Life & Work with Janus Rose of Los Angeles

Today we’d like to introduce you to Janus Rose.

Hi Janus, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
It all started when I discovered that rock bands could be comprised of all girls when I was twelve years old; I knew immediately that music would be my future. Funny enough, the instrument that I wanted to play first is the one I still don’t play – my dream of being a drummer I can credit entirely to Josh Dun of Twenty One Pilots and Nia Lovelis, who was the drummer of the all-girl rock band Cherri Bomb and later Hey Violet. However, my parents were less than thrilled about their twelve-year-old kid wanting to put a drum set in their house, so it wasn’t until about a year later that I discovered the stage presence and work of Frank Iero that I had my sights set on my next endeavor – becoming a guitarist. With a couple of friends, including the one who’d introduced me to My Chemical Romance, I became the guitarist of my first ever band. This was a position I actually happened to claim before I owned a guitar! Thankfully, that fall I scraped together all the dollar bills that fourteen-year-old me owned and bought myself my first electric guitar, which I played for a good two months before I even got an amp to complete my setup.

Ironically, I wasn’t a fan of “heavier” music until months after I started playing guitar (and bass, which I began playing the spring after I bought my guitar). I was introduced to the world of metal through Evanescence and Lacuna Coil, and I took those six strings as low as they would go in order to play my new favorite songs. It wasn’t professional by any means, but I loved what I was doing, and that’s all that mattered to me. I began to focus on improving my vocals when I was in my sophomore year of high school, including learning to scream shortly after the pandemic started (and trust me, a celebration was had about that one). During the summer of 2020, I began listening to Korn and System of a Down, shifting my style of playing quite a bit and igniting the burning desire for a seven-string guitar. I began posting guitar and bass covers on a new Instagram account I’d made to find friends that liked similar bands, and it worked like a charm.

It didn’t occur to me until around this time that I could pursue a project of my own. Up until this point, I’d just been content learning songs by my favorite bands, but I hadn’t even thought of making my own music since my brief middle school rock band era. As a novel writer, I found it much easier to come up with the concepts of a theoretical personal project than writing the music itself, but I trusted that it would come with time and patience. As high school came to an end and I launched into an uncertain era of my life, I leaned heavily on music to get me through. Perhaps the work of Paramore was the most important to me at this point in time; Hayley Williams’ writing has been some of my favorite since I was five years old, and I find it most fitting that she is one of my favorite musicians to this day. I often credit her and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante as the biggest songwriting and vocal inspirations for me, as they have both taught me a lot in both departments. They make up half of my self-proclaimed “inspiration quartet,” joined by Frank Iero, whose solo projects I draw from quite a lot, and Anthony Green, who is a part of a handful of different projects and is seemingly always a creative machine for each of them. A couple of my other notable inspirations from over the years up until now are Doll Skin, Knocked Loose, Halsey, Dying Wish, Jinjer, and Meet Me at the Altar.

However, drawing from so many different musicians in drastically different genres poses quite the challenge for someone that wants to incorporate every element of them. I’d say that’s been the most difficult part of writing my own music – do I want to write melodic post hardcore guitars? Do I want to rip some crazy low screams a la Courtney LaPlante? What about sitting in front of a microphone with just my voice and an acoustic guitar in the style of Hayley Williams and Anthony Green? So far my route seems to be creating instrumentals and putting my own spin on covers, but despite my itch to create in a vast number of genres, I remind myself of what led me to learn my musical abilities in the first place – patience. There is so much I have yet to create in my future as a musician, and I’m thrilled to experience each piece of it. I also believe there’s something to be said about my thankfulness for having that challenge in front of me, since it means to me that my creative work is only just beginning.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There are definitely certain aspects that have been more challenging than others. Me playing music has always been fueled purely by my passion for it, but writing music has always been the most difficult for me. Not only is that due to drawing from so many genres, as I mentioned, but as a creator of several mediums, I’m overly self-critical, and a great deal of what I create never sees the light of day. I often have a specific vision of what I want a song to sound like, and it’s easy for me to become discouraged when it doesn’t match my exact vision. I’ve also pushed myself to be as independent as I can – producing my own music, playing every instrument, writing everything, all of it. I still believe that that’s something I am capable of, but there is still so much more to learn, especially as far as producing goes. I’d say overall my biggest challenge is creating something and letting it be what it is, instead of criticizing it and throwing it out just because it doesn’t fit the vision. After all, if I want to create different types of projects, there will naturally be different visions for each of them.

I’m also a university student with several more years of schooling in front of me, and finding time to engage in music whilst not having much time to do so is hard on me – living away from home means I don’t have all my instruments with me, and because I share a room I’ve got to keep the volume much lower than I would at home. While the arrangement is only temporary and I’ll be back home in the summers to play and sing to my heart’s content, I wish I had more time and space for it here. For now, though, it’s me, a midi keyboard, and my seven-string guitar against the world!

Lastly, I struggled with a pretty strong creative block for the better part of two years, and it wasn’t until later in 2025 that I felt I truly got back my creative identity. The well of ideas is full again, and it’s up to me to take advantage of that, in whatever form that takes.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’ve now been playing guitar for seven and a half years, bass for seven, and I’ve been doing vocals for about six. Given the amount of time I’ve dedicated to them over the past two years especially, guitar and vocals are my forte, and I can most easily see myself fronting a metalcore band or playing guitar in a post hardcore band. I think the acoustic guitar songwriting style of music is one that I don’t give enough attention to, as that’s what I’ve done the most of, at least as far as original music goes. I’ve been slowly assembling all the pieces to form my dream solo project – whose name I won’t yet reveal – and that includes crafting riffs, writing poems that I work into lyrics, and creating an ambient soundscape through my favorite guitar plugin. I’d say I’m most known for my guitar covers, which I’ve been posting for more than five years now. I used to record them by playing the song I was covering through a speaker in the background and recording using my phone while playing over it through my amp. Now I use a DAW and can edit the whole thing together in a mix that’s much more balanced, but the spirit of that girl playing songs to her iPhone camera still lives within me.

Above that, though, what I’m most proud of is being “one of the first” in the genres that I play. Women in metal are not numerous as it is, and the number of black queer women in metal are even fewer than that. Growing up in a predominantly white area of California, I didn’t know many people who looked like me, let alone those who had the same interests that I did. Seeing black women in spaces that it wasn’t common to see us in fueled my inspiration since I was a kid, even outside of music. Diamond Rowe of Tetrarch only as of 2024 being the first African American woman to have a signature guitar was a bit of a wake-up call for me, and I feel like I have a responsibility to push myself to step onto the big stage to inspire the next generation black women who want to enter the scene as well. Knowing how important it was to have those people to look up to, I want to be able to give back, in a way, because seeing me playing guitar or fronting a band onstage may be someone’s realization of “you know what? I think I can do that too.” Music helps foster amazing communities, and as someone who’s met so many amazing people through music, it changes lives.

What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
The characteristics that have gotten me as far as I am now have been patience and passion. The passion to create has always been strong within me, but reminding myself to stay patient while my projects are still a work in progress is the other side of the equation that I must be mindful of. The patience that I’ve had so far is a testimony to how much I’ve already pushed myself to create, and with the number of creative resources and outlets I have on my hands, the next steps in my music journey feel all the more promising.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedziamara
• Other: https://www.bandlab.com/thedziamara

Image Credits
All photos taken by me.