The Art of Caroline Rose

It’s never been just about the music for Caroline Rose. A cursory glimpse at the album covers of LONER and Superstar—which see Rose going from an all-red tracksuit to surreally airbrushed bleach-blonde—are enough to telegraph that striking, unforgettable images are just as much a piece of their creative urges. “That all started when I was working on LONER,” Rose tells me, on a Zoom call during a family getaway in Maine. “Before that, I really just wanted to be a songwriter—to write songs with other people and live in my car and focus on that. But it always left me wanting more. Maybe that’s the world-builder super nerd in me, wanting to create more of an experience.”

The world-building appetite keeps growing for Rose and, as time goes on, the indie singer-songwriter feels increasingly pulled toward expanding the imagistic possibilities that can accompany their songs. “I’ve always thought of these [albums] as chapters—the way an author would write a book,” they continue. “You don’t write the same book twice, and each book is a different era of someone’s experience. I always thought it would be cool to get through your entire career and then look back and have all these different chapters that make up your life. It offers something different and it expands the palette.” With a growing laugh, they toss in a self-deprecating aside: “It’s a really cool idea in theory, but it’s a pretty terrible commercial idea.”

When we chat for this story, it’s at the very end of the album cycle for Rose’s latest record, 2023’s The Art of Forgetting, where their impulse to delve into the visual became something far bigger than ever before. At first glimpse, the album cycle held all the pieces of Rose’s modus operandi to date: indelibly evocative cover art, a distinct aesthetic identity from their last releases and attention-grabbing music videos that broadened the worlds suggested by the album art and promotional stills. But Rose’s ambitions this time around folded in elaborate new pursuits in the set design for their tours and a filmmaking project bigger than any previous music video, resulting in a unified vision towering beyond anything they had done before.

In June, Caroline Rose dropped a short film companion to The Art of Forgetting, stitching together videos for “Miami,” “Tell Me What You Want” and “Everywhere I Go I Bring the Rain” into a single continuous narrative of disintegrating time loops, splintering romantic and existential relationships and intricately choreographed long takes. The film came as a collaboration with Sam Bennett, one of Rose’s oldest and best friends, who took Rose’s ideas for the emotional thrust of the story and brought a technical prowess that naturally complemented their own preoccupations. “Often,” Rose says of the duo’s collaborative process, “we start working together with just many hours of phone calls back and forth, swapping ideas. Sam is the type of person to write a map of how everything’s going to work down on a napkin, and then bring the napkin to set.”

The meticulous planning involved helped make many of the short’s big moments sing, even with the tight budget and shooting constraints on the crew. Making the most of only three days of production, a limited number of sets and no shooting permits for outdoor locations, the team had to act quickly on their feet to nail the intricate camera motions and choreography of doppelganger extras. The indoor portions of the shoot ended up requiring just as much resourcefulness and ingenuity, most notably on “Miami”—where footage was reversed in post-production and, therefore, had to be synced to a backwards version of the song—and a sequence in “Everywhere I Go I Bring the Rain” where the crew made that title literal. “Sam had an idea to make it rain inside this warehouse we were shooting in,” Rose says with a laugh. “He was like, ‘Let’s make a rain machine!’ And I was like, ‘What the fuck is a rain machine?’ So my friends slapped together a rain machine, made with a garden hose and a pump.”

Though this scale of film project was new for Rose, it’s a field they’ve had a vested interest in well before the short’s production. Discussing their history of loving the medium, she says, “I’ve always flirted with it because I’m really influenced by film, probably more than any other form of art.” Their love of movies seeps into the germination of every album cycle for them, all the way back to LONER. “I often think about it in terms of: ‘What would this movie look like?’ When you put on an album, what are you visualizing? What is this movie like? Is it narrative? Or is it the type of film that’s erratic and has no plot, but shows you a lot of vignettes of someone’s life?”

The latter was the case for LONER, where each individual track like “Jeannie Becomes A Mom” and “Getting to Me” existed as an isolated character study (“It felt like I was piecing together my personality through miniature films,” Rose explains, “and each song was its own little film”), while Superstar held a conceptual approach closer to the former notion of linear narrative. With The Art of Forgetting, however, something different transpired. “I wasn’t necessarily thinking so much about how the story pieced together until it had almost written itself,” Rose says of the record’s narrative of heartbreak. “I was so desperate to write material to help myself feel better that, by the time I was done with the writing process—which lasted two years—the story was already there.” In a way, Rose’s process mirrored the elliptical storytelling of the short they eventually put together, wherein “the story of grief” they were experiencing moved forward, backward, sideways, and folded in on itself at any given moment.

