the 1 | chaennie

47. 1989

"These songs were once about my life. They are now about yours." I was born in Melbourne on December 13, 1989.

In the world we live in, much is said about when we are born and when we die. Our birthday is celebrated every year to commemorate the very instant we came into the world. And a funeral is held to mark the day we leave it. But lately I've been wondering... what can be said of all the moments in between our birth and our death? The moments when we are reborn...

The debate over whether people change is an interesting one for me to observe because it seems like all I ever do is change. All I ever do is learn from my mistakes so I don't make the same ones again. Then I make new ones. I know people can change because it happens to me little by little every day. Every day I wake up as someone slightly new. Isn't it wild and intriguing and beautiful to think that every day we are new?

For the last few years, I've woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded. I listened to a lot of music from the decade in which I was born and I listened to my intuition that it was a good thing to follow this gut feeling. I was also writing a different storyline than I'd ever told you before.

I wrote about moving to the loudest and brightest city in the world, the city I had always been overwhelmed by... until now. I think you have to know who you are and what you want in order to take on Chicago and all its blaring truth. I wrote about the thrill I got when I finally learned that love, to some extent, is just a game of cat and mouse. I wrote about looking back on a lost love and understanding that nothing good comes without loss and hardship and constant struggle. There is no "riding off into the sunset," like I used to imagine. We are never out of the woods, because we are always going to be fighting for something. I wrote about love that comes back to you just when you thought it was lost forever, and how some feelings never go out of style. I wrote about an important lesson I learned recently... that people can say whatever they want about me, but they can't make me lose my mind. I've learned how to shake things off.

I've told you my stories for years now. Some have been about coming of age. Some have been about coming undone. This is a story about coming into your own, and as a result... coming alive.

I hope you know that you've given me the courage to change. I hope you know that who you are is who you choose to be, and that whispers behind your back don't define you. You are the only person who gets to decide what you will be remembered for.

From the girl who said she would never cut her hair or move to Chicago or find happiness in a world where she is not in love...

Love, Rosie

-

"I chopped all my hair off at the start of May. I wrapped up my tour with a few shows around Asia. I dropped the first single for my upcoming album and I was doing great. Better than I had in a long while. I learned how to be happy by myself - well, not in a relationship. I found company and comfort with my friends and the new life I was cultivating for myself away from ... everything else. But of course, life has a way of pulling the rug out from under you, just when things are starting to look good."

"And that, of course, was running into Jennie again?"

Sagely nodding, Rosie anxiously cupped a fist in her hand, fiddling as she tried to quietly crack her knuckles, her hands clammy and warm as she grew restless. "Mhm. I wasn't ready at all. I had just released my new album, 1989, about ... a month before that. It was doing really well. A million copies in its first week. Again . I was buzzing with that. You know when someone doubts you so much and you just want to prove them wrong? Well, I did . It did better than the labels best estimates, and I was smug. Oh God, I must've seemed so insufferable to my team. I had to stop myself from literally saying ha! I told you so! I was very chuffed with myself, I thought that nothing could knock me down. Especially not thatsoon. But seeing her again ... that didn't even seem like a possibility."