“After all the booze and tears and patience / I’m an overnight sensation / Thirteen years in the making,” sings Lily Rose in her newly released song “Overnight Sensation.” It’s an introspective, mid-tempo look into how just one song can change a singer-songwriter’s career on a dime — and that’s something Rose knows firsthand.
This time last year, Rose was an aspiring musician who worked a rotation of odd jobs to help fuel her dreams of making it in the country music business. In the fall of 2020, she decided to try her hand at the TikTok app, and began to amass a fanbase as she posted a series of videos of herself performing. One day, she posted a song called “Villain,” and, in under a week, the clip raked in 4 million views and 2,000 shares on TikTok.
Rose then independently released ”Villain” on Dec. 15, and the song swiftly proved that it could dominate on streaming services, too: “Villain” debuted at the top of iTunes’ all-genre and country charts, even surpassing Taylor Swift and Mariah Carey in the process.
True to her new song’s lyrics, all at once, Rose became an “Overnight Sensation,” after years and years of working hard to gain traction in the music business. But while the song is certainly autobiographical, she actually wrote it before her breakout success, according to American Songwriter.
“I write down everything that pops in my mind,” Rose explains of her songwriting process, saying that she’d had the phrase “Overnight sensation / Thirteen years in the making” written in her phone for nearly three years prior to pulling it out for a co-writing session with Morgan Brock, Lauren Hungate and Matt Morrisey in September 2019, over a year before becoming an “overnight sensation” herself.
That doesn’t take away from the emotion she associates with “Overnight Sensation,” Rose goes on to say, telling American Songwriter that the song’s earnest, big-hearted storytelling style gave her a chance to lean “as country as [she’ll] probably ever be.”
“When I sit in Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora playlist meetings, and I get to play them this song, I cry every single time,” she admits. “It’s such a polarization from the day I wrote it to my day-to-day now. I hope 20 years down the line, I still have that feeling of overwhelming humility about it all.”
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