On Caitlin Rose's first album in 9 years, she's wistful, wiser and having fun again
A dozen or so years ago, the title track of Caitlin Rose's debut album Own Side Now found her torn between craving company and resolving to follow her own whims. "Who's gonna take me home?" she fretted with crystalline melancholy. " 'Cause I don't wanna go it alone." But solitude was exactly what her protagonist seemed to be steeling herself for by the song's end: "I'm on my own side now."
That's also a fairly accurate summation of Rose's standing as an artist back in those days. Though her father was an industry exec and her mother a notable Music Row songwriter, she kept her musical ventures to herself in her teens. Toward the end of the 2000s, she emerged from the close-knit informality of Nashville's DIY circles with a grasp of sturdy, classic country, pop and soft-rock song structures alongside an affinity for the casual irreverence and obliqueness of anti-folk and indie rock. To her, there was nothing at all contradictory about swirling those sensibilities together.
"I'm not a serious person," Rose says by way of explanation at a neighborhood pub that she frequents in Nashville, on a mild enough November afternoon that she's removed the medical boot from her still-healing broken foot, "but I do take the craft really seriously."
Her artistic approach garnered international buzz, but had few analogues at the time, which meant that she was perpetually asked to explain what she was up to and where it fit. "It's not 'ahead of my time,' " she muses, "but 'early to the party,' maybe." Indie troubadour and the guitar duo , composed of Spencer, and registered with slightly more familiarity. Hell, Rose may have even helped prepare Nashville for the moment when would introduce her own brand of cool skepticism to country.
