Liz Rose started writing Swimming Alone, her first-ever solo record, in Irving, Texas, in the 1960s. She wasn't aware that it was happeningshe was just growing up, working at her parents' dime store, and going to the pool with her friends in the blazing, Texas heat. Those images lay dormant as Rose grew, married, had three children, wrote her way toward a Grammy, and opened her own store in Nashville. The stills of her Texan past remained quietuntil last year, when they started to resurface.
'I write every day,” Rose says, flanked by brightly colored textiles in the back corner of her Edgehill boutique, Castilleja. 'I come in here before I write, and I come in here after.”
Though many writers who have achieved her level of success (she has written with an all-star cast of artists, including Taylor Swift) might be less committed to a day-to-day routine at a retail space, Rose attributes this work ethic to her time spent working at her father's store in Dallas.
On Saturday mornings, she and her five siblings would pile into the car, head to the store, and put in a full days' work, learning genuine customer service and the subtleties of retail along the way.
'We make a friend firstwe make a customer second,” Rose says of her own business philosophy.
Between traveling back and forth to Texas to buy for Castilleja's eclectic inventory and implementing her father's customer service techniques (like popping popcorn in-store on special occasions), the images of her childhood began to resurface. 'It triggered all these memories. There were titles poppin' up, and every time one would, I'd go, ‘Well, I really can't write that for somebody else. That's my story.'”
Realizing the memories weren't going to stop coming, Rose began writing and enlisting songwriter friends in the process. On 'Working at the Five and Dime,” the story of her parents' store, Rose reached out to Caitlyn Smith, who was staying at her house in Texas at the time. On the title track, 'Swimming Alone,” Rose enlisted longtime co-writers Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey. Story by story, she wrote her way through her childhood. 'I write other people's stories,” Rose says. 'But it was really fun to tell mine.” Swimming Alone, along with a new line at Castilleja, arrives this month.