British singer-songwriter and producer Cosima has always existed beyond easy definition, and that’s exactly the point. Born in London, to a German mother and a father who claimed to be Cuban, Cosima blends soulful vocals with cinematic melancholy and lyrics that read like diary entries. Her music feels both expansive and close to the skin, stitched together by motion across cultures, memories, and sounds.

“I feel like my connection is more found in art,” the singer says. “That’s kind of my home that I take with me.” For Cosima, who founded her label, South of Heaven Records, to protect her creative autonomy, that home travels in the form of notebooks, melodies, and questions.

Growing up, Cosima was immersed in Cuban music. She studied artists like La Lupe and Celia Cruz, believing it was part of her inheritance. “My dad always told us we were Cuban,” she laughs. “He thought he was Cuban, or maybe he was just playing a role.” It wasn’t until later that she and her siblings discovered they were, in fact, Jamaican.

The pivot “We’re going with Jamaican now,” one brother declared, came with a mix of rupture and recognition. But it also clarified something deeper: that stories, even the invented ones, shape how we see ourselves. “It made me think a lot about how identity is built, what we cling to, what we inherit, and what we create.”

Cosima never gave up on her own voice. One of her earliest musical awakenings came in rural Germany, where she spent summers with her grandparents. With little else to do, she’d wander the countryside with headphones, immersed in sound. “It was quiet and isolating in a way that made me more aware of my inner world.” Her mother eventually arranged lessons with a local classical singing teacher. “That was the first time I understood my voice could do more than just mimic,” she says. “It changed everything.”

Now, her voice is so compelling that she could sing the dictionary and people would still listen. That power is palpable in her original track for Rosewood’s The Color of Places campaign. The playful song titled One Day You’ll Show Me Everything is a meditation on how identity and environment shape one another. It serves as the soundtrack to a short film in which she drifts through rooms, engaging with others as the space dissolves into color and light. “I wanted it to be a green screen for your imagination,” she says.

Listen to her song and you’ll hear shimmering soul production and the syncopated drums of Cuban rhythms. But above all, you’ll find it hard to pin down a single genre, a reflection that Cosima is not hesitant to claim. ”I took cues from Nina Simone’s raw urgency, Connie Francis’s Cuban ballads, and the haunting tension of Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear”. In doing so, the artist transforms soul by looking backward without getting stuck in the past. The result is a track that feels like both a lullaby and a letting go.

Speaking of movement, travel has never been about escape for Cosima, even if she once hoped it might be. “When I was younger, I thought if I moved away, all my baggage would disappear. But then I left, and I realized, oh. I’m the baggage,” she laughs.

Still, there’s clarity in claiming that baggage. “You can’t outrun yourself,” Cosima reflects. “But sometimes, returning to a place shows you how much you’ve changed.” She cites Werner Herzog’s “When you walk, you see”, likening the act of traveling to a quiet reshuffling of the familiar.” That philosophy runs through her work — music, visuals, direction. In The Color of Places, she’s less a performer than a presence, quietly piecing herself together across landscapes and textures.

When asked about the most colorful place she’s visited, Cosima pauses — Marrakesh or Istanbul? “The first drive from the airport in Marrakesh, I was overwhelmed,” she recalls. “It felt like walking into a dream I’d been having for years.” She’d long fantasized about Istanbul too, ever since watching Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge. “One of my favorite singers, Sezen Aksu, is in that film,” she says. “And when I was finally there, I got to perform one of her songs. That was surreal, like something closing, or opening.”

However, her latest work may also mark a quiet reclamation. It was Jamaica that struck her deepest. “There was music on the radio that made sense of things about my dad I never understood before.” She remembers hearing a Jamaican cover of a Barbra Streisand song — a strange but familiar echo. “That’s where the connection was.” One afternoon on a Jamaican beach seeded the idea for her last project The Fun is Here?. “It’s very Gidget, very ’50s beach girl, but emotionally loaded,” she says, smiling.

In recent years, Cosima has quietly become a favorite in fashion circles. She performed a Sinead O’Connor cover for Valentino and sang at the Italian luxury brand‘s couture show in Venice. “Fashion has given me another lens, but it hasn’t changed my core,” Cosima says. Whether dressed in couture or wrapped in silence, she remains deeply committed to vulnerability and voice.

As a second-generation Jamaican Brit, Cosima didn’t grow up listening to Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira, but found her through a book. “Quincy Jones said she was one of the best singers in the world,” she recalls. “And I thought — who is this lady?” As a teenager with a deep voice, de Oliveira became a revelation. “No one celebrates girls with low voices when you’re young. But hers was so rich, so expressive. It made me feel less alone.”

That same feeling of turning loneliness into legacy still fuels Cosima’s songwriting. “When I’m working on my records, I tend to overthink everything,” she admits. “But this campaign taught me to let go. To trust the line as it comes.”

Now, as she begins writing her next album, she’s holding that lesson close.

“I still have doubts,” she says. “But maybe… a couple fewer.”