With an accomplished roster of hit songs, Rozzi thought she knew herself. After spending years touring with artists like Maroon 5 and Kelly Clarkson and collaborating with everyone from Kendrick Lamar to Nile Rodgers, the singer-songwriter had effectively built a career around emotional honesty. But while creating her new album Fig Tree (which you may have seen a sneak peek of on Kelly Clarkson’s show), inspired by Sylvia Plath’s famous metaphor about the many possible lives a woman could live, she found herself confronting a new kind of reality.
Looking inward, Rozzi’s album captures the emotional chaos, existential questioning, and unexpected freedom that can come with entering your 30s. The inspiration struck while she was reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath during her “post-Saturn return part of life,” a period where suddenly “the beginnings of quote unquote real life seems to be sprouting.” Friends were getting engaged. Her brother had kids. And after freezing her eggs—an experience she describes as both “amazing” and “super annoying”—Rozzi found herself thinking deeply about life as it stood.
When it came to the fig tree passage in The Bell Jar, Rozzi admitted that she didn’t know about it, saying “I was like, did you guys know about this?” The passage, she said, hit her “over the head.” She went on to say that she “felt really just incredibly recognized in the words about choosing one life, meaning erasing the rest.” And the thesis of her album can be found in the lyric: “The love of my life is the loss of another, and that's something to grieve, though there's no better lover than you.”
Describing the album as feeling “lived-in and messy,” Rozzi told The Newsette that that’s kind of the point. “I love to schedule my weeks by the hour, that's my personality, so for me the antidote really is releasing and experiencing. I'm super emotional as a person, and I think sometimes the mess feels kind of scary for that reason, but it's always led me somewhere better.”
With the album now streaming and her residency in Los Angeles, Rozzi is having lots of conversations with listeners, finding joy in connecting. “This album is a little more complex, it's like a little more existential,” she said, “it's a little harder to fit into three minutes, and so to have people say that I successfully articulated those kinds of bigger thoughts has meant a lot to me. It feels like we're growing together.”
Notably, Rozzi’s residency series taps into her love of collaboration. “I love to collaborate.” she said. “That's kind of the center of the whole gallery collaborative show that I'm doing. I like to live my life surrounded by as much art as possible.”
Unsurprisingly, Rozzi is a big reader and while she recommends that all women in their 20s and 30s read The Bell Jar, she also adds a book called Motherhood by Sheila Heti to her list. “I wouldn't say every woman needs to read that, but if you're contemplating motherhood, I think it's like incredible.” Currently? She’s reading Lena Dunham’s memoir and said that she is “devastated that it will ever end. I really love it. She's so smart, she's so funny. Talk about articulating things that I'm feeling in a way that I couldn't do. She's a master at that, so I'm loving that.”
Dream book club guest? Miranda July, of course.
Post Saturn-return, Rozzi said that the most underrated part about being in your 30s is that “You're hotter, everyone is hotter.” The idea that you’re hottest in your 20s, she said, “is such a patriarchal lie. I can't believe how much of a lie it is. It makes me laugh sometimes. I look at photos of myself in my 20s, and I gotta say props to my parents for giving me self-esteem, because I thought I was banging, but it doesn't really translate.”
