Choosing joy over sorrow

Lucy Rose discusses her upbeat fifth album, This Ain't The Way You Go Out, and the terrifying rare illness it was borne from

- Lucy Rose , WILL RICHARDS

‘I never really know how I’m going to be able to talk about this stuff,” Lucy Rose says at the kitchen table of her Brighton home. Ostensibly, I’m here to talk to the singer about her fantastic fifth album, This Ain’t the Way You Go Out, but none of it makes sense without the context of the life-changing and medically mystifying experience that was its catalyst.

After her tour behind 2019 album No Words Left finished almost exactly at the start of the pandemic, the singer planned to take an extended period of time off, during which she became pregnant.

Five weeks after she gave birth to her first child in the summer of 2021, Rose began experiencing debilitating back pain, which she was told can be common for new mothers. With the pain continuing to worsen and doctors shrugging off her questions, Rose paid for an MRI scan that revealed she had fractured eight vertebrae and was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of pregnancy-related osteoporosis. A bone density scan was then undertaken. With severe osteoporosis indicated by a score of between -2 and -4, Rose’s result was -4.4. The condition — a weakening of the bones — is most common in women in their 60s and 70s; Rose’s diagnosis came at 32.