Charlotte Rose Benjamin, photographed by Charlotte Dulany.
In girl world… There’s sentimentality, friendship, infatuation, and glittering exuberance. Charlotte Rose Benjamin loves it here. She’s a pop-fuzz darling of bouncing energy, channeling her heartaches, daydreams, and musings under the microscope and into the microphone. The output is endearingly intimate and often scathingly honest, her confessional lyrics resembling a meandering conversation with your closest friends. That’s who Charlotte Rose is: indie-pop’s newest best friend – sincere, goofy, and riotously girly.
The singer and model traded one island for another when she moved from her hometown of Martha’s Vineyard to New York City in 2014, steered by her passion for music. There, she found the scene that led her to her current band of rotating members; she recorded her latest album, “Moth Mouth,” with bandmates Nardo Ochoa on guitar, Matti Dunietz on drums, and Zoe Zeeman on bass. Charlotte Rose comes from a family of artists and a house full of music — her father is a musician, and her mother was a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company — so performing is in her DNA. She’s island-made and city-minted, churning out songs with a pop punch that meld wistful nostalgia against a gritty city backdrop.
It’s hard to believe that someone so effervescent and chirpy — a doll with modelesque bone structure, no less — could face the same dejection and mundanity as the rest of us. But she’s surprisingly human, armed with self-deprecating jabs and an unapologetic embrace of insecurity. Her songwriting is as sharp as it is tender, like in “deep cut” (2021), where she sings, “I wanna float like a girl with no anger,” or in “Cumbie’s Parking Lot” (2022), with the lyric “Wanna be anybody I am not.” In “Back to the Future” (2021), she confesses, “I regret every single thing I’ve ever said or written down.”
Her debut album, “Dreamtina” — a playful moniker for the ultimate dream girl — tried on pastel indie-rock styles, blending chugging electric guitar with bric-a-brac tintinnabulations, while “Moth Mouth,” recorded at Electric Lady Studios and her childhood home, drifts further into a folk-pop space. Her whimsical curlicues chart the course for universal themes of bittersweet, hazy tribulations of love. She’s as uninhibited in truth-telling as she is by the parameters of genre.
Her catalog has garnered recognition from BBC 6 Music and BBC Radio 1 with Jack Saunders, and she has been featured on Spotify playlists including Global New Music Friday and Fresh Finds: Indie, where “deep cut” and “Cumbie’s Parking Lot” enjoyed a 10-plus-week run. Her list of contemporaries and collaborators is equally impressive, with names like Gus Dapperton, Houndmouth, and Sarah Kingsley, the latter of whom she’s set to tour with beginning this month.
Last year, her collaboration with e.l.f. Cosmetics’ production arm, e.l.f. Made, on the single “Hairpin” ignited a career-changing crackle. With 9.9 million views on YouTube, the anthem — part of e.l.f.’s 16-track album “Get Ready With Music” — has catapulted her into a new sphere. And not just the one she entered in the zero-gravity airplane for the music video.
Other visual components of her artistry span eras, from 18th-century France to the Wild West to modern day Martha’s Vineyard, barefoot in the back of a pickup truck. In “Party City,” she dons colorful wigs from the titular store and sings, “Don’t have much but I’ll keep waiting and one day we’ll both be famous / No one saw it coming and I can’t wait to blow their fucking minds.”
I, for one, can see it coming.
TUESDAY, 11:00 AM, APRIL 1, 2025, BOWERY
Charlotte: When you’re not in the spotlight, who is Charlotte Rose?
Charlotte Rose: I feel really comfortable spending time alone, so I feel like I’m probably watching TV in my apartment, taking a long walk, that’s so boring of an answer… I’ve been doing a lot of weed gummies lately, so I’ll do half a weed gummy and have a day to myself, frantically writing in my Notes app and everything is exactly right, and I’m getting ideas.
Charlotte: When you read those notes back later, how do they hold up?
Charlotte Rose: Half the ideas are good and half sound like I’m stoned.
Charlotte: Do you have a stage persona, or is what we see an extension of your everyday or exaggerated self?
Charlotte Rose: I think that a big part of the music for me is how I present myself, and it’s almost equally important as what I’m wearing. That’s probably the main thing that separates my stage persona from who I am. I feel like I’m always thinking about the costume of it, and it’s maybe more a glamorized version of myself, almost like a way to separate the real person from the stage person. It’s really just the clothes, I’m not great at performing like a different person, I just am very much myself on stage.
Charlotte: What’s your most defining on-stage memory?
Charlotte Rose: I love when it’s the original band – Matti, Nardo, Zoe – and we’re so locked in with the music, and my favorite memories are watching Nardo play guitar because he takes really long solos and he goes crazy makes me so happy.
