‘I couldn’t even spit my toothpaste out’: Lucy Rose on returning to music after agonising maternal osteoporosis | Music

Five weeks after giving birth to her son, the singer-songwriter Lucy Rose had a pressing question for the other new mothers at her NCT baby group. “I was like: is anyone else’s back killing them?” None of the women were able to empathise but Rose still managed to persuade herself that the excruciating pain she was in must be a normal part of the gruelling postpartum experience.

Until a few days later. Rose was lifting her son Otis out of his cot, when “my whole body collapsed, then my back started spasming. That’s probably when the first vertebrae broke.”

It would be months, however, before she would actually find out what was happening to her. In the meantime, she was in extreme physical pain and feeling “isolated and ashamed that I couldn’t pick up my kid when he was crying”. She made repeated visits to a doctor, who X-rayed her chest, took blood samples and suggested the pain could be psychosomatic, without ever investigating her spine. When she suggested an MRI, the doctor told her to “dial it down”.

At this point, Rose was practically begging for help. “I said: I can’t push a pram. I can’t leave my house. I couldn’t even spit my toothpaste out.” She told the doctor that a physiotherapist she had seen suspected she might have a fractured vertebra. “He went: ‘If you had a fractured vertebra, it would be excruciating. There’s no way your back will be broken in a million years.’”

I’m sitting with Rose, 34 – who began her career as a backing vocalist with Bombay Bicycle Club, before striking out with her own successful brand of ethereally beautiful folk-pop – at her kitchen table in Brighton, where she lives with her husband, Will. One end is strewn with craft materials that she and Otis, now two, have been using to make Christmas decorations. At the other, Rose – whose default air is one of no-nonsense self-effacement – is in tears: this is the first time she has spoken publicly about the trauma of the early months of her son’s life.

Rose eventually paid for an MRI out of her own pocket; the results showed her back was broken in eight places. Part of her was “weirdly relieved”, she says, as at last she knew “I’m not crazy. I’ve got this validating information – why I wasn’t able to be the mother I wanted to be.” Yet she also quickly realised she must have osteoporosis, a condition that weakens bones and is mainly seen in post-menopausal women, but can also in rare circumstances affect new mothers. Thanks to a supportive Facebook group, Rose soon knew more than the consultants, who were openly Googling the illness at appointments.

She also knew that the first step to recovery was to stop breastfeeding – a suspected cause of the condition (it is often called pregnancy and lactation-associated osteoporosis). But Otis wouldn’t take a bottle, and attempting to feed him with one was distressing: “I was crying, Will was crying, my mum was crying.” The midwives told Rose “to go cold turkey, he’ll probably scream for two days”, she recalls, but after a few hours she relented, unwilling to “starve” her child, and breastfed him until he was old enough for solid food.

Today, Rose’s bone density is still severely low – “If I fell over, it probably wouldn’t be good” – but thanks to drugs (the funding for which she had to secure from her local council, another source of stress) and hydrotherapy, her life is largely back to normal. She has been able to return to music – something she believed might never happen, having been in “mum mode and medical mode” for so long that “‘Lucy Rose’ was this completely distant memory”.

And yet Rose has managed to channel the emotional toll of her illness into her most exciting music yet. Her excellent fifth album, This Ain’t the Way You Go Out – a mantra inspired by the straight-talking hydrotherapist who treated her – sees her swap the sparse, maudlin soulfulness of her previous record for hook-laden, intricately layered tunes shot through with stark pain. The lead single Could You Help Me, produced by the feted British producer Kwes (Loyle Carner, Tirzah, Solange), matches frenetic, shuffling jazz with lyrics that express the desperation of those early days (“now I’m learning how terribly lonely illness is”), while the gorgeous title track sees Rose “blame myself for being so weak” in her crystal-pure voice. There is also room for rage at the responses of a couple of friends, especially on the deceptively peppy Life’s Too Short. “It was amazing how unsympathetic some people could be,” she says.

This Ain’t The Way You Go Out is a deeply personal project, but it was borne of collaboration. In late 2022, the US chart-topping rapper Logic offered to fly Rose to New York to sing on his new album (her vocals have featured on three of his previous records). During breaks she found herself jamming with the other musicians present, and their distinctly un-British zeal began to restore her confidence. “No one was self-deprecating; they were like: ‘We’re rocking this!’ I needed that sort of energy. Then I was like: right, I’m going to record these songs.”

Back in the UK, she texted Paul Weller. In 2018, she had sung backing vocals on his album True Meanings and he had offered to let her use his studio. Five years later, she took him up on it. Weller was so impressed with the fruits of one day’s labour that he told her to use the studio as much as she wanted. “He has just been this hugely supportive person,” says Rose. “On my bad days I’m like: ‘Paul Weller likes me! It’s not all bad, Lucy!’”

