“I’m wearing my Rosie T-shirt,” Bruno Mars says with his signature suave smile as Rosé laughs in disbelief. She, too, is wearing artist merchandise — only hers is a Bruno Mars T-shirt. “We weren’t planning this,” attests Bruno, to which Rosé adds with a playful sigh, “This is our life.”
Even over Zoom today from across the world, with Rosé in Seoul and Mars in Los Angeles, there’s a comfortable candor between the two collaborators and close friends — a relationship that Rosé, 28, likens to siblings, with Mars, 40, acting as a music industry mentor and older-brother figure to her. They first met at an Atlantic-arranged meeting at Mars’ L.A. studio in the summer of 2024, as the Blackpink superstar was preparing her solo debut album, and Mars remembers how she was immediately “hustling information” from him. As Rosé recalls, “I was trying to get the most out of the meeting because I thought it’d be our last — first and last meeting, forever. Like, ‘This is my moment, I need to get all the tips, all the help I can.’
“There was a lot that I was determined to learn about,” she says of embarking on her solo career, for which she signed with The Black Label for management in June 2024 and Atlantic Records for label services that September — and, in September 2025, with WME for worldwide representation for future releases and solo global touring. “I just remember feeling like a very curious soul as to what I would want to do on my own,” Rosé explains, “so it was a good opportunity for me to meet new people in this industry.”
Read the full Rosé cover story here.
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