Charlotte: Many of your lyrics touch on themes of feeling misunderstood. Do you feel that your emotions and experiences translate more clearly when expressed musically?
Charlotte Rose: Oh my god, that’s like the best question that anyone has ever asked me. That’s so smart. Yeah, I’m so happy that you picked up on that because if you were to ask me why I make music, the number one reason would be to feel understood, that’s what I’m trying to do. I used to really believe that I could fix everything if I was able to articulate it perfectly, put it into a song, and package it really neatly and accessibly, because then I would feel understood and once I felt understood, everything would fall into place. Now I’m finding other ways to do that. I want to start zooming out, being less specific, and making music that’s fun.
Charlotte: How did the seeds of “Dreamtina” and “Moth Mouth” come together, and how did their production processes differ?
Charlotte Rose: For “Dreamtina,” I had decided I was going to make an album when we had recorded half of the songs already, and I finished it out cohesively. We recorded it over the course of maybe two years, mostly at my parent’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, which is like the most fun ever — we go there for a week and my dad has a small, ramshackle studio in our backyard that he uses for rehearsing but it’s where we record. And that just felt so nice and I was not with a label for any of it, doing it totally on my own, which I’m really proud of and I’m happy that I made that choice…
“Moth Mouth” was a lot more of a struggle because we started recording it at Electric Lady and that didn’t work out, and it went through lots of different homes of studios and labels, and now looking back, I think, ‘I should’ve just done it like how I did with ‘Dreamtina.’’ I also wrote it when I was so sad, it feels a little darker than “Dreamtina.” And I think the experience of making it is all tied together, whereas with “Dreamtina,” I felt no pressure and really free, and with “Moth Mouth” I was trying to prove something and writing from a place of vengefulness and anger. Now, I just want to be light as a feather and have fun all the time.
Charlotte: Are you already imagining what your next album could look like?
Charlotte Rose: I want it to be fun and silly and less specific.
Charlotte: Tell me about your media diet. What are you reading, watching, listening to?
Charlotte Rose: Oh my god, it’s all junk right now. It’s really bad… I’m obsessed with the house “Summer House” on Bravo and, like everyone else, I’m watching “The White Lotus,” and I have two or three podcasts I tune in for every week. Musically, I’m more interested in discovering old stuff.
Charlotte: How has the way you consume culture changed since moving from Martha’s Vineyard to New York City?
Charlotte Rose: So much. I moved when I was 20, and I think you’re so absorbent at that age, no matter where you live. But my taste completely changed. I always felt that I needed to live here, and then when I did I was like, ‘I was right.’ The main thing that I didn’t get on Martha’s Vineyard was seeing people my age doing what they wanted to do, and seeing young people be in DIY bands. I didn’t know that was a thing, and when I moved here I saw it everywhere and it was so inspiring.
Charlotte: When it comes to your art direction and image, do you envision everything in one piece, or is it more a collage of ideas you collect over time?
Charlotte Rose: It’s probably a collage… I’ve only made two albums, but I go into them very intentionally with a sense of the visual vibe is going to be. With “Moth Mouth,” I had a lot of conversations and dinners with my friend Emma Craft about what we wanted it to look like, and then she took my ideas and consolidated them into a clear vision. She directed the “French Resistance” music video and did all of the cover art, and a bunch of press photos. Chloe Felopulous was the stylist for that, too, and they together took my thoughts and consolidated them.
Charlotte: What’s your favorite deep cut?
Charlotte Rose: I love Joni Mitchell and “Blue,” her most popular album, but I think the least popular song on that album is my favorite, “Last Time I Saw Richard.” It’s probably one of the most famous albums of all time, but it’s a conversation that she’s having with someone in a bar, and it’s so brilliant.
Charlotte: Party City is going out of business. Do you think parties will be less fun?
Charlotte Rose: Probably no, but that is so sad and I don’t know where people will go to get party supplies!
See Charlotte Rose Benjamin live with Sarah Kingsley:
April 8 — A&R Music Bar, Columbus, OH
April 9 — Turntable, Indianapolis, IN
April 10 — Vivarium, Milwaukee, WI
April 12 — The Waiting Room, Omaha, NE
April 13 — Amsterdam Bar & Hall, St. Paul, MN
April 15 — The Bottleneck, Lawrence, KS
April 16 — Old Rock House, St. Louis, MO
April 18 — Headliners Music Hall, Louisville, KY
April 20 — Jefferson Theater, Charlottesville, VA
April 21 — White Eagle Hall, Jersey City, NJ
May 10 — Night Club 101, New York, NY (Solo show)