REILLY ROSE
As a seven-year-old taking classical piano lessons in Southampton, Reilly Rose was always trying to sound things out by ear or make up notes that weren’t on the page, and by the time she was double-digits, she was writing songs and making music videos with a digital camera in her Sagaponack backyard. So it comes at no surprise to hear that at 23, Rose has been performing professionally for nearly two years and is celebrating her first single, “Mood For Land,” with a music video that was “shot on super 8 and is very Wes Anderson-feeling with all of the locations in the music video that are local to the Hamptons: in the John Jermain Library, at the Breakwater Yacht Club out in the bay in Sag Harbor, and at the Topping Horse Farm. It was one of those moments where I got to look at the final product and see an ode to all the places where I grew up, so that was very fun and very exciting; I’m very proud of that.”
Rose says her music lives at the intersection of the indie, alternative, and singer-songwriter genres. “The instrumental elements are driven by piano joined with poetic lyrics rooted in storytelling, balancing both vulnerability and humor,” she said. “I pour my boldest convictions and my intimate reflections on life into the words and melodies, all with a dash of playfulness! My hope is that listeners feel this and can identify with the spirit of the music.” That spirit? Make it theatrical, please, like her high school days with Lola Lama and the other theater kids or IRL marketing campaigns like folks finding messages Rose has left in bottles at the beach. Playing places like at the Sagaponack Distillery “looking out on the field of what the Foster family is growing” or “among the flowers” at Kidd Squid only aesthetically adds to the appeal of coming back home to the East End from the East Village to perform. “What I love about playing out East specifically is that nature and open space and fresh air are so refreshing to have during a performance,” says Rose. “It feels extra cinematic to feel a breeze when you’re playing.”
SILAS JONES
For 20-year-old Silas Jones, the music has always been there. His dad is the band teacher at Springs School, Ben Jones, and his mother is Amanda Jones, a professional pianist. But his own musicianship? Well, that is really only just getting started. Jones came home from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy this past January after ultimately realizing he was far more passionate about playing guitar than he was about theater, which had long been his main pursuit. Guitar started as a Covid hobby he picked up far faster than he imagined; he’d subsequently fell head-on in love.
“There’s not even words to describe what I feel when I’m playing guitar,” Jones explained. “It’s like I’m going into an entirely different reality and escaping for a bit; I never really felt that with theater.” It was nervewracking, at first, to tell his parents about his change in professional direction, though his musical mom and dad were stoked to hear he’d be metaphorically following in their footsteps. Despite that fact — and that they do collaborate on occasion — Jones said the three are mindful not to infiltrate one another’s independent musical lives.
A highlight for him is getting to play with “partner-in-crime” Julian Link Morse, who attends Berklee College of Music in Boston and with whom the two performed as Merchant’s Path this past summer alongside Cash Muse on drums. Another iteration of that band could happen again next summer, but “no matter where we go, [Julian] and I, as long as we’re playing together, we’ll be happy,” Jones said, adding he has a studio in his room where he has been recording songs using Logic Pro and has plans not only to release a song before the end of the year, but an EP before next summer. “For me, I think the only time I feel like I can truly escape from the horrible things that happen on Earth is when I’m at a concert, so I hope I can give that same experience to other people because music brings people together more than anything else,” he said. “I just want to give people joy and for them to know I’m having as much fun making the music as they are listening to it.”
CHLOE HALPIN
If you asked Chloe Halpin to describe her sound, she might say, “It’s like if Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift had a song baby! It’s angsty, but tells a captivating story.” That story would include both artists: Lavigne’s tunes are the ones Halpin first learned on electric guitar and Swift’s 2008 CMA Award performance of “Picture to Burn” was the moment that spurred her to become a performer herself. That instant when Swift takes off a black fedora into which she’d tucked her blond locks and tosses the hat away? As the pyrotechnics began, so did Halpin’s dream.
“I just fell to the floor, sat down, and was like, ‘This is it, this is what I’m going to do someday no matter what happens in my life,’” she recalled. Halpin went on to garner her Bachelor of Arts degree in songwriting at Belmont University’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, graduating a year early thanks to a “lifechanging” semester abroad in Uganda and Zimbabwe, but it would take time to come into her own as an artist. Pursuing her degree on Music Row, Halpin realized “you could throw a stone in Nashville and hit a girl like me with a guitar like mine. . . . ” It was daunting at first, but after three years touring her “big three” of New York, Nashville, and Kentucky full-time — with a supportive family and former professors alongside a growing fanbase — Halpin, at 27, ends that ellipsis by asking, “ . . . but do they have my swagger, do they have my education, and do they have my voice? No, they don’t, and that’s what makes me different. I’m confident, I have some swagger, I know I have a good voice and I know that the songs I write are not the songs that other people write.”
ANNIE TREZZA
From a very young age, this folky singer-songwriter-surfer has been obsessed with music and knows the exact moment she knew she wanted to write her own: At 15, feeling her first good bit of heartache listening to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Since then, heartaches and breaks have been as central to Annie Trezza’s artistic expression as skateboarding down to the beach, so while Trezza has been dreaming a bit about spreading her wings to fly, perhaps even across the Pond, “having Montauk as my home is part of my music.”
At 33, she is kind of over being stuck in the corner of a restaurant, but Trezza does love a good Talkhouse show and is as thoughtful about such gigs as she is about her releases in general. She recently took another listen to last year’s Surf Crushin’ EP with her bassist and Monk Music Studios engineer, Parker Lyons, and, while she’s currently formulating a full-length album in that “wired, inspired creative brain” of hers, Trezza is more immediately planning an A/B release — likely in November — two songs she describes as the most intense she has yet written about a trip to France with someone who meant a lot to her. “I think being a woman who is into women, I tend to be falling for people who aren’t necessarily on the same spectrum . . . it keeps happening, so that has inspired many a song,” she said. And while the East End is a difficult place for anyone in the dating scene — especially in the wintertime — Trezza doesn’t want an app to find love.
“I’m all about the old-school, in-person, star-crossed rainbow butterflies, love-at-first-sight type of thing, y’know? I’m a hopeless romantic for sure,” she said. That comes through in spades from Trezza’s songwriting, an emotional practice she says is done in private before she’ll share with the band. “The songs come to life,” she said of the process. “Sometimes when it’s just me and an acoustic guitar, the songs tend to sound sad even if they aren’t, so the band can make it groovier and brings that extra energy. It’s always cool seeing people dancing to the music.”