Mary Cole Mello
In 2001, Siena Rose Facciolo entered Montpelier’s Union Elementary School as a kindergartener. This was also the year she began piano lessons and sang a solo, “The Marvelous Toy,” during a school performance (in front of a packed auditorium). She began composing her own music a few years later. Now she’s 30, and she’s promoting her latest album, “Yin.”
“I was 11 when I started recording piano improvisations on a little voice recorder my mom got me,” she says. At the age of 13 she wrote her first song, “Morning.”
Since those early days, the Montpelier native has taught piano lessons at the Sonatina School International Piano Camp in Bennington, Vermont; attended McGill University and then the University of Rochester, where she studied music theory and musicology; performed in living rooms, coffeehouses, and theaters; and has released two albums. Her first, “Dear House,” came out in 2018. She released her second, “Yin,” in the fall of 2025.
She’s currently based in Baltimore and goes by the name Siena Rose.
Reviewer Olivia Sieck writes: “The best way to describe (Rose’s) voice is Janis Joplin meets Amy Winehouse.” She’s also been compared with the artist Fiona Apple. Like Apple, her music might be described as “baroque rock.” Rose notes that the term references both her classical training as well as “the raw edgy sound I bring to my music.”
The name of Rose’s second album is related to the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, the symbols that represent opposing but complementary forces that exist in harmony, such as dark/light, sun/moon, heat/cold.
When reviewing “Yin,” Rochester’s City magazine noted that “balanced emotional highs and lows are the overarching theme of the album.” To the ancients, Yin represented “female” qualities: darkness, passivity, and receptivity. Rose, however, sees darkness as “an incubator … We need to go underground so we’ll have the space, the opportunity … the resources to grow.” Rose says that when getting ready to compose, she sometimes turns off the lights and lies still in the darkness of the room.
“Yin” touches on a wide range of experiences and emotions, beginning with the piece “Blue,” in which Rose dreams of a relationship unbound by society’s limits, with lyrics such as “Meet me in the chances never taken … In the aches we never speak of.”
All the vocals, piano, words, and music in the collection are from Rose with one exception, a version of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” inspired by Nina Simone’s adaptation and that showcases Rose’s impressive vocal powers.
In the last stanza, she changes many of the pronouns from “you” to the more empowering “I.” “You take it like a woman,” becomes, “I take it like a woman,” emphasizing that women both cry and break down and are powerful and strong.
The song “(come back in)” may be the most meaningful in this collection.
“It’s really emotional for me,” Rose says. “ I wrote that song for my mom on Mother’s Day 2013, the year I graduated from high school. In it she tells of her mother’s presence in her life from her first memories on. “Tuck me in and turn out the light/ pull the blanket to my chin/ snuggle into the night/ but there’s something else, I gotta say/ Oh, Mom, come back in/ Oh, I gotta question.”
Then, there’s the fifth track, “Overheard in Cafeteria About a Father.” “I was in college sitting at a table eating my lunch,” Rose says. “Two women were talking, one telling about her son’s relationship with his father. I took out my phone and began taking it down … it was poetry.” When Rose paraphrased the dialogue, she made it rhyme: “There’s nothing you can teach me/ Now I can leave you/ I can finally be free.” The song resonated with Rose because she’s also experienced difficult relationships although not, she notes, with her own father.
Like her first album, “Yin” was recorded in one take before a live audience, but Rose has come a long way since she released “Dear House.” At that time, she says, “I had a lot of fear about being perfect … about people liking my songs … I’ve worked hard, using therapy, yoga, practicing acceptance, gratitude, and non-judgement.”
Now Rose feels more like her authentic self when performing, she says. In her blog, she tells readers, “When I step in front of a microphone, I unfold.”
She laughs when asked about her most ambitious dream. “I want to collaborate with other musicians to create fine-tuned arrangements and to perform the music in a large concert hall!”
“… with a Steinway.” she adds.
The author, Mary Cole Mello, was Siena Rose’s kindergarten teacher at Union Elementary School in Montpelier.
