Caroline Becomes a Mom, or: How to Reinvent Yourself Completely
One of the biggest regrets of my music review “career” is missing out on Caroline Rose’s first album pivot to pop-rock. With their dry sarcasm backed by bouncing new wave rhythms and retro synths—even in a year with Mitski, Idles, and Janelle Monae—it would have easily become my pick for album of the year, and has since become one of my favorite albums of all time.
LONER
Caroline Rose
Indie Rock | 2018
Nearly ten years ago, Caroline Rose was finished with country. The industry of that genre had worn them down to a point of total apathy, and nearly ended Rose’s love of music. In part, this was due to the landscape of country shifting ever-closer to click-track pop with hints of twang and steel guitars, focused more on broad generalizations of homey nostalgia and “cool” parties than on the sound’s actual roots in mythic storytelling and cultural enlightenment. Gone were the days of Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash singing a song that is literally about doing so much cocaine that he shot his wife (fictionally, obviously). Now we had nebulous platitudes to corn, dirt roads, and a song literally about plastic cups.
However, their biggest drive was country’s lack of diversity and perspective. Caroline Rose has long identified as a queer woman who uses “they/them” pronouns, and to say that country basically forbade that sort of “liberal” thinking is underselling it. There was just no space for someone like Caroline to tell the stories they wanted to tell in a genre so restrictive that its power base once forced Billboard magazine to de-list a song by a gay, black man, despite that song being the most popular of 2019 by orders of magnitude.
So, Caroline decided to take their stories elsewhere. After nearly four years of writing, editing, rewriting, and testing, they found a sound that was equal parts timeless and novel. Hollow, spacey synthesizers that mimic those of the earliest electronic organs, 60’s-style pop guitars, a hint of honky-tonk bass and drums, and songwriting that uses the best of top 40 radio, combine with Caroline’s biting witticisms to create a totally new, totally rocking experience.
Those synths are the first sounds we hear from LONER, when “More Of The Same” opens to their stuttering chord progressions. Rose’s vocals then sound out, an obvious echo filter making the point that, here, they feel completely alone in their own mind, decrying the state of county music, American consumerism, and even the people around them. “I go to a friend of a friend’s party / Everyone’s well-dressed with a perfect body / And they all have alternative haircuts and straight, white teeth / But all I see is just more of the same thing,” Rose laments, immediately showing off her mordant worldview before we even get to the first chorus of the album. That chorus, delivered in a full belt, just below a scream as the synths morph into a reverbed orchestra and the guitars play in full wash, is perhaps Rose’s most personal on the entire album: “Just a little bit is more than I can recall,” they begin—our modern age has ruined our ability to engage in any sort of deep thought; “I’m never gonna figure it out / No, I’m never gonna try again / If all of this is just more of the same thing.” What’s the point of fighting the machine, when you can just leave?
“Cry!” begins with a looped synth-bass pattern that brings us more into the world of pop, the drums echoing its staccato and recalling the 60’s and 70’s blues rock that became so instrumental in morphing rock-and-roll into heavier and more varied offshoots. From here, we could go anywhere. But Rose uses this platform to exorcise the demons of objectification. “You silly thing / You’ll learn your place yet,” Rose sneers before demanding in the chorus that the subject cry, more in the insincere sense of “why don’t you run to your mom and cry about it,” than in one of healthy emotional release. “You’re just another little girl with a broken heart,” Rose mocks, while stunningly produced and mixed backing singers “oh, oh, oh” and a full band power-pops their way to a whirling gyre of distortion.
Perhaps the biggest signal that LONER is no country album is “Money,” a hyper, loud, surf punk rager that shows the full display of Caroline’s might. The song tilts back and forth between and ode to Dick Dale, and an homage to hardcore grunge, but always at full blast. Rose’s lyrics are blisteringly fast, delivering quip after quip to mortally wound the industry they now look into from the outside: “I did it for the money / You all did it for the money.” Their pace and noise never relent, even when the lyrics come so fast Caroline almost seems to trip over them: “Rah, rah, priestess / Join the army, do a dance / I didn’t do it for a thing, man / Other than the money.” Heads are banging in full metal mosh pit mode when Rose once again delivers the chorus at full throat, before pulling the rug out from everything with an overwhelmingly juvenalian “la la la la la la la la la,” that’s more hurtful than a thousand playground taunts.
The centerpiece of LONER’s pre-release promotion was the absolutely brilliant “Jeannie Becomes a Mom,” and rightly so. Those spacey sounds from “More Of The Same” return, only now in a positively upbeat dancehall motif, more akin to elevator muzak than anything one might call “popular.” A rolling, bass joins before the band explodes into a rich, full sound that will continue to back Rose’s tale of suburban ennui. Our main character, Jeannie, dreams of becoming a Leave It To Beaver-esque housewife with no worries and totally fulfilled. But such a life is rarely fulfilling, especially when it’s…more of the same. “The world don’t stop / Even when you’re living in color,” Rose croons over a din of synths and jazzy drum fills; Jeannie learns her lesson the hard way. Trapped in a wretched imitation of her original dream, Rose gleefully rubs it in, “No, the world don’t stop / Time is only gonna pass you by / Now you’re in real life.”
Caroline’s outlook takes a nose dive to the depths of bedrock on “Getting to Me,” a gorgeously produced track that eschews much of the synthesizer and mechanical elements of the album so far, in exchange for finger-picked guitars and violins. A gentle maraca tags along as Rose delivers their most intimate and heartbreaking message: “Line ‘em up / A single cell, another one gone / Ostracon vase with your name on the line only to say / Hey, I think this might be getting to me.” Rose’s nearly deadpan delivery of the verses—retellings of their daily routine at a diner filled with loners, and another witnessing a seemingly happy couple while wishing for the same type of relationship—is contrasted by the soaring heights of the chorus, with Caroline reaching both their highest and most delicate of registers. To voice this loneliness any louder would break them, it must remain a whisper on the wind to, hopefully, one day, be carried away.
“To Die Today” changes the mood of LONER in an instant. The gated steel guitar and drum machine turn to the sound into a kind of dread, evoking some dark corner of trip-hop or industrial EDM that we fear to tread. But Caroline is here to guide us, however unwillingly, to this end. Rose has described the song better than I can, saying “thinking about death, to me, helps me appreciate life.” “To Die Today,” is that thought, that if we dive very, very deep into death, that maybe we will actually appreciate life that much more. So, we must discuss those darkest of places: “Gonna know what it feels like to drown / My lungs fill up and make the liquid of a cloud,” Rose opines, describing how maybe that final release is lighter than we think. In other moments, Caroline’s view turns even more morbid, and frankly, violent. “I want more than just a kiss / I’m going to breathe you in until you cease to exist,” is delivered as a slithering whisper; maybe we cannot trust our guide after all. The transformation from simple peer-pressure to draconian cultism is an almost imperceptible one, as Rose now tries to convince us “to feel no pain,” today.
Fortunately, our time spent contemplating the big sleep is as fleeting on LONER as it is for a high school goth, as “Soul No. 5” picks the speed, mood, and snark back up to 11. A simple drum and guitar pattern serves as the perfect background for Caroline’s upbeat (heavily sarcastic) machismo, with self-confident lines like “I do a hair flip, I strut my stuff,” immediately stunted by “I don’t have a job, but I got a lot of time.” Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the way to go. Their chorus begins with “souped up, man, I’m ready to blow,” while more and more layers of cymbal crashes and “Centerfield”-like organs build up with the admission that not having it all doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it. Self-pity is out, dance-rock is in.
