I have been trying to find out, from various interviews carried out on the occasion of the release of this record, what the hell happened to Caitlin Rose to disappear from the front line of the spotlight and maintain a whopping nine years of record silence. However, Caitlin doesn’t seem very willing to talk, although she hints at a deep crisis, not only creative, but also intense personally. It had to happen that in 2019 she participated in a tribute to the late David Berman of Silver Jews, so that the music bug was inoculated again in her DNA. That and that her friend and her producer Jordan Lehning would never lose faith that the record return of Caitlin Rose Was going to happen. He didn’t know when, but it was going to happen and he let her know every time they met in his city Nashville for lunch.
And now is when it’s time to pull the cliché and say that the wait has been worth it. And although I don’t like being so obvious, it’s not a matter of being untrue either. Caitlin Rose He has done a very personal and measured job. A record she had to be proud of again. Because if the author was clear about something, it is that she did not want what happened to her with the second one to happen to her, in which she wrote with other musicians like Gary Louris from The Jayhawks or included a beautiful version of The Felice Broters (“Dallas”) , it remained that he felt the album as something entirely his own. A crisis of imposture that she dragged with displeasure and that she was clear that she did not want to repeat.
It is therefore obvious that “Casimi” is an album that is much closer to author pop-rock than to the trotting rhythm of Nashville country-pop with which Caitlin Rose she’s been breastfed her entire life (her mother is a songwriter for, among others, Taylor Swift and her father is an executive in the city’s record industry) though she hasn’t given it up entirely either, as she demonstrates on tracks like “Getting It Right ” (with the participation of Courtney Marie Andrews), “Gemini Moon” or the contagious “Holdin’”. However, that is not the feeling that inspires the tone of the album, which unabashedly searches for melody, bordering on the power-pop of the now-defunct Fountains Of Wayne (“Modern Dancing”). A taste for making it as intense as it is beautiful that she has on songs like that enormous final touch that is “Only Lies” or in “Lil ‘Vesta” has a sufficient degree of contagion to forgive her for the nine years of inactivity.
In spite of everything, it is no less true that the album does not reach anywhere near the same degree of sound roundness that his debut album did have. Unrepeatable work and a handicap that Caitlin will carry with her throughout her recording life. The creative crisis also came from there.