Caitlin Rose's Europe tour starts next week

Nine years ago, Caitlin Rose released her second album, The Stand-In. The title spliced a couple inside jokes from the first record’s tour: The months onstage had her feeling like an impostor; when she felt like herself, she longed for an understudy. But in the album’s wake, a good number of interviewers and critics turned her into a stand-in for country music: If she wasn’t an alternative to Taylor Swift, maybe she was the inheritor of Loretta Lynn or Emmylou Harris. You can see where they were coming from. Rose is a Texas-born Nashvillian—with all the twang that combo implies—and her parents (a label executive and a songwriter who’s won Grammys for writing with, well, Taylor Swift) are Music Row stalwarts. From the outset, she was a natural at depicting the gnarled emotional entanglements of classic honky-tonk—the misspent desire, the loneliness at the heart of the party—but her interiority was more suited to plaintive indie pop. Monologues, not playlets.

CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon. Pick a track: someone’s either breaking apart or barely holding it together. If anyone actually gets through the door, they pull the house down behind them. It could make for a heavy listen if Rose treated these situations weightily, but that’s never really been her approach. On CAZIMI, Rose boldly dismisses the preconceived idea of what a “Caitlin Rose Album” should be. Instead, she skips across genres, combining new wave influences like Elvis Costello and Magnetic Fields with the pop stylings of Katrina and the Waves and the melancholy Americana of David Berman and Silver Jews alike into one cohesive mix-tape. 

Taking its title from the astrological term for when a planet is in such close, specific proximity to the sun that it’s considered to be in the heart of it, CAZIMI finds the listener at the moment with its examination of trauma, chronicling “the slow motion unraveling of somebