Spend five minutes speaking with Anna Rose and you’re bound to be charmed. Spend thirty minutes speaking with Anna Rose and you’ll be convinced that you’re speaking with a future rock-and-roll star.

You might be able to glean her potential simply from listening to her magical self-titled EP, a five-song collection of tracks that will also appear on Nomad, her debut album, which will hit store shelves in 2010, but in speaking with her, as Groovevolt.com did during a recent interview, it is clear that Rose is a hard-working artist who just happens to be blessed with a beautiful voice.

The first thing that strikes you when you speak with Anna is her humbleness. She speaks about the members of her band in glowing terms, explaining that she worried about being “slightly intimidated” by a group of musicians who  she thought wouldn’t want to work with her because she was not classically trained.

Though not classically-trained, the 24-year-old Rose has been working on this album since she was 15. “The songs had a long time to develop,” she said. She spent a long time gigging in Los Angeles, until she “got what I wanted from the songs.” And while she arranged the songs herself, it was “important for the band to have a say” in the recording and arranging process. According to Rose, the album took about a year to complete, but the tracking process was “easy.”

Rose wrote many songs over the years, and only a minority of them made the final track listing for Nomad. “These came forth as the frontrunners,” she explained. She also learned to play the piano at a young age and after learning “a G-chord” from her cousin, studied the guitar with celebrated guitarist Arlen Roth.

Now that the album is done, Rose admits to being “very much emotionally done with the songs…. It’s so nice that it’s finished.” Having lived with the tracks for the better part of a decade, her feelings are understandable.

That said, Rose said that she very much enjoyed playing the tracks in concert and hadn’t tired of them. “We rework them a bit [when playing live],” she explained. One thing that she is doing in the live setting is not playing the guitar, as she did when she recorded some tracks for the album, which “makes the experience different. Being able to just sing allows me to tell the story to someone. It’s a different way of performing.”

Though Rose has not yet released her first album, she is already working on her next release. Having spent as long as she did with the first set of songs – some of which ended up on Nomad – she is writing “songs that call to me.”

Rose’s ability to write strong songs can be attributed partially to the fact that she was exposed to the arts at a young age — her mother was a ballet dancer and her father is legendary composer Alan Menken – and “there was nothing else I wanted to do. My dad works harder than anyone I know” and he continues to drive her. She described a recent competition between her and her father where each had to write a song.

Her drive is also evident in the fact that Rose not only recorded her first album independently, but she also has established a production company in the hopes of releasing both her music and music from other new artists.

After speaking with her, you believe that she will be a force in all aspects of the music industry. She fronts a talented band and is never overwhelmed – something that often happens with new artists. Bold and confident, personable and talented, Anna Rose is a star on the rise. Jump on the bandwagon now, because you’ll want to say you knew that she’d be a major industry player.