Appropriately, the further our conversation gets, the less we end up talking about the direct inspirations and techniques used on The Art of Forgetting short film, and the more we delve into Rose’s affinity for film as an entire art form, as well as the impact that’s had on their creative personality as a whole. “I feel like I didn’t get super into film until I was a depressed high school student,” they recount at one point. “It was a direct link between my depression increasing and the need to watch more films to escape my reality. You step into someone’s mind. You can not only escape your own reality, but expand your reality. That hasn’t totally changed. I feel like I still resort to film to escape my reality, and I find it one of the coolest experiences of art—you can create something like that for somebody, just from ideas that pop into your mind, and bring them into fruition.”

Caroline Rose names a number of filmmakers throughout our interview, all of whom have an intensely idiosyncratic footprint and a history of working along similar lines as their self-proclaimed “DIY Pro” style, stretching the limits of low budgets. There’s John Waters, whose devotion to “always doing his thing” and being “such an interesting freak” even with repeated commercial failure stands out as especially admirable. There’s Harmony Korine, whose ethos of “just use what you have and make it interesting” defined much of his early work that still ripples out in contemporary indie filmmaking circles. And there’s Sean Baker, whose creativity with making stunning iPhone-shot footage on Tangerine enhanced the movie’s story and acting—which Rose sees as the real foundation and heart of his filmmaking.

But one film hovers over Caroline Rose’s visual playbook, not just for The Art of Forgetting, but their career as a whole: Wim Wender’s 1984 masterpiece Paris, Texas. The film’s iconic, striking use of all-consuming color and lighting from cinematographer Robby Müller has remained a key reference point for Rose on every album since LONER, and it played a vital role in defining the look of The Art of Forgetting short film. “My favorite stuff is when you’re feeling a little off-kilter from the way the lighting feels,” Rose explains. “You don’t necessarily notice it, but you feel it the whole time. Obviously, if you’re a filmmaker and paying attention and looking at Paris, Texas, you’re like, ‘Wow, the lighting is incredible.’ But if you’re just casually watching that movie, by the end of it, you’re like, ‘That was really emotional, and I feel a slight sense of unease, and I don’t totally know why.’”

Rose mentions that lighting, particularly, is a big priority for them for how to make the most out of leaving a strong emotional impact on a viewer, even if the budget is limited. They feel that “a sense of otherworldliness, or surreality of emotion” can heighten the effect of a film, and making the lighting unshakeable in that way is well worth what little money a project might have. They single out Paris, Texas’s famous use of pure green hues—achieved by Müller opting to not correct for the way fluorescence appeared in post-production—as proof that “you can get a lot more creative with less.”

“I feel like the same thing applies to stage design,” Rose continues. “That’s a big gripe that I have with going to a lot of music performances: you end up seeing the same lighting over and over again. A lot of times, it just feels unintentional, overwhelming, and overstimulating.” As an alternative, Rose offers a suggestion, not dissimilar from how they selectively use lighting when performing “The Kiss” from The Art of Forgetting: “Maybe instead of a million moving lights for an entire song, you have no lights until the very end.”

Stage design is another realm of Caroline Rose’s visual world that comes naturally to them, in part because they hold a degree in architecture. The past year of touring that Rose recently completed saw them putting that background to more intentional use than before, constructing a tableau of thin screens behind them, upon which video sequences, home movies and spotlights of color were projected and cast over the band.

But challenges still arose, as with any creative endeavor. The most immediate was trying to physically fit the design on the stage at as many shows as possible, with the inevitable differences in venue size that come with touring. “I have to get the dimensions of every single stage we play,” Rose elaborates, “and be like, ‘How can we do this where our design and infrastructure will fit on all the stages we play? And if it doesn’t fit on the smaller stages, how can we have an equally compelling show?’”

Another came in the pure physical reality of the 2023 tour’s set design: Rose put the screens between them and their band, leaving them all alone on stage in front of the audience, and their accompanists cordoned off out of view. “The album is supposed to feel pretty isolating and intimate,” Rose says about how the stage was meant to mimic the record’s themes. “But then when the big parts come in, it feels enormous—it feels really big. I wanted to create this dynamic between a person talking to themselves and an eruption when these big feelings emerge. I thought it really nailed that sense of intimacy, but it felt emotionally explosive on the parts where it really opens up.

