The Lucky One

USテキサス州オースティン拠点インディ・フォーカー/ポッパー、6年振りフルアルバム!

USテキサス州オースティンより身近な距離感で壮大なスケールを描く事に定評がある、インディ・フォーカー/ポッパー キャロライン・セッズことキャロライン・サリー。何と6年振りとなるフルアルバム『THE LUCKY ONE』をWESTERN VINYLからリリース!

この6年間でテキサス州、アラバマ州、NY州ブルックリンを転々としながら、得意の思い出や心象風景を歌にする技を強化。それぞれの地で過去、現在、未来を思い描けるようになり、一気に本作の曲を書きあげレコーディング。リード曲"Faded and Golden"のゆったりした始まりからキャロラインの丁寧なメロディが響き、風景を想起させるピアノやギターの絡みが聴こえてくれば、もう既にキャロラインワールドから抜け出せないでしょう!

After releasing her second album, 2018s No Fool Like an Old Fool, Caroline Sallee moved around a lot, including making her way from Texas back to her primary home state of Alabama and to Brooklyn, New York. With these transitions -- and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the underlying march of time -- came further awareness of things like shifting perspectives, the nature of memory and its role in the present, and the inevitability of change, all things that had already been major themes of her songwriting. Six years in the making, her third Caroline Says album, The Lucky One, finds her sounding more reflective and isolated than ever. Still bridging West Coast folk and dreamy, home-recorded pop (The Lucky One was entirely self-recorded), the songs seem a little quieter and more stripped back this time, at least on average, beginning with the gentle, fingerpicked opener, "The Lucky One" ("You call me the lucky one/Before the wind blew you away"). Accompanied only by acoustic guitar, her own multi-tracked backing vocals, light keyboard chords, and ghostly, pedal steel-like howls, the half-whispered song ends with a wish that she could tell an absent figure about a local bar changing its name. While much of the album continues along these lines, she adds a rhythm section and picks up the tempo on second track "Faded and Golden," another song about how relationships continue after the other person leaves; she adds a vaguely Latin flair to the warmer "Eyes in the Night" ("I always dream Im running, disappearing"); and she takes things to the records haziest extremes on "Always Looking Back," which stays in the clouds despite animated rhythms that sound something like hand-drummed jeans, and metallic mallet percussion. Throughout, The Lucky One never stops feeling insular and lonely even at its sweetest, a candidate for which is the lightly countrified closing track, "Something Good," a song inspired by visiting childhood haunts in Birmingham, Alabama, and expecting to see people who werent there. ~ Marcy Donelson