After 2016’s acclaimed debut album, Control, Rosie Lowe began training as a counsellor. “The speed of self-development that you have to go through when you're training is very quick,” she tells Apple Music. “And I quickly came head-to-head with my perfectionism issues. I felt like there had always been something holding me back with my music—these chains around me.” These issues resulted in a temporary halt on her second album. “About two-thirds of the way through I felt it was too stressful, too painful,” she says. Fortunately, YU made it. And despite its uneasy genesis, Lowe’s record shows off pop and R&B at its most soulful, and at times, spiritual. YU intricately unfurls itself, with spare and gorgeous interludes sidling up against the big, proper love songs and slinky bangers. “I wanted this one to flow through,” she says. “I wanted people to be able to listen to it in one take. Not feel like those are singles chucked into an album.” Let Lowe guide you through, track by track. Lifeline “I wanted it to be the first song because I felt like it encapsulated the theme of the album in terms of talking about sharing myself to another as a lover and partner and friend. Basically, the song is saying this could be so much easier if I wasn't in love with you. We didn't have to go through all of this stuff but you're intrinsic to my heartbeat and my breath, I guess. “It's like setting up the album, like this journey isn't easy but it's absolutely necessary. The song I wrote with William Arcane in south London. On this day, we just decided to take the afternoon off and we went and had a few beers. Then we went back to the studio and we were just jamming, basically, and he started playing that piano line but we had it on record and then I started singing. So the first time you hear me singing that-that is the recording. It's the first time I sung those lyrics ever. We're just jamming and in the background you can hear him whisper, ‘Carry on!’ “I didn't want to go back and re-record those vocals because it felt like it really encapsulated that moment and it felt really raw when we did it and it felt really electrifying.” The Way “This song proved to me I'm fine with writing a love song now. Maybe one each album or something I can handle. Receiving Jay Electronica’s verse was just one of the best days yet in my musical career. I had a meeting and I cancelled it, and I just listened to it over and over and over again. My jaw was on the floor. I emailed Jay to say thank you and to tell him he’s a psychic as I hadn’t emailed him the song’s lyrics or the album’s themes but he somehow picked up on all of it. He was like: ‘I went so deep.’ I love how London-centric it is as well.” Birdsong “I don't think I've really told anyone really what this song's actually about. The Birdsong for me is obviously about longing and waiting for somebody, but really the Birdsong represents the male orgasm. I was thinking about the kind of power of dawn and that feeling of waiting for the opportunity to be able to please your lover. Musically, I wanted it to feel sleazy. I started with a drum sample, then I wrote the bass line on a synth. It was just those two and my vocals. I took it to Dave [Okumu, Lowe's songwriting and production partner] and we went and tracked it in Church Studios with some of my favourite musicians. I imagined a male choir because I was talking about the male experience. I wanted it to feel like a call and response to the Birdsong I’m referencing. They would represent the birds, almost. And I got my dream choir: Kwabs, Jamie Woon, Jordan Rakei and Jamie Lidell.” Pharaoh “This song was already quite formed when I got it from Dave. It has harmonic change which is really beautiful and quite unique in how it shifts. The main sample is from a Pharaoh Saunders track called ‘Memories of Edith’. It was one of the more challenging songs because I felt everything I wrote wasn't good enough. So I spent about three months trying different choruses for it. I dove headfirst into ancient Egyptian symbolism. I was in that world for like a good few weeks. I was in the British Library a lot.” Valium “The song talks about someone being ‘beautiful but dehydrated’. They are so disconnected with themselves that they can't give anyone else a thing. It's like water represents nourishment, basically. Dehydrated here represents, for me, the lack of kind of self-awareness and self-care that we sometimes have.” Mango “From the beginning, I felt like this song is very powerful. I've been reading quite a lot of kind of Bible stories, because I think that they're beautiful apart from anything. else. But I was like very much placed in the Garden of Eden when I was writing it. “It felt like a very sensual song for me so I had like all these food and water connotations. So in the song I'm imagining myself as Eve—I don't feel like you get to hear Eve's perspective much. I just feel like she's painted as the sinner. And I'm asking Adam to eat the apple so we can both go to paradise together. I'm kind of saying what's the use of love and