Three albums into his career, Conan Gray wrote what he calls his “first ever love song,” a lovelorn ballad titled “Alley Rose” fromFound Heaven. The 25-year-old musician had written about love before, but not from the perspective of having truly been put through the emotional wringer by way of a real, reciprocated relationship. On the latest episode of Rolling Stone‘s The Breakdown, Gray delves into how “Alley Rose” — written on his own and produced by Greg Kurstin — emerged as the one song on the album that details the aftermath of the crush he spent most of the record singing about.
“I don’t really write about things immediately after they happen,” Gray explains. “After I have enough perspective, then I start to write about situations in a way that’s more accurate to how I felt rather than just like, ‘Fuck you!’ It’s a lot more nuanced when I give myself time to write about something.”
Gray had written entire albums about crushes, unrequited feelings, and internal reflections before — his 2020 debut Kid Krow and 2022’s Superache — but he wasn’t prepared for the way heartbreak could bulldoze his process. “[“Alley Rose”] made it on the album very much at the very, very end, because I hadn’t really been planning on writing about a breakup until I got broken up with,” he says. “And then I was depressed for seven months and didn’t write and couldn’t work because I was severely ill.”
It was also complicated because the relationship that inspired the song wasn’t some kind of devastating emotional avalanche. Gray isn’t singing from a point of anger or resentment — it’s all love. “To me, ‘Alley Rose’ is my very first love song because there’s no point in the song where I’m accusing anyone of mistreating me or anything like that,” he says. “It’s not me pointing fingers like, ‘Fuck you, I hate you, never come back.’ The whole song is me begging this person to return. It’s me saying, ‘Hey, I loved you so much. You taught me so much about life, so much about love. Please just come back.'”
When Gray did begin crafting “Alley Rose,” he stuck with one melody to run throughout the entire song and used it as a chance to experiment more on the production. He details the “tricky” time changes that speed up the song in the bridge, Beethoven-inspired harmonies, and intricate vocal stacks.
Having gained some distance from the situation through his creative process, Gray saw the experience through an entirely new perspective. “I was falling in love for the first time ever, which created feelings in me that I had never felt before,” he added. “Basically, I felt like a completely different person, and I just needed to represent it in the music. Now that that’s over. I’m like, woah, what did I make? I look at this, and I’m like, damn, was it that serious? But I guess it was.”
“Alley Rose” was inspired, in title, by Abbey Road in London (where much of Gray’s whirlwind romance unfolded) and the narrowness of alleyways, which reflected the “little private spot in between the scenes of the rest of the world” that he existed in during that time. And the rose element was his own “fuck you” to the facade of romantic gestures: “Rose just made sense because rose is a symbol of love, but I think a very stupid symbol of love. Like who the fuck buys people roses?”
