” she said.

The first single she ever released, “I Miss You” documented her personal struggles through the lens of a relationship in an attempt to relate to more people.

“Sophomore year I was having such a hard time and struggling a lot with [my] mental health,” Darling said. “I wasn’t missing anybody, I wasn’t missing a particular human. I think it was more of an underlying, I miss myself, I miss feeling good.”

While this time in her life was a frustrating setback to her traditional college path, productivity did come out of the detour.

“[After] going through all of that, I dropped my first single and I wrote that in that moment of ‘shit what am I doing’,” Darling said. “Something good did come of it, but I’m not to terms with it yet. I can’t look back and tell you it was worth all that pain.”

After taking time off of school, Darling came back to Elon and made the hard decision to quit her acapella group, the Sweet Signatures.

“I kind of had to just take away everything that made me happy or sad to try and figure out what was going to make me happy,” Darling said.

Once again, she strayed from the less traditional path of a more structured format of a vocal group and it paid off.

“I’m now thriving doing my own music and it brings me so much joy,” she said.

In the future, Darling plans to keep collaborating with OKO, a person that she says is the “best person she’s ever worked with” and inspired by her time there, eventually move out to L.A. However, right now she and OKO want to focus on getting a million streams on Spotify on one song, according to OKO.

“And we’ve got releases for the next six months in planning. Eventually we’re planning to do live shows, but I don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s quite far off.”

No matter where her unconventional path leads her, this artist will always follow her main passion, music.

“I just do music. I can’t have another passion or else I’m cheating on music,” she said.