Found in the Inbox: Phoebe Rea Finds Her Grandad in Everyday Life on “Meet Me There”

Phoebe Rea’s new single “Meet Me There” begins with a familiar kind of absence: the person who is gone keeps turning up in the way you live. Released today, October 23, the song is about her late grandad and the habits, curiosity and appetite for life that she still recognises as his influence. For the Oxfordshire-born singer-songwriter and pianist, remembering him has become a way of moving forward.

The release introduces a new chapter after her debut EP, Anybody Else?, and the first glimpse of an upcoming EP. Her earlier work explored perfectionism, co-dependence and self-sabotage. This project starts from a different impulse: what it means to acknowledge difficult feelings while making room for warmth and growth.

Finding someone in the everyday

In the account accompanying the release, Rea describes finding her grandad in good views, long walks and trips to exhibitions that begin with coffee and cake at the museum café. They are small rituals, but they carry a larger inheritance: the desire to go out, see the world and make something of the day.

“Getting to see him was like travelling home to myself,” she says in the release notes. His generosity, she explains, left pieces of him with the family. The song gives those pieces a place to gather, allowing grief to become a celebration of what remains in other people.

That movement took time. Rea says she initially downplayed the loss because losing a grandparent felt inevitable. Writing “Meet Me There” helped her recognise how deeply it had shaped the previous three years. The story does not depend on a dramatic turning point; it comes from finally giving an ordinary, lasting grief the attention it deserves.

A project growing towards the light

The idea behind the new project is phototropism: the way plants respond to and grow towards light. Rea connects that image to a change in her writing, following the darker subjects she explored in her earlier twenties. The metaphor offers a useful way into this single. Growth can include the people and experiences that formed you, even as the direction changes.

The supplied release describes “Meet Me There” as a piano-led meeting of nu-jazz and art-pop, with delicate harmonies, layered instrumentation and a shifting arrangement. Those musical reference points sit naturally within Rea’s background as a keys player and her emphasis on live musicianship.

From Oxfordshire to London’s jazz community

Classically trained in piano and violin, Rea studied at the BRIT School and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her biography traces an important part of her development to the collaborators she found through London’s jazz scene, alongside a songwriting practice concerned with identity, self-worth, relationships and growth.

Her live history includes Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, Pizza Express Live and Truck Festival 2025. With “Meet Me There,” the next part of that story arrives through a particularly personal subject: how someone’s example can keep expanding your world after their death. The single is available now, with more music from the forthcoming EP to follow.

Photo: Tessa Libby (@tessa.libby). Image supplied by LPR Agency and used with permission.