JSInk: How you see your musical persona? How does it differ for you off-stage? Rose: I feel like my onstage persona is just an extension of some part of me, that’s why I’m attracted to different styles of music. I love the energy of rock music, and folk music that can be quiet and introspective - and talk about love or heartbreak -and I love hip-hop for the party vibe. It’s all part of me; it’s me trying to get all the influences out through my music, whether it be Jeff Buckley or Stevie Wonder or Steven Tyler, I feel connected. It flows though me.

My understanding was you came late to singing, somewhere in your junior year in high school.

I was singing but I took my career seriously after high school. Before I didn’t understand what it meant. Understanding is about getting to know who you are, and that’s the journey I went through in Berklee – [discovering] who you are and who you want to present to the world.  It was a total education for me, understanding songwriting, the structer of songs, harmony, understanding jazz music, the history of music. I fell in love with and how it evolved, how the blues came around and evolved into rock and roll. Berklee brought a lot of things together and made me cohesive and reminded me of how much work I had to. I don’t want to be boxed in.

I see some of what Janelle Monae does it what you do.

Thank you. I love her! She’s great, one of those people that has that whole jazz/hip-hop thing. I love that, that people in our generation are experimenting and paying homage to the legends we love and grew up with.

How do you look at what you’re doing?

I think of myself along the lines of people I aspire to be like, how they made an impact socially, like Bob Marley or Jimi Hendrix. 

Marketing is part of the game of course. If asked what genre you’re in …

I don’t want to be boxed in. I always say rock, soul and hip-hop.

You sent me a link earlier when asked about the sexuality in your work, about Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan artist who moved to New York in the mid-1990s. The Satchi Gallery bio says: “Mutu’s work explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and makes reference to colonial history, contemporary African politics and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction and funkadelia …Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations. Their forms are grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. Mutu examines how ideology is very much tied to corporeal form.”

A friend who’s a NewYork artist told me about her; she’s a good friend of his. I started discovering art and incorporating that into my music, being inspired by art and dance and culture. She’s a collage artist and a lot of deals with what we go through as women, our sexuality and how its’ perceived in society and the pressure we have. She’s taking body parts and making them into a collage. That really spoke to me. That inspired my cover {Rose strikes a strong, nude Grace Jones-like pose on the cover of “Mixtape”] being empowered by my body and doing it on my own terms.