I’ve been listening to Rose Cousins‘ new album on repeat for days now, and damn if it hasn’t gotten under my skin in the best possible way. Five years since her JUNO-winning Bravado, the Nova Scotian songwriter has returned with something that feels like a letter from an old friend who’s been on one hell of a journey.
The album opens in the most literal way possible: with birth. To Be Born (overture) is a short instrumental, a prelude that feels like an inhale before the first note is sung. From there, the songs unfold like vignettes, each one capturing love in a different light. Not love as an abstract ideal, but love as it truly exists—messy, complicated, contradictory.
“Forget Me Not” unfolds over a delicate piano melody, weaving together the names of flowers with an unspoken plea for permanence. It’s about growth, change, the way we reach for something lasting even as time pulls everything away.
The album came together with longtime collaborator Joshua Van Tassel, who co-produced, and centres around this gorgeous 1967 Baldwin grand piano Cousins stumbled upon while running an errand for Van Tassel. She’s said that piano is where she feel the most connected emotionally. You can hear it, too—throughout these songs, her playing shifts from gossamer-light to thunderous, always in service of the emotional current running beneath.
The pandemic did a number on all of us, but Cousins seems to have used that forced stillness to spend time outdoors, often alone, inspiring her to dig deeper with the music. She’s using rivers and stars to talk about human hearts and somehow avoiding every nature-writing cliché along the way.
If there’s a centrepiece here, it’s “I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard)”—the kind of song that resists easy categorization. The song acknowledges how bloody difficult it is to stay open and vulnerable in a world that keeps teaching us to armour up. There’s no resolution, no grand conclusion—just the quiet understanding that love is worth it, even when it’s not easy. Especially when it’s not easy.
Elsewhere, Cousins distills complex emotions into strikingly simple forms. “Denouement” is a breathless list of words, a series of snapshots that somehow capture the arc of a relationship. The repetition builds momentum, each word carrying the weight of an entire story.
“Needed You” hits like a punch to the gut—it’s a reckoning with old wounds that avoids both the trap of bitter recrimination and sugary resolution. Instead, Cousins finds this messy middle ground where you can acknowledge what you didn’t get while understanding how you survived anyway. It’s exactly the kind of emotional precision that’s made her songwriting stand out for years.
But if that song gets you choked up, “K’s Waltz” might just break you. Written for her late friend Koady Chaisson, it somehow contains both crushing grief and genuine wonder at how resilient we humans can be. Rather than reaching for trite metaphors about loss, Cousins just bears witness to that strange persistence of love that outlasts physical presence.
Then there’s the final track, “How is this (the last time),” which barely exists at all. Just one question, repeated: How is this the last time you’ll close your eyes? And then silence. A full forty seconds of that final chord fading away. The absence of sound is its own kind of presence, just like the absence of someone you love never truly feels like emptiness—it’s a space that still holds their shape, their shadow.
What strikes me most about this record isn’t just its piano-forward sound or thematic focus but how Cousins has managed to evolve without abandoning what made her special in the first place. If you’ve followed her work, you’ll recognize that emotional intelligence and that voice—an instrument that conveys complex feelings without pyrotechnics. But there’s also a new spaciousness to these songs, room for them to breathe and unfold at their own pace.
Van Tassel deserves a heap of credit for the production here. Throughout the album, electronic elements appear and recede like tide pools around the acoustic foundation. Nothing feels tacked on or trendy; instead, the production creates a sound that could have been recorded last week or twenty years ago.
The album title hints at more to come, and honestly, these songs do feel like the opening chapter of a larger story. By focusing on the “conditions” of love rather than love as some abstract concept, Cousins examines all the environments—internal and external—that allow connection to flourish or wither. It’s a much more thoughtful, more nuanced approach than another collection of straightforward love songs.
Conditions of Love, Vol. 1, is released March 14 on Nettwerk.
Rose Cousins plays Bar le Ritz on April 7. BUY TICKETS
Photo – Lindsay Duncan
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