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.”