The texting didn’t stop there. Keen to leave her comfort zone and “start being brave and believing that other people want to work with me,” she set her sights on Kwes. A friend had passed on his number, but Rose had no idea how to approach him. “Do I just say: ‘Hi, I’m Lucy Rose, presuming you know me, which you definitely won’t.’ Or do I send a message saying: ‘I’m a musician called Lucy Rose and this is my background?!’” she says, still clearly stressed from the memory. But Kwes responded immediately – with enthusiasm. She also approached engineer Dan Parry (Adele and Lady Gaga), “and he was like, hell yeah!” These positive responses made her think: “Maybe, Lucy, you’re not as crap as you think you are.”

It doesn’t seem at all strange that these figures would jump at the chance to work with her: Rose has been critically acclaimed. She attributes her shock to “quite normal female musician self-esteem issues”, as well as her transition to motherhood. Rationally, Rose knows she has “made a great record and has lots to be proud of”, but says that a voice in her head tells her she might not be relevant any more: “You’re a washed-up 34-year-old mum now, making a record nobody’s gonna want!” And the reactions of some acquaintances can also get to her. When she tells other parents she is making an album, she says, the responses “will be like: ‘Good for you, still giving that a go!’ And it kills me a bit because I’m like: ‘Oh God, am I just pathetic?’ I think there’s a presumption that if you’re not No 1, you’re failing to a degree.”

After hearing her story, pathetic is one of the last descriptors you could apply to Rose. From barely being able to walk, she is now preparing to play live in London, and is looking forward to immersing herself in the uncharacteristically upbeat sound of This Ain’t The Way You Go Out. Even though the lyrics sting, “the music has really lifted me,” says Rose. “It’s giving me a defiance.”

The pain is still fresh, but Rose is ready to move on. She recently had therapy to make peace with her body, which she previously viewed as “weak and broken”, before realising “it’s the strongest in the world because it has persisted”. She is also determined to raise awareness of the condition so that nobody else has to spend months in extreme pain and self-blame as she did. She hopes that there will be medical progress, too: she recently gave blood samples to scientists from Edinburgh university who are investigating the illness.

Yet, her biggest comfort is her son – as he always has been, despite the devastation she felt at not being able to look after him as a newborn. “Not to sound really cheesy or anything but Otis was the only thing that got me through the day: I had such a good reason to keep going,” she says. “I felt so unlovable – I hated my body – but Otis just loved me so much, I was still his number one person. The experience of being his mother is the best experience of my life. I would do all of it a million times over.”

Five weeks after giving birth to her son, the singer-songwriter Lucy Rose had a pressing question for the other new mothers at her NCT baby group. “I was like: is anyone else’s back killing them?” None of the women were able to empathise but Rose still managed to persuade herself that the excruciating pain she was in must be a normal part of the gruelling postpartum experience.

Until a few days later. Rose was lifting her son Otis out of his cot, when “my whole body collapsed, then my back started spasming. That’s probably when the first vertebrae broke.”

It would be months, however, before she would actually find out what was happening to her. In the meantime, she was in extreme physical pain and feeling “isolated and ashamed that I couldn’t pick up my kid when he was crying”. She made repeated visits to a doctor, who X-rayed her chest, took blood samples and suggested the pain could be psychosomatic, without ever investigating her spine. When she suggested an MRI, the doctor told her to “dial it down”.

At this point, Rose was practically begging for help. “I said: I can’t push a pram. I can’t leave my house. I couldn’t even spit my toothpaste out.” She told the doctor that a physiotherapist she had seen suspected she might have a fractured vertebra. “He went: ‘If you had a fractured vertebra, it would be excruciating. There’s no way your back will be broken in a million years.’”

I’m sitting with Rose, 34 – who began her career as a backing vocalist with Bombay Bicycle Club, before striking out with her own successful brand of ethereally beautiful folk-pop – at her kitchen table in Brighton, where she lives with her husband, Will. One end is strewn with craft materials that she and Otis, now two, have been using to make Christmas decorations. At the other, Rose – whose default air is one of no-nonsense self-effacement – is in tears: this is the first time she has spoken publicly about the trauma of the early months of her son’s life.

Rose eventually paid for an MRI out of her own pocket; the results showed her back was broken in eight places. Part of her was “weirdly relieved”, she says, as at last she knew “I’m not crazy. I’ve got this validating information – why I wasn’t able to be the mother I wanted to be.” Yet she also quickly realised she must have osteoporosis, a condition that weakens bones and is mainly seen in post-menopausal women, but can also in rare circumstances affect new mothers. Thanks to a supportive Facebook group, Rose soon knew more than the consultants, who were openly Googling the illness at appointments.

