Meet British singer-songwriter Riri Rose with her debut single ‘Questions I’ll Never Know’. In many ways, this is a classic tale of a small-town girl searching for meaning beyond the few miles of everything she’s ever known. Yet, Riri plays with the convention by not looking out to the horizon, but within, to the minutiae of her Lincolnshire village, to all the small details. Through her refreshingly down-to-earth folk-pop style, she paints a vivid picture of her rural surroundings, “empty, dying fields, rotting fences, throwaway house collapsed, in the trenches.” All around, traces of former lives seem to haunt this songwriter, from the graveyard full of her ancestors to her vintage camera with a century of lost photographs.

You can’t help but be drawn into Riri’s unique perspective, finding yourself similarly looking around your environment and wondering who was here before and if they were anything like you. In searching out these invisible threads that connect all of us, this young songwriter hopes to find answers to her burgeoning question: “should I stay or should I go? I’ve always wanted to more.” No doubt, we’ve all wondered this before, especially in one’s formative years when the home you grew up in seems no longer to fit who you are becoming. As much as ‘Questions I’ll Never Know’ is a deeply personal debut from Riri Rose, it also hints at her ability to write relatable, universally meaningful songs in the future.

“This song was written about my tiny village in the Lincolnshire countryside. It’s where I grew up, and where my family grew up. I don’t know the people in the graveyard, but I know who’s related to me, and I wonder: have they walked the same path I have, and have I felt the same pain? I don’t know what they looked like, but do I resemble them in any way? I was also inspired by my love for old cameras and by the almost 100- year-old fingerprint markson them. I won’t know the pictures they took, but I can continue that legacy by using them.”

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