Rose Cousins’ latest album proves that love is both undefinable and limitless
Whether it be the ones closest to us, those too far to reach, or the harmony of lying under the sun, there is love all around us. Our parents, our children, our partners and our friends. Yet, when we try to describe our love, we can only gesture towards the emotion that keeps us going..
Conditions of Love Vol. 1 is, in Cousins’ words, “an endless examination of what it’s like to be a human through the lens of love.” Its 10 tracks are an appreciation of a terrible beauty that both soothes and scorns; a worry that is ever-constant and yet fulfills our need for companionship. From the grass growing beneath us to the endless universe above, there is always room to love every single piece of this world—including ourselves.
“Love is there. It wants to exist,” Cousins says in an interview with The Coast. “It’s trying as best as it can to survive in all different kinds of weather. It’s trying to survive neglect. It’s trying to survive being smothered. It’s trying to survive the storm that we put it through.”
But the multi-award winning folk-pop artist says there is no real answer to what love is, our need for it, or why we cling to it—nor where it comes from, or why it begins or ends.
“It’s not just one thing. I’m still left with questions,” she says. “Everybody has different relationships with it. We have perceptions that are planted by our family, by our society, about what love is supposed to look like. I just think it’s such a spectrum and the flavour palette of it changes depending on who it’s travelling through.”
The perfect piano
From songs that describe the wonder of the endless expanse that surrounds us to the agony of lacking a loved one’s support, Cousins explores every aspect of the topic using one of her original musical loves: the piano. It was her first instrument, and as she describes it, an emotional companion.
“The piano is a very important and precious companion to me, and probably the holder of all my deepest of my emotions and everything I’ve ever felt since I was a kid.”
The piano on the record is a 1967 Baldwin grand, delivering a rich tone to accompany Cousins’ vocals. Her co-producer, Joshua Van Tassel, had sent her on a mission to look at a Yamaha piano for him at Dr. Piano in Bedford. She noticed the Baldwin, which was on reserve for someone else, and added her name to the waitlist. A few days later, she got the call that it was available.
Having only a small apartment-sized acoustic piano and a keyboard, the Baldwin grand was her first time owning a full-size piano.
“I got that big piano into my space and was actually, like, communing with it like I would have when I was a kid—the old piano we had in our living room on PEI. I was like, I think this is it. I think this whole record is going to be piano. It brings out the truest emotions from me and my writing, so it definitely became the backbone of the record and sets the tone.”
Atmospheric elegance
This resounding piano is the first layer of Cousins’ mural, with her voice acting as a drifting brush, colouring the tracks with her signature airy yet powerful vocals. This is further aided by a production focused on the soundscape. Conditions of Love Vol. 1 will convince listeners they are in a concert hall, alone, with ethereal melodies bouncing from wall to wall.
The atmosphere is aided by several factors: firstly that Cousins recorded this album alone in her home—a space where she could be as intimate as she needed to be—and secondly, because of her aforementioned co-producer, Van Tassel, who helped shape the atmospheric sound of this record. Van Tassel is an exceptional musician, producer and sound designer with experience in creating digital instruments under his company Dream Date Design. He set up the environment so Cousins could record at home. She would send him piano and vocals, he would process them and they would figure out where they belonged on the track.
“We discussed what the air around each song should be made of and we would both contribute elements to it,” says Cousins. “The things that feel synthesized on the record are things that we made, whether it’s my voice being reprocessed or an instrument that he has that’s really cool. By the time you get to the end of the record, there’s elements from the whole record in that last song, so we kind of take the journey with us all the way through to the end.”
Van Tassel was also encouraging of Cousins to experiment, particularly on the track “I Believe In Love (it’s very hard)”—a piano pop jam powered by the joyful expression of believing in love despite it’s difficulties.
“I was talking to him—I really wanted to write an upbeat song on the piano, and I kept talking about it and talking about it, and he [said] just go do it,” Cousins explains. “He knows I can do it, and I just have to go do it.”
Lyrically, Cousins’ poeticism is in full force, particularly on the track “Denouement”, where she purposefully sings sparsefully—typically one word or phrase per line. The emphasis strengthens the narrative of the song through absence. She explains that the process behind writing that song was an exercise in finding the patterns in words that also fit together thematically.
“I think I started with the word denouement,” she says. “I don’t even know why I thought of it. Maybe I was trying to come up with a way to summarize the cycle of relationship, and I just started barfing out rhymes. And then I was like, oh man, can I say a whole lot by just coupling words together and making each single word hold so much meaning and story around the cycle of relationship.”
Similarly, the second track “Forget Me Not” could be an extensive order at your favourite flower shop, as Cousins lists flower after flower over her keys. She describes it as, “allowing the music and the words to have a lot of responsibility in the telling of the story.”
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2025.