lust and water and life if we can't go to paradise together. Dave and I wanted it to feel really woozy. Like you're in this dream and there's this real push and pull.” ITILY “I Think I Love You. I was in Devon at my parents’. It was summer, the doors were open, I had built a little studio shed down there. I was getting high. It's very much that song of the record. It felt nostalgic for me—there was something nostalgic in the air. And when I was approaching the song I imagined being 15 and really fancying someone or really liking someone but not knowing if I was supposed to like someone or not knowing how that felt. Just like a feeling of like being maybe a bit of overwhelmed with emotions. When I'm saying, ‘He has gone out and he won't be home for another three hours,’ I wasn't thinking of an extra-marital affair. I was thinking: ‘My dad's gone out, come and let's get jiggy.’ “Oh, and just on the birds on this track: I went through five albums of German birdsong to find the right birds. They had to sound like birds from my dad's house.” Little Bird “I wrote this about my little nephew, Samu, when he must have been coming up to one. He was tripping up all the time, trying to learn to walk, basically, and just falling. And it started as a little song to him to encourage him to not worry about falling, and it's fine, you have to fall to be able to learn to walk, basically, or fly. His other aunties buy him chocolate, I write him songs. “I did have a realisation that actually maybe it was a song for my own little girl. So what started as a song to my gorgeous little nephew then became a song about the young person in me who's still as frightened as I probably was on the day that I was beginning to walk as well.” Royalty “This one was a one-take wonder. Again, we wanted the song to sound pretty sleazy. But guess in this song I wanted it to be really like, No, actually I'm not in it for love, and that's okay, and also, you're really lovely.’ So I wanted to find a way of it being respectful. ‘No thank you, but thank you very much.’ Very polite.” Body / Blood “So this is me exploring my feelings around faith. My partner comes from a very religious background. And I was having a lot of discussions with him about if he was going to heaven and I was not. I started asking what do I need to do to get into the same place as my lover because he's maybe a better human than me. There's a lot of things that I don't agree with, but I've totally fallen in love with someone whose history is rooted in religion. And without that it wouldn't have made him who he is. So I guess that it's like opened me up to...I'd say now I'm agnostic. I don't think that it's for me but I can see the elements could really work for me, and maybe one day it will be.” UEMM “You Ease My Mind. It totally encapsulates the feelings of love I have towards my partner. Really, he makes me feel safe. I’ve fallen in love before but not in this way. Or with an intention that maybe this could be a forever love.” Shoulder “This was originally the chorus for ‘Little Bird’. Waste not, want not. I had these real memories come up when I was writing this song that never existed before. It was a family friends’ swimming pool that we use to go to when we were younger. They had this jump up into the pool and I would run up the steps and really work myself up. And then I just wouldn't be able to do it. To this day, I've never jumped. It came up for me vividly in dream when I was writing this song. “This song was a response to that. Just letting myself not be perfect. Letting myself do a one take and it's absolutely fine, because you can get the feeling of it, instead of killing it with precision. And it was all about that. It was basically just about jumping in and allowing myself the space to not always be perfect, which I'm definitely not.” Apologise “My friend Sam Crowe was at my house as we were sorting visas for some gigs in India. He was just playing my piano and I clicked record on my iPhone Voice Notes. In India, I had that melody in my mind, so I just went through the file and chopped it up. And then I wrote to it with my headphone mic, I sung the song through it on buses and hotels in India. I wanted to keep that original Voice Notes recording but because I was going ‘hmm, yeah, love it’, and someone was talking about visas in the background, we eventually decided we had to get a better recording of it. So I got Sam back round and I did 20 takes, trying to get the same feeling through the iPhone. “The song's about the roles we take on. In this song particularly, I was looking at the victim/rescuer roles that we often play out, in lots of different relationships. And I was feeling quite aware of my ability to become a rescuer. I feel like I can rescue people. But then realising that through my rescuing people, I'm making people victims. And through people being victims, them making me a rescuer. I'm saying but why is it always me who has to apologise, why am I always on my horse, coming in to save you? And then I'm a fool, because I'm letting it go on.”