“At first it felt strange to receive all these accolades I’d been wanting for a long time—instead of grounding me, it made me feel anxious,” says Rose, who made her acclaimed full-length debut with 2013’s Cut to Impress. “But then the new songs started pouring out, and it felt like such a gift. I realized the recognition had come at a time when I was finally able to fully articulate who I am through my music, because of how my voice and my songwriting have evolved over the years. So if people are looking at me more closely, I’m glad they’re looking now.”

Co-produced by Lawrence Rothman (Amanda Shires, Margo Price) and Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges), Half Moon took shape through a charmed and fluid process that began with the three musicians meeting up every few weeks to write in Tashian’s home studio, taking advantage of his abundant stash of instruments (e.g., Mellotron, upright bass, a saloon-style piano). “We’d leave each session with these beautiful, fully conceived demos, and after a few songs it became apparent that something special was happening,” says Rose, who was eight months pregnant at the outset of the album’s creation. As they gave voice to the complexities of her inner life—her lived experience of womanhood, the sacredness of her closest bonds, the thrill and overwhelm of expecting her first child—the trio of collaborators surrendered to a shared journey Rothman sums up as “a year-long wild ride of writing, producing, crying, laughing, babies being born, and dreams coming to life.” Tashian, meanwhile, compares their creative kinship to “a bunch of kids building sandcastles on a beach and just enjoying the sunshine…We were all passengers, and the songs were taking us wherever they wanted to go.”

Six months after the birth of her son Graham, Rose headed to the historic RCA Studio A in Nashville and recorded Half Moon with an elite lineup of over two dozen musicians, finding the album’s true cohesion through the kinetic energy of people gathering in a room and giving the songs their fullest life. Along with top-tier players like guitarist Tom Bukovac (Emmylou Harris, Stevie Nicks), bassist Dennis Crouch (Elvis Costello, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss), and keyboardist Peter Levin (The Highwomen, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit), that lineup included Rose’s touring band: percussionist Tim Burkhead, bassist Judd Fuller, guitarist M.P. Gannon, and multi-instrumentalist Cav Mims. The follow-up to her 2025 EP Cocoon, Rose’s fifth studio LP marks a bold departure from the rootsy soul of No One Gets Out Alive—a Best Americana Album GRAMMY nominee featured on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of Rolling Stone. Thanks in part to its lavish string arrangements and velvety horns, Half Moon unfolds with both sophisticated ease and daring grandiosity—a direct reflection of her newly widened emotional world. “There’s a bigness to this music that was really exciting to explore,” says Rose, who names the orchestral pop of the Brill Building era among her touchstones for the album. “I think that has everything to do with this album coming from a moment when I was feeling a depth of love I’d never felt before, and the subject matter being more awe-inspiring than anything I’d ever had to work with.The sound is orchestral and wide-ranging because I was trying to capture and portray the duality within the album.”    

Partly recorded at Sound Emporium Studios, Half Moon takes its title from its soul-searching centerpiece, written just two days before Graham was born. “My labor was induced so I knew he’d be born under a full pink moon, which led to Lawrence and Daniel and I talking about the link between the phases of the moon and the way we see ourselves,” Rose recalls. A low-lit reverie adorned in sumptuous strings and spellbinding piano melodies, “Half Moon” inhabits a moody intensity as Rose muses on the nature of identity. “At the time I was overcome with emotion; there was so much love and excitement, but also fear and anxiety about what parts of myself I might lose and not be able to reclaim,” she says. “As I was working through all that, it helped me to think about how the moon is always whole—it’s just presented to us in different ways at different times, like all the many aspects of ourselves that we’re constantly trying to navigate.”

A gorgeous showcase for the vocal prowess that’s found her hailed as one of the finest singers in Nashville, Half Moon begins with the slow-burning grandeur of “Used To It”—a rapturous expression of longing and lust, spotlighting an artist in total command of her inimitable voice. “Even before most of the album was written, I knew I wanted ‘Used To It’ to be the first track," says Rose. “It felt like the start of a new thread for me; there’s something elegant and elevated in its structure, but it’s got some teeth as well. From a sonic standpoint, I wanted it to open the record because it feels like an unwrapping: there’s a smoldering, simmering build-up to a bombastic ending, pulling the listener into the album’s journey.” Next, on the wildly fun “Red Shoes,” Rose’s vocals take on a joyful ferocity as she delivers a dance-ready anthem of unapologetic pleasure. “It’s a song about forgetting your responsibilities and everything happening in the world and just going out and having a good time, which I think we all deserve,” she says. And on “The Mission,” Rose strikes a winning balance of assured sensuality and playful flirtation—a dynamic echoed in the groove-driven track’s glossy guitar tones, effervescent strings, and vibrant hand percussion. “There’s a confidence to ‘The Mission’ that feels really good to me,” says Rose. “At the core it’s a love song, but it’s also about owning your sexuality and however that manifests for you.” 

While Half Moon’s A-side radiates a lighthearted vitality, its B-side brings nuanced introspection and tender emotionality to tracks like “Gentle Man”—an acoustic-guitar-led meditation on the trappings of masculinity. The album’s latter half also includes “Hiding In Plain Sight,” a wistful piece of self-reflection penned with country luminary Natalie Hemby (one of her few co-writers on the LP apart from Rothman and Tashian). For Rose, the album intimately chronicles a season of profound personal transformation—a period in time she refers to as “this amazing moment of expecting and then giving birth, and re-emerging with a completely new part of my identity.” In sharing Half Moon with the world, she hopes to provide listeners with a similar sense of refuge and release. “We’re in an extremely vulnerable time, so I hope this record gives people space to feel whatever they need to feel,” says Rose. “I hope it helps everyone to be more gentle with themselves and give themselves grace—and reminds them that, just like the moon, we don’t need to shine full and bright all of the time to do what we’re meant to do. Like the moon, the whole of us is always there but just revealed differently depending on the light.”