Biography
Music first came to Lia Rose in an instrument that seems far removed from popular music – wind chimes. As a child, her family owned a musical wind chime business in Southern California. "On the weekends, I'd get up at 4:00 a.m. and jump in the ‘chime mobile’ – off to sell the chimes with my mom and brother,'" Rose says, “I thought it was a normal thing for a kid to do.”
As Rose grew she was surrounded by music and spent a lot of her time playing the guitar. She found herself trying to figure out the various unusual musical instruments lying around the chime shop and, at age 15, she wrote her first song. But then Rose gravitated towards chemistry and mathematics, prompting her to move to the Bay Area as a science student at UC Berkeley. After graduation she finally returned to her musical roots when she stepped into the local limelight as a member of a popular San Francisco group, Minipop. She began to write more songs, learned to play the bass and the piano and then, in December of 2005, she formed her own band, Built for the Sea.
For the past three years, Rose has spent much of her energy cultivating the sounds of Built for the Sea. She has often said that she craved “a big sound” for her songs. That’s what she got. And her band’s oceanic indie rock has earned them spots at the SXSW Conference (‘07, ’08), San Francisco's Noise Pop festival (’07, ‘08’ 09), and the Live 105 studios. The Bay Area quartet released their self-titled debut in 2006 with a sound said to land somewhere between Mazzy Star, Radiohead, and The Cranberries. Live 105 DJ Aaron Axelsen has praised their music as "very mesmerizing, very hypnotic."
Throughout her years with Built for the Sea, Rose has also written songs that don’t demand such a “big sound”. She has been encouraged all along to record her more delicate solo material and she is finally doing just that. Armed with a voice that cuts straight through to the heart and a newly found courage to “go it alone,” Lia Rose is working on her first solo record at long last.
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