On her transformative album ‘There Is No Ship,’ Rose Betts confronts grief, heritage and personal growth through intricate production and soul-baring songwriting.

Stream: “Six” – Rose Betts

Rose Betts makes music the way a great architect builds a cathedral – layer by layer, creating sanctuaries that inspire awe and a fleeting sense of something sacred.

“When I sing, it’s like building something in the room that changes the atmosphere,” she says. “People feel it, and then the moment’s gone. You can hear how it feels, you can see it. It goes through them; their body is experiencing it.”

Betts captures that fleeting yet powerful presence on her sophomore album There Is No Ship, an 11-track emotional trip through memory, loss and legacy. From the ethereal opening notes of “Six” to the weight of the title track, she weaves intricate tapestries finely stitched together with textured storytelling.

Rose Betts 'There Is No Ship' © Catie Laffoon — There Is No Ship – Rose Betts (photo © Catie Laffoon)

Her voice shape-shifts from delicate and airy to dynamic and commanding – often within the same song. On the title track, Betts’ vocals rise and fall, like a riptide pulling listeners into something that feels deeply personal yet ancient.

Respectfully drawing on her Irish heritage through her mother’s lineage, Betts layers the record with modal harmonies, fiddle lines and a narrative tradition that gives even its lightest moments a sense of depth.

The seemingly playful tracks “You Never Looked Back” and “Doodles” carry painful little pokes of sorrow and introspection. In “Doodles,” she sings with a raised glass and a slight ache: “And it’s one for the times when I let them win / One for the light that I let him dim.”

Loss has played a key role in shaping this album, she says: “Last year brought a lot of death – a family friend, our dog, even just… the atmosphere. Something shifted.”

That sense of impermanence and fragility permeates the record.

“Take This Body Home,” written for her estranged grandfather, offers a complex and compassionate farewell. Framed by the traditional Irish blessing, it’s a moment of poetic closure: “May your hardened heart be woken / by the soft and distant song / Of all you left here unspoken / all the shards we keep stepping on.”

Her grandfather was emotionally distant from her mother. His passing stirred up conflicted feelings of grief, but also a strange kind of peace. That thread continues in “My Funeral Song” and “Save Me a Seat” – the latter of which Betts contemplates mortality with moments of levity, like the quietly surreal realization of finding her first grey hair at 22.

Throughout the album, Betts, who was a co-producer, creates lush, layered pieces that reveal something different with each listen.

The result is an album that feels rich and emotionally resonant. Each track is a world, carefully constructed, then let go – just like the fleeting “buildings” Betts creates when she sings.

“I got a high when I first started writing songs,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about that little girl a lot; I’ve been trying to get back to that girl who wrote for herself. There’s something undisturbed and perfect about that world.”

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