The surf-rock themes return on “Smile! AKA Schizodrift Jam 1 AKA Bikini Intro” while an increasingly number of disturbingly distorted voices and laughs tell Caroline (and women everywhere) to “just smile, baby,” returning to the message of “Cry!” Here, Rose adds layer after layer of voices in order to demonstrate just how obnoxious the sentiment of “why don’t you smile more,” is, especially when it’s constantly leveled at women, particularly in their industry. But at the same time, the presentation defangs that objectification, with its distortion of the voices (some Caroline’s, some her producer, Paul Butler’s, and some computer generated) making the sentence sound totally ridiculous. The voices are played over an uptempo rock number that was apparently a live show staple that never really got a name or recording prior to this. In recreating it, Caroline may actually…smile. But it’s also the perfect musical segue to…
“DANCE!” Rose yells over an almost circus-like synth line, “put on this bikini and dance, dance, dance.” “Bikini” is the riot grrrl feminist anthem we didn’t know we needed. It’s message—that being female-identifying in the music industry is horrendously objectifying and exploitative—is very much on-the-nose, but since subtlety clearly flies over the heads of studio executives and label men the world over, bopping them one is the only thing that’s going to work. The song is a brilliant combination of early-70’s bizarre, electronic piano psychedelia and headbanging punk. “Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it / And now give it to the world,” describes the predatory practices of the industry more succinctly than any that have tried before, and Rose’s closing shouts of “d-d-d-d-d-d-daaannnce!” are as much biting criticism as they are instructions to the listener. Just make sure to do it with your middle fingers up.
“Talk” is Caroline Rose’s “Redbone,” warning us to watch and be on guard for “them.” Given the environment in which the album was written: the depths of Orange Julius’ tyrannical administration that weaponized identity politics to entrench the elite behind an ever-widening chasm between those with and those without; it is not wildly inappropriate. Rose highlights the danger of letting “them” have and do whatever “they” want to benefit [insert incredibly nebulous mechanism of society that politicians actually have no control over, but will tell you they’ll “fix”] within the first few notes: “they’re coming for you / Waiting in the wings / Slither, preying on you / Vulture ready to eat.” But Rose then immediately deflates the paper tigers with the song’s repeated theme: “they’re all talk, talk, talk / There ain’t nothing up their sleeve.” Then, Caroline leaves us with the most prescient line of all: “don’t forget, guile knows how best to show its teeth.” Remember, those people scaring you into hating your fellow humans because of inconsequential differences, especially if they’re telling you they can fix it, are grifters, pure and simple.
Closer “Animal” is as close to a love song as Caroline Rose is willing to give us on LONER. Full of jealous rage they thought they were “over” after seeing an ex with someone new, the song has a garage-rock revival quality, punctuated, of course, by the now-signature hollow electronic organ punches. Combining the rock instrumentation of an AM-era Arctic Monkeys song with the dark sensuality of Timberlake’s FutureSexLoveSounds showcases Rose’s breadth of musical knowledge, while their lyrics—and their emotionally diverse delivery—proves Rose is ever the wordsmith. “It boils over in my mind / The heat from underneath their sheets pours out his eye,” Caroline pines, leaving us to wonder, are they jealous of the ex, or the new partner? Are Rose’s descriptions of the imaginary tryst meant to be fuel for the fire of anger, or the object of Rose’s own fantasies? There is nothing more cruel to a person’s emotional state than their own mind, and realizing you’re still in love with a person who has long since moved on? That is the unkindest cut of all.
With LONER, Caroline Rose not only proved they were more than capable of switching genres, writing a batch of inimitable songs, and delivering them with emotional maturity, but also that music is one hell of an exorcist. Demons of society and of self are purged in the cleansing fires of raucous rock. Exploring the depths of our darkest fears and exposing the dumbest of norms, Caroline Rose becomes our therapist just as much as LONER is their therapy.
In changing their musical direction, Caroline Rose was free to use their imagination how they saw fit: exaggerating the absurd, tearing down the unjust, and reveling in the little pleasures. During the darkest of times, I often turn to Rose’s LONER as a lighthouse. They may be experiencing and expressing the same anxieties we all have about our disorienting, destabilizing world, but Caroline Rose, and LONER, makes this reality just that much better.
