Friendship is best served sunny side up – a very real and proven hypothesis tested out during my sit-down conversation with Rose Mainer at my favorite sun-bleached, tucked-away park. Though the musician and I aren’t strangers to each other’s lives, it’s rare we’ve ever been so honest. Picking away at his childhood family relations and self-desires doesn’t typically describe our day-to-day. But in the context of a fresh single being released, it became a laughable experience as our creatively equal friends ran around us, clicking away at digital cameras before lying down far away in the grassy field. Between dodging ants crawling up our arms, I dug deep into the world of Mainer’s new enveloping sound upon his April 20th release of ‘I Wanna Be Adored.’
Cult fanbases are in. At least for alternative singer-songwriter Rose Mainer, who, with a mischievous laugh, jokes, “I want to be able to go to jail, and they’ll bail me out.” After almost a year spent in creative hibernation, the twenty-three-year-old bursts back onto the scene, eager to illuminate the depths of his longing and throw himself wide open to the wild, electric pulse of the music world once more.
Before setting out alone for Austin and the thrill of college, Mainer’s musical roots were already twining through the landscapes of Maryland and Florida. On one branch, his father’s steel guitar and earthy blues; on the other, his mother’s velvet voice, together nurturing Mainer’s self-taught artistry, which blossomed at just fourteen. Basketball may have dominated his early days, but Mainer never hungered for the crowd’s gaze on the ball; he craved their rapt attention on him.
“Basketball is more of a team thing, and it’s harder for me to shine,” said Mainer. “Through music, it’s only me. I get to tell my own story and be the hero.”
In eighth grade, the singer wandered through silence, desperately wishing to find a voice in the world. Abandoning basketball for music marked a deliberate leap and sprouted a refusal to wear the badge of failure. XXXTENTACION and Kurt Cobain ignited those first sparks of inspiration, pushing Mainer into rap, a fledgling era he now laughs off as “fucking horrible.”
“I was really drawn to artists that had cult fanbases and had a movement behind their music because that’s always what I wanted to do; build a whole movement and family around my music,” said Mainer.
Eleven months after unleashing the experimental noise rock single ‘Mallory,’ the vocalist returns with ‘I Wanna Be Adored,’ a track that signifies his urge to be someone. Drawing direct inspiration from The Stone Rose’ iconic 1989 anthem of the same name, Mainer lets the UK band’s haunting refrain, “I don’t have to sell my soul / He’s already in me,” spark the creative engine for his own title track. This lyrical motif becomes the linchpin, setting the stage for his new artistic leap.
“It tickled something in my brain, and then I did some research on what they meant by that. It was more about having this desire to be admired and adored inside of you. It’s a bad thing,” said Mainer. “I was like, ‘Yes, this is me. This is everything that I’ve wanted.’ And then I decided to make a whole album about it.”
Work on his debut album commenced in December, driven by a commitment to reveal himself with unexplored vulnerability and raw honesty. Unlike earlier projects, Mainer seized full creative control over production, a feat not particularly relished in retrospect.
“It fucking sucks. I hate producing,” said Mainer. “I’m good at vocals and everything else, but producing is not my strong suit. I’m very new to it. Other than that, everything else was easy, and it was very therapeutic.”
The seven-minute track unfurls like a midnight confession, its opening a procession of disconsolate hymns drifting atop hauntingly cinematic piano. Each chord is a ripple across a moonlit lake, echoing with purifying wails that rise and fall like tides of longing. The arrangement is stripped bare, a vessel of raw melancholy, expertly channeling Mainer’s deep-seated yearning for companionship through the crystalline simplicity of his aural tapestry.
Though the lyrics are sparse, the title morphs into a relentless mantra, an aching plea for adoration that reverberates through the song’s core. In the final two minutes, a heavily distorted guitar seeps in, saturating the tranquility with a wall of sonic gloom, its textures bleeding into the mix. Then, with an abrupt cleave, the composition collapses into a spectral humming, so fiercely lonesome it evokes the ocean’s lament, tides whispering their sorrow to an empty shore.
The closing interlude, “When the party’s over / I’m all I ever knew / Because I don’t have a soul / I’ve given it to you / I wanna be adored,” captures Mainer’s life with striking, evocative simplicity. Its quietude invites reflection without demanding the listener approach it with undue gravitas.
“There’s a certain feeling that you get from playing the piano,” said Mainer. “Even before I learned how to play the piano, if you sit down and just play random keys, something good will come out of it. It’s like you can’t play any wrong notes. It just speaks to you, and it spoke to me when I was writing the song.”
Mainer’s upcoming June album promises a boundary-pushing exploration of sound, where lush piano textures meet a spectrum of experimental vocal techniques. Expect a fusion of layered harmonies, raw screeches, impassioned belts and moments of spoken word. The production leans heavily on ambient soundscapes and inventive reverb, poised to redefine Mainer’s artistry as he enters an unexplored era of unflinching emotional honesty.
“Everyone has something that they can contribute to the world,” said Mainer. “I think you should definitely put everything that you have in your mind into the world so that other people can relate to it.”