On the Rise
Essy Sparrow

But look to the locals, and they’ll demystify this idyllic image. There are so many everyday stories to be told that transcend the idea of coastal spaces solely holding up as “the place to get away from it all”, and singer-songwriter Essy Sparrow has taken on the task of telling them with her second EP, Gossip From A Coastal Town.

The postcard version of Cornwall depicts a quaint stillness, but the image that Sparrow articulates hums with communal noise: pub chatter, harbour gossip, and rumours that circulate for years — indelibly cemented as local lore. "It's harmless, and there's also something kind of nostalgic about small towns, especially coastal towns," Sparrow says, beginning to trace that feeling back further than her own lifetime. "There's so much history of Victorian tourism, and Cornwall in particular has this history of artists coming here to paint and being inspired by the landscape. There's something really yearning about the environment that churns up emotions in you as well."

Raised on a rural commune as the daughter of a priest, much of Sparrow’s early exposure to music came from church choirs. She recalls the choirs being a prominent fixture, but notes that they existed alongside a more eclectic and immersive sound palette within her home growing up.

“My earliest memory is just how immersive it was,” she tells me. “Walking into the house at Christmas and my parents would have James Taylor and Amy Grant’s music on, and it would just feel like Christmas. I could smell cinnamon candles, but the music added to it. I remember the experiences; it all comes back, and I think of them as some of my earliest memories.”

Dancing between choir music and acoustic music, Sparrow would eventually find herself drawn to film soundtracks — a perfect combination of the intricate songwriting and harmonic theatricality that formed her earliest musical foundations. “When I really think back to the music that got me feeling stuff, it was soundtracks to films,” she says. “I feel like people do say that a lot, but I think of You’ve Got Mail, and rom-coms, and how the soundtracks build the story and give you a clear sense of place.”

Eventually, Sparrow would begin to tap into her own creative outlets. At the time, her family didn’t have money for music lessons, but her mother found a way to make it work. “She had a clarinet from when she was young, and she sold that so I could get cello lessons, which is really nice,” Sparrow says. “I had six weeks of lessons. Being on the commune, there was a lot of creativity, and I developed a real sense of it across the board.”

With only eighty people living and working on the commune, most being over eighteen while she was thirteen, Sparrow allowed that creativity to flow through her as visual art. “I would just go home, put on the Disney Channel, and paint,” Sparrow recalls. “I think that really developed a sense of creativity that felt more instinctive.”

Finding herself more drawn toward indie folk as she entered her teenage years, With no phone signal and time on her hands, Sparrow began watching videos of Laura Marling on the internet. Inspired, though, without formal lessons, Sparrow went on to teach herself guitar. And while she was self-led, she also began to realise that she didn’t necessarily fit within the lines of the folk singer-songwriter persona.

“I noticed that I didn’t feel represented by their personalities,” Sparrow admits. “I loved the music, but I’d go in and be like, they're so comfortable being quiet and staring into the middle distance, and I love performing. I didn't feel like my musical talent fit anywhere. I love indie folk as a genre, but I'm too big as a type of person." But rather than digesting this as a disadvantage, Sparrow was pushed further into accepting her musical identity for what it was."My journey has really been realising that that's a lovely thing, not a negative one. I don't have to fit into that box."

Sparrow’s journey would take her out of the South West and for a detour through London, where she spent a decade running cafes and working multiple jobs just to make rent. "It was a huge adaptation, coming from a rural commune life to living in the city," she says, though she notes that this was a choice with an expiration date."I really just wanted to live there till I felt like I was done. I didn't want to leave and feel like I was escaping. I'd go back on holiday to Cornwall and feel so at peace, but I wanted to learn to be at peace somewhere different." The city ultimately gave her plenty in the way of experience, but very little in the way of room to create. “I struggled to be creative. Working three jobs to pay rent, my well was dry.”

"I'd grown up in quite a specific way, and then I came into a very different world of the city, and I just spent a lot of time unpicking what was me and what was my upbringing," she continues. "I didn't feel like it was a place to write from. I wanted to figure that out privately.”

When Sparrow returned to Cornwall in 2024, it felt like perfect timing. The creativity that she struggled to tap into in London was gradually opening up, and she was able to fully lean into this with the comfort of home. "I started doing open mics just as I left London, and started to feel like I could sing in front of people again, even though I was shaking physically," she recalls. "And then I moved to Cornwall, and started going to open mics here, and it was just like a spark lit. I felt really safe to be imperfect, and that opened up a well of creativity for me." She set herself a simple rule and held to it: open mic every week, "until my hands stop shaking”. Soon, the songs started arriving at the same pace.

That same year, Sparrow released her debut EP, Still Upset About It Actually. The lead single "Artists Dreamers" unexpectedly went viral on TikTok, hitting over two million views and giving Sparrow her first real indication of what people were connecting with in her writing. "I really noticed the honesty was cutting through, and the storytelling was cutting through.

Something people really loved about it was the gossip behind it, the specific place names in the song," she tells me. “That's so interesting, I thought, cool, let's write an EP about gossip. Let's crowdsource gossip from my friends' lives, from my small town, from my own life, and have that all mixed up into one.”

