Caroline Says

Today, Caroline Says, the moniker of Alabama-native, Brooklyn-based Caroline Sallee, announces her latest album The Lucky One, out October 11th via Western Vinyl, and shares its lead single/video “Faded & Golden.” Having explored the intricate nature of regret and the strangely persistent impact of fragments of our pasts on her 2017 debut album, 50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong and her 2018 sophomore album, No Fool Like An Old Fool, Caroline revisits these ghosts of her past on The Lucky One, on which her gaze is fixed more clearly than ever on the evocative landscapes of our memories – hometown bars, road trips, and late-night swims – and how these memories continue to shape who we are today.

One of several tracks on the album that delves into the complexities of relationships that naturally grow apart as life takes us in different directions, “Faded and Golden” reflects on the bittersweet nature of reunions with old friends, where the idealized memories of youth can clash with the realities of the present. On the track, Caroline explains: “Relationships are, first and foremost, ideas. That’s what allows relationships to persist even when we’re apart. We may yearn for an old friend or lover, especially one from our teenage years and our hometown. But there is a bittersweetness to any reunion. They may shatter the memory we’ve made of them.”

Throughout the writing process of The Lucky One, an almost Dickensian triad of perspective emerges, as Caroline moved from Texas back to Alabama, and then to Brooklyn, with each new location informing her sense of past, present, and future. Like her previous two albums, Caroline wrote, performed, and recorded everything you hear on The Lucky One, a process that magnifies the insular clarity of her vision as she stitches together her casually sophisticated melodies and forlorn lyrics.

A thread of self discovery and analysis is present throughout the album, as Caroline explores the yearning for sincerity in relationships and daily life in tracks like “Palm Reader.” Other parts of the album explore themes of childhood, youthful innocence, the complexities of grief, and the sting of unmet expectations. Album closer “Something Good” then revisits Caroline’s Alabama childhood. Lost on a recent trip to Birmingham, unable to find the familiar path to a riverside hangout, the experience becomes a powerful metaphor; we can’t always retrace the paths in our memories, but those memories, however unreliable, continue to shape us. In the end, The Lucky One celebrates this enduring power, acknowledging how past relationships and experiences, even those lost to the haze of time, continue to inform the stories we tell ourselves, and the way we navigate the present.