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Sam DeRosa has an impostor account on TikTok—pretty sus, but understandable that someone would want to be her. The singer-songwriter has some *major* creds to her name, including writing on Dixie D’Amelio’s smash hit, “Be Happy,” and lovelytheband’s “broken,” which broke the record for being the longest-charting track on the Alternative Rock charts.

And her resume as a singer is climbing fast, too. DeRosa is on the pilot episode of Songland, where she performed her song “Pill For This” in front of Charlie Puth (who was her college classmate IRL). Though she wasn’t selected as the season’s winner, she went on to record the track as a single—and it will soon appear on her EP The Medicine, which is set to drop this month. 

Though DeRosa has a lot to look forward to, she is living the quarantine lifestyle just like the rest of us and doing her best to stay motivated while she works from home.

“I feel that I have those days where I think this is only happening to me,” DeRosa confesses. “I think everyone goes through that. And then I snap out of it real quick and remind myself that there's a lot more going on in the world than what I'm going through my day-to-day. I have been just trying to stay busy, stay inspired even though I'm home.”

And inspiration always seems to find her. DeRosa is spending her weeks splitting time between writing for herself and writing for other artists, much like she did for Dixie. When she was younger, though, she didn’t even realize that songwriting could be anything more than a hobby or backup plan.

But she always knew she wanted to be part of that world, coming from an overtly musical family, and that was enough to drive DeRosa into the path that became a life of artistry.

“I don't think I ever really figured out that songwriting was a career,” DeRosa said. “I thought that everybody who was a songwriter was an artist who maybe didn't make it or changed their mind and gave their songs away. I didn't understand that it was an actual career path. And then when I started really trying to push, I always wanted to sing my own songs. From the get-go, I knew that I wanted to do that.”

Now, DeRosa has the best of both worlds. Not only did she make a career out of writing, but she was able to pen songs for herself while also creating for other musicians. The way she writes a song varies; sometimes, DeRosa writes a song to pitch an artist, and for others, she finds a narrative she can’t wait to tell on her own.

In the case of “Be Happy,” the inspiration came about a little differently than the stories behind other tracks she has written—and it was long before Dixie brought her voice into the mix.

It began at TJMaxx in 2017. DeRosa, a self-declared “Maxxinista,” was shopping at the store after a “horrible week” when she saw a sign that said simply, “Be happy.” But DeRosa asked the question: What if I don’t want to be? 

“I saw this little 'Be Happy' thing kind of pointing fingers at me, and I was like, ‘Okay, I hate you today. So, I remember specifically getting really mad, [making a] nasty phone call, crying to my mom. What was I doing? I flipped the sign down, and I just said, ‘I just don't want to be happy.’ I said it out loud to myself. I do that a lot. I have my own little TED talks in my apartment with myself. And I was like, ‘I just don't want to be happy today.’ And I remember putting it in my phone.” 

The sign lives in DeRosa’s bathroom now, and the idea, after being shelved in a “Dropbox graveyard” for years, exploded in 2020 when Dixie revamped and recorded the sure-to-be hit.

According to DeRosa, Dixie was sent a number of songs after posting a video of herself singing; luckily, “Be Happy,” which DeRosa shares credits on with Billy Mann and Christian Medice, is the one that stuck.

Though the pandemic prevented DeRosa and Dixie from meeting IRL, it didn’t stop the two from connecting in another super sweet way.

“I got this cute little video from her in the recording studio,” DeRosa said. “She's like, ‘Hi, Sam, thank you for the song!’ And I was like, ‘I love you.’ I just think it's so crazy how the song has just done what it's done, because they have such a platform and they're using it for such good. I never imagined that song would reach as many people as it did.”

Now that the song is taking over, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Triller U.S. and Top Triller Global charts as well as editorial playlists like Spotify’s Pop Rising, the songstress can take a moment to work on some music of her own (though she never really stopped).

Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Jon Bellion are among DeRosa’s dream collaborators, but her standalone singles have proven to be faves, such as her latest from The Medicine EP, “Sad Faces," which touches on the cyclical effects of battling poor mental health, and "Pill For This" as seen on Songland.

Even before she found success in the music industry, DeRosa was genuinely just happy to be here. But with her history of hits as artist and writer, it's clear that she is here to stay.

“I feel like now, being in this position where I'm an artist and I'm signed to a label, that's the dream,” DeRosa said. “It's so cool to have success as a songwriter because I can only hope that it'll help on this next chapter that I'm on, because I'm going to continue that same chapter, too. But seeing what Blackbear can do when your voice is on a song…seeing what Dixie did, I’m kind of just hoping I’ll have that same luck.”

by Logan Potter | 11/1/2020