Sophia Michaels
Sam DeRosa is taking the high road after a breakup. On Friday, as she released her EP The Good Parts, DeRosa premiered the music video for her song “After the Tears” with Rolling Stone.
The video follows the songwriter — who’s penned songs for Lovelytheband, Fitz and the Tantrums, and Dixie D’Amelio — in front of some nature-filled scenery as she heals from her past heartbreak and admits that she’s got “nothing but love” after a breakup.
“I wanted the video for ‘After The Tears Dry’ to look like it felt when I wrote it: like I went to a place and dealt with all of my stuff,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I worked through it. Forgave it. Took responsibility. And all that was left was the love and the memories.”
For DeRosa, her new project — which features previous singles “Friends with My Exes,” “The Good Parts,” and “All the Time” — deals with several breakups, including a “music business” one that forced her to take her career into her own hands.
“If you sit with it all long enough, you connect the dots, and it makes sense; you start to feel thankful,” she says. “You can’t heal things fully until you feel them. Ultimately, I think that’s where I am. I am who and where I am because of everything that happened to me. Good and bad. This EP is about my getting to that journey.”
The project follows her 2020 EP The Medicine, which featured “Pill for This,” the song she performed while competing on NBC’s Songland, the former competition show focused on prolific songwriters led by Shane McAnally.
“The Medicine was about creating my own closure after heartbreak. When my uncle died of COVID, it started to mean even more than just a breakup. Heartbreak is universal. It was about having to process and deal with it without ever getting a proper goodbye,” DeRosa says. “This [new] EP is the page turn. The next chapter. It’s about healing and moving forward. Setting boundaries and rules for yourself, but ultimately letting go for your own sanity.”
The old EP even featured an unplanned easter egg for the name of her new project since her song “The Medicine” includes the lyric, “Maybe it isn’t right, how you left, though I’ve kept all the good parts, I’m still kind of haunted.”
“A fan messaged me and called it a ‘Taylor Swift moment,’ DeRosa says. “I was honored!”
