Caroline Says: Getting Lost in Creativity

In the midst of recording her new LP The Lucky One, grappling with the overwhelming sensations of loneliness and isolation that comes with making an album all by one’s self, Caroline Sallee watched Stereophonic, a Broadway production that tells the story of a Fleetwood Mac-esque band from the 1970s struggling to record their album in a collaborative and seamless way. It was the exact opposite of what struggles the Alabama-born musician was facing; Sallee found herself battling to piece things together in the ideal vision she had for the album—a pristine, and carefully optimistic folklorne take on death—because she wasn’t going through it with another person or additional bandmates. “Maybe it would have been better if I’d been recording with other people, but maybe it wouldn’t,” she reflects. The clash of ideas on The Lucky One was internal, and although it was massively burdening at times, she always had envisioned it playing out that way.

Sallee, who releases under the Lou Reed-evoking moniker Caroline Says, has self-recorded each of her three albums. It’s a tried-and-true process that she loves, treasuring the feeling of creating something authentic and pure that nobody else can say they edited or changed. But when it came to The Lucky One, she faced an increased level of hurdles that made the self-recording process even more isolating than it usually is. She lost one of her part-time jobs in the wake of COVID-19, and moved from her home in Alabama to Austin and then went northeast to Brooklyn shortly after.

The Lucky One is a collection of these stacked and withered passport stamps, as Sallee oscillated from an empty lakehouse in Coleman, Alabama, a barn in rural Illinois, her parent’s garage back home and back to her space in New York just to find suitable places to record. Her previous album, 2018’s No Fool Like an Old Fool, captured the weariness of outstaying your honeymooned welcome in a city (“I used to love this town / What has it done for me?” she asks on “Sweet Home Alabama). The Lucky One reflects on the takeaways of being here, there and back again—while confronting the haunts that no one can escape regardless of how many times you change your mailing address, especially during an unpredictable pandemic. “I think I was always so confused by people who were so productive during that time,” Sallee says. “I was like, ‘How are you guys doing this?’ I struggled with what I would even write about.”

Sallee found a dark inspiration in the imminent threat of death that lay in the air around her during those three years in limbo. She watched helplessly as close friends passed too young, and struggled to make sense of the deaths of now distant acquaintances that were once special to her. As these moments of loss ran rampant around her mind, she recalled memories of her grandparents who died in 2018 as well, and knew he needed to articulate the bout of intense sadness—but from a lens of preservation and sophisticated clarity. “I started this album hilariously in mind that I wanted to make a pop album,” she says. “It didn’t turn out that way, but I really wanted a positive album. A lot of it is about celebrating people who aren’t typically celebrated and treasuring what is usually discarded.”

Throughout the album, Sallee pays homage to the symbols of her familial heritage, while watching them play out through her current self. “Something Good” sees the Alabama native return lakeside to think about old friends whom she hung out with, curious if they too remember the memories. On “Roses,” she speaks of a racehorse named “Sunday Silence”—the winner of the Kentucky Derby the year she was born—whose name was etched into her grandma’s collection of commemorative glasses. She relates the hardworking, eager-to-please animal’s journey to her own: “If you’re not gonna win then why even race at all?” she wonders somberly, her mind no longer thinking about the poor horse on the track.

For Sallee, the making of The Lucky One was an incredibly lonely process. She wrote, performed and recorded every lyric, note and sound that is heard on the album, taking on multiple roles and cycling through several versions of herself. To prepare for her press cycle, she took out an old journal she kept during that time, and found pages and pages of declarations that she never wants to self-record again. “I wanted someone to bounce ideas off of,” she admits. “When I spent that much time listening to my own songs over and over and over without anyone else, I had a really hard time knowing if this was even worth working on.”

In the long stretches of determining if she truly liked a song she wrote, she would trick herself into adapting into an editor. “I would purposely forget about a song, forcing myself to not listen to it for a month,” she admits. “I would come back to it, and it would almost be like I was a different person judging it.” Even though it gnawed away at her at times, the true beauty of The Lucky One is how Sallee makes sense of the multiverse within her own work. She weaves vivid tales of past and present lives over layers of warm strings, soft, feathery drum taps and pops of piano and bells. She harmonizes with herself, existing in every crack and surface in the work so resolutely that it’s hard to not feel completely immersed in her unwavering world. Sallee herself admits that she sees herself as too brutally honest at times, but she’s simply gathering what she sees around her and expressing it the only way she knows how. “A soul untamed,” she labels herself on “Faded and Golden,” alive and feeling all that’s around her in a beautifully upfront manner.

Even though she didn’t end up loving Stereophonic, the play allowed Sallee to see that she didn’t need a backing band acting as an opinionated editorial board—because she possesses the power to be all of those people herself. She also realizes that the battles she dealt with internally would probably have happened anyway if more egos were thrown into the mix. “They weren’t having fun either,” she laughs. “Hard work can be grueling, but you do it because of the feeling you get when you’re creating something you’re proud of. Getting lost in creativity is the best—it’s my favorite feeling in the world.”