This became the entire premise for Gossip From A Coastal Town. However, rather than approaching gossip as a taboo, she refers to it as a genuinely underused songwriting form. "I wanted it to sound like when something happens and you're talking to your friend, and you do a voice for the baddie and a voice for yourself as the goodie. It's one-sided, and I wanted to give myself permission to lean into that," she explains. “I often get questions about how true certain things are, and I'm like, well, how true is anything? When you're telling your friend what happened at work, it's all your side. You exaggerate things to make people laugh, to keep the narrative going, and that's what this gave me permission to do.”

Although immersion and creating a sense of place is something that resonated with Sparrow in art that she consumed early on, it’s something that came to define the EP after the songs were written. ”When I met with my producer CJ, I had a massive brief deck. I had an old newspaper with a coastal town on it, I was like, this is the coastal element, I don't know if we can do it. And he was like, ‘Yeah, we can do it’," she says. Each track was then mapped onto a specific location.

In turn, the locations shaped the soundscapes. There are field recordings of the harbour, a local sea shanty band on backing vocals, and seagulls that intervene mid-verse, ensuring that the coastal terrain is embedded thoroughly within the songs. Sweet, jaunty lead single "Weddings and Funerals" is mapped to the church in town, tracing back to an actual walk with her friend Fran, who now performs as one of her backing dancers. "I said, ‘I know I'm really fun at a wedding, but I just feel like they want to wheel me out for weddings and funerals’, and Fran and my partner were like, 'That would make quite a good song," she recalls. While the track drew hate comments when it was released — some of them from people in her own town, saying that the song was mean — Sparrow read the feedback as confirmation that she was on the right path with how she was using her voice.

"So much of culture right now is about being morally right — ‘Did she do everything right? Can we align with everything she aligns with? '," she muses. "It's interesting, the pressure on women to be moral guides through their art. It was fun to ask what the audience does when that's not the case, when I'm both the annoying part of it and the victim part of it. I loved seeing that reaction." This is said with candour, as Sparrow adds, ”How cool, to give people the chance to creatively react to your music instead of just reacting to it.”

Second single "Vinyl Spinning" found its way onto Gossip From A Coastal Town a little bit differently. The song first started as a poem written as Sparrow looked out over the Cornish coast, but she later reworked it into a song. Where "Weddings and Funerals" leans into gossip and mischief, "Vinyl Spinning" sits at the more reflective end of the EP. In her words, it’s about "embracing all you've ever loved and acknowledging how it has shaped you, even if you don't have it in your life now." It's a small shift in tone across the record, but impactful evidence that the concept was never meant to be one-note. Gossip, as Sparrow moulds it, can stretch to cover both the petty moments and the tender reflections.

As someone who still maintains a regular daily life, holding down a freelance career in social media management alongside the music, Sparrow is perfectly placed to uphold this delicate balance and track her observations with groundedness and care. “I've built a career that's quite niche, and that means I can have a flexible freelance life around my music," she tells me.

"I played Boardmasters a few weeks ago, and then the next morning I was in a local shop filming a client's pottery. It really took me back to earth. It grounded my feet, reminded me that everybody makes art in different ways, and music is beautiful, but it's not the only thing." What she's building, as she describes it, is less about hustle than about sustainability. "I'm trying to build a life that feels peaceful. It’s very hard to make art when you're stressed.”

Giving herself greater flexibility has also allowed Sparrow to fully embrace the moments in which she’s validated as a professional artist versus a hobbyist, which she specifically traces back to quitting her full-time job last year and playing a BBC Introducing showcase the following day.

"Seeing my name on an artist label on the badge, I still have it hanging in my car," she smiles. For most of her twenties, she assumed that "artist" was a category reserved for other, more established people. "I felt like that was something for people who were serious, who had lessons, who were born artists. And I had to realise, you don't come out the womb an artist, you do the things that you want to do." As Sparrow would reveal to me, it was her father's terminal cancer diagnosis that pushed her resolve further, adding a greater weight to the decision to honour her agency. "There's something about how that puts your life into perspective, and you're like, ‘Why would I not do the things I love?’ If you can go and play on a stage and have fun, you should do that.”

However, the taste of imposter syndrome can still linger for Sparrow despite her commitment to move forward with her passions in earnest. To remedy that discouraging voice, she has developed her own small ritual. She tells me that she’s given her inner critic a name, and will address it directly when necessary. "My inner critic would be like, ' Who do you think you are? You're in Cornwall, you're never going to be as good as anyone else who lives anywhere else’,” she admits. "But I had to realise your inner critic just gets louder when you're stretching out of your comfort zone, and it's barely ever an indication of truth. I gave it a name. This is Alice, and Alice sometimes says some quite harsh things. I write her a cease and desist, and I go through all of her points.”

To instill such a ritual seems aligned with Sparrow’s ability to make the most out of whatever a situation may present to her, and to persist despite perceived or imposed limitations — a trait that appears to have been nurtured throughout her life. From relying on self-teaching, to juggling multiple jobs that left her creative world dormant, the “artist” label was constantly just within reach. However, her ability to observe the world around her and turn years of murmurs within a small-town grapevine is enough to deflect her doubt. The postcard version of Cornwall may be glossy with the sheen of peace and quiet, but Sparrow has found something much greater in her real, noisier interpretation.

"Alice says I'm not good enough because I live in Cornwall," Sparrow says, before offering a confident retort: "Well, actually, Alice, that feels like a really important part of who I am."