Alexa Rose

Singer/songwriter Alexa Rose merges the mountain traditions of her Allegheny roots with elements of folk, rock, country, and pop, thereby carving a distinctive path through American roots music. She first surfaced in 2013 with a pair of self-released albums, later securing a contract with Fat Possum’s Big Legal Mess Records that yielded the richly textured and emotionally direct Medicine for Living in 2019. On her 2021 follow-up, Headwaters, she continued probing varied directions within Americana through an album that balanced breadth and closeness.

Raised in the Allegheny highlands of West Virginia after her birth in Clifton Forge, Rose began guitar lessons during adolescence. She later relocated to North Carolina, where enrollment at Appalachian State University sharpened her approach to songcraft. Artists including Doc Watson, Patsy Cline, Gillian Welch, John Prine, Joni Mitchell, and Lucinda Williams shaped her sensibility, prompting the independent arrival of her debut album, North, in 2013. After settling in Ashville in 2015 and immersing herself in the local music community, she issued her second album, Low and Lonesome, the next year. The Big Legal Mess association produced her third record, the widely praised Medicine for Living, tracked in Memphis alongside guitarist Will Sexton, drummer George Sluppick, bassist Mark Edgar Stuart, and keyboardists Rick Steff of Lucero and Al Gamble of St. Paul & The Broken Bones. Headwaters followed in 2021, spotlighting the tracks “Big Sky,” “Human,” and “Clearwater Park.”