“And, technically, as a band, it’s really difficult to have a wall between you,” they continue. “It’s extremely isolating, emotionally, leaning into the isolation of the music. I really catered to the audience’s experience, because I knew that would be the most compelling, but feeling so incredibly isolated every night with a literal disconnect from my band really took a toll on me emotionally.”

Though this initial tour for The Art of Forgetting vividly captured the record’s unflinching depth of feeling, the mutually taxing experience for those on either side of the screens led to everyone agreeing to change things up for the follow-up dates. “The band was like, ‘Let’s just be together and make music!’” Rose says. The set design was rearranged accordingly—the entire band was visible throughout the show, and the individual screens were spread throughout the stage, behind each respective player. The change required retooling this visual aspect of the show, but it was worth it in the long run. “I wasn’t as sad,” Rose adds. “It felt like I was fully healed by the time we did the tour this year.”

For now, though, after the end of a second national tour for The Art of Forgetting, Rose is content to take even more time before the next phase in their creative evolution. Rose is just starting to decompress after a glut of time and energy to this record from a deep place of personal vulnerability, but is already awash with thoughts on possibilities for the road ahead. “I feel more and more open, the older I get,” they tell me. “I feel less like my ego has a stronghold on me, and more the opposite, like, ‘It’d be really fun to work with somebody on this, or show someone this idea and see what they would do to enhance it.’”

One place Caroline Rose knows they already want to venture back into is the character-heavy work that defined much of LONER and Superstar. “I feel like it’s part of my DNA,” they say, “because all the women in my family are from the South, and they’re all incredible storytellers.” Hearing stories like the ones they grew up with, Rose was enamored with the characters “from another planet” that seemed to occupy these narratives, and found similar idiosyncratic figures creep into their own work.

Now that Rose has gone into new territory in filmmaking, this prospect is all the more enticing because of the ways COVID-19 dashed their plans for expanding the world of Superstar, released in early March 2020. Though the budget for the album was only “a nominal increase” from what Rose had to work with on LONER, their plans for Sean Baker-inspired in-character guerrilla iPhone videos got put on ice once the world ground to a halt in the early days of lockdown and quarantine.

“And it is personal,” Rose stresses about their character exercises, emphasizing that this kind of work and The Art of Forgetting are cut from similar internally-drawn cloth. “That’s something I find kind of funny, when people are like, ‘Oh, you just created this all from thin air?’ No, I didn’t, it’s from my life.” They bring up the work of director Pedro Almodóvar—their “favorite of all-time”—as a point of comparison, mentioning “his use of characters to tell completely outrageous stories—bizarre, usually gay soap operas, talking about past traumas in a way that’s bright, colorful, buoyant, and satirical.” Though The Art of Forgetting was the most transparently from-the-heart record that Rose has made so far, they aim to make every release just as much a reflection of themselves, no matter whether explicitly telegraphed as such. “I’m sure the first time someone saw a cubist self-portrait, they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ But it’s still personal.”

And Rose already knows that they want filmmaking to be a big part of the next record as well. “That had always been my dream: to be making films along with the music—something that people can latch onto,” they say. “In a way, maybe I’ve always been inching my way to filmmaking through my music career. But, to me, they’re inextricably linked.”

Regardless, just as Caroline Rose had plunged headfirst into more adventurous filmmaking with The Art of Forgetting, they’re intent on being anything but static, and remain more enthusiastic than ever about traversing uncharted territory. Doing anything otherwise, to them, is “a cop-out.” “You know what will work. You’re not taking risks anymore. It starts to feel like a commercial endeavor.” As always, Rose is content to keep working for themselves first and foremost, and to avoid the pitfalls that come with seeing success in a highly capitalist music industry. “I don’t ever want to get sucked into this mindset that you need to have a bigger budget each time, and that it has to be more glossy and impressive each time.” With a smile, they add, “Sometimes, my favorite things are the things that are made on the cheapest equipment.”

As our interview winds down, Caroline Rose offers a metaphor for the different paths that emerged before them with each album: “When you go on vacation, you can either take a month off and see 15 different countries, or you can stay in the same place and wander around for a really long period of time and get to know the locals.” They say that both are necessary for different reasons, and that the viability of either illustrates that both exploring new ground and getting to know something intimately are each valuable in their own ways. “I’m at this point where I want to take my interests and what I’ve done so far over the last three records, and maybe stay in this realm of character-driven satire and storytelling techniques, enhance what I’ve already done, and find some new boundaries to push without completely changing everything,” Rose muses. “Maybe I’ll stay in the same neighborhood for a little bit and see what happens.”

Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.