She also knew that the first step to recovery was to stop breastfeeding – a suspected cause of the condition (it is often called pregnancy and lactation-associated osteoporosis). But Otis wouldn’t take a bottle, and attempting to feed him with one was distressing: “I was crying, Will was crying, my mum was crying.” The midwives told Rose “to go cold turkey, he’ll probably scream for two days”, she recalls, but after a few hours she relented, unwilling to “starve” her child, and breastfed him until he was old enough for solid food.

Today, Rose’s bone density is still severely low – “If I fell over, it probably wouldn’t be good” – but thanks to drugs (the funding for which she had to secure from her local council, another source of stress) and hydrotherapy, her life is largely back to normal. She has been able to return to music – something she believed might never happen, having been in “mum mode and medical mode” for so long that “‘Lucy Rose’ was this completely distant memory”.

And yet Rose has managed to channel the emotional toll of her illness into her most exciting music yet. Her excellent fifth album, This Ain’t the Way You Go Out – a mantra inspired by the straight-talking hydrotherapist who treated her – sees her swap the sparse, maudlin soulfulness of her previous record for hook-laden, intricately layered tunes shot through with stark pain. The lead single Could You Help Me, produced by the feted British producer Kwes (Loyle Carner, Tirzah, Solange), matches frenetic, shuffling jazz with lyrics that express the desperation of those early days (“now I’m learning how terribly lonely illness is”), while the gorgeous title track sees Rose “blame myself for being so weak” in her crystal-pure voice. There is also room for rage at the responses of a couple of friends, especially on the deceptively peppy Life’s Too Short. “It was amazing how unsympathetic some people could be,” she says.

This Ain’t The Way You Go Out is a deeply personal project, but it was borne of collaboration. In late 2022, the US chart-topping rapper Logic offered to fly Rose to New York to sing on his new album (her vocals have featured on three of his previous records). During breaks she found herself jamming with the other musicians present, and their distinctly un-British zeal began to restore her confidence. “No one was self-deprecating; they were like: ‘We’re rocking this!’ I needed that sort of energy. Then I was like: right, I’m going to record these songs.”

Back in the UK, she texted Paul Weller. In 2018, she had sung backing vocals on his album True Meanings and he had offered to let her use his studio. Five years later, she took him up on it. Weller was so impressed with the fruits of one day’s labour that he told her to use the studio as much as she wanted. “He has just been this hugely supportive person,” says Rose. “On my bad days I’m like: ‘Paul Weller likes me! It’s not all bad, Lucy!’”

The texting didn’t stop there. Keen to leave her comfort zone and “start being brave and believing that other people want to work with me,” she set her sights on Kwes. A friend had passed on his number, but Rose had no idea how to approach him. “Do I just say: ‘Hi, I’m Lucy Rose, presuming you know me, which you definitely won’t.’ Or do I send a message saying: ‘I’m a musician called Lucy Rose and this is my background?!’” she says, still clearly stressed from the memory. But Kwes responded immediately – with enthusiasm. She also approached engineer Dan Parry (Adele and Lady Gaga), “and he was like, hell yeah!” These positive responses made her think: “Maybe, Lucy, you’re not as crap as you think you are.”

It doesn’t seem at all strange that these figures would jump at the chance to work with her: Rose has been critically acclaimed. She attributes her shock to “quite normal female musician self-esteem issues”, as well as her transition to motherhood. Rationally, Rose knows she has “made a great record and has lots to be proud of”, but says that a voice in her head tells her she might not be relevant any more: “You’re a washed-up 34-year-old mum now, making a record nobody’s gonna want!” And the reactions of some acquaintances can also get to her. When she tells other parents she is making an album, she says, the responses “will be like: ‘Good for you, still giving that a go!’ And it kills me a bit because I’m like: ‘Oh God, am I just pathetic?’ I think there’s a presumption that if you’re not No 1, you’re failing to a degree.”

After hearing her story, pathetic is one of the last descriptors you could apply to Rose. From barely being able to walk, she is now preparing to play live in London, and is looking forward to immersing herself in the uncharacteristically upbeat sound of This Ain’t The Way You Go Out. Even though the lyrics sting, “the music has really lifted me,” says Rose. “It’s giving me a defiance.”

The pain is still fresh, but Rose is ready to move on. She recently had therapy to make peace with her body, which she previously viewed as “weak and broken”, before realising “it’s the strongest in the world because it has persisted”. She is also determined to raise awareness of the condition so that nobody else has to spend months in extreme pain and self-blame as she did. She hopes that there will be medical progress, too: she recently gave blood samples to scientists from Edinburgh university who are investigating the illness.

Yet, her biggest comfort is her son – as he always has been, despite the devastation she felt at not being able to look after him as a newborn. “Not to sound really cheesy or anything but Otis was the only thing that got me through the day: I had such a good reason to keep going,” she says. “I felt so unlovable – I hated my body – but Otis just loved me so much, I was still his number one person. The experience of being his mother is the best experience of my life. I would do all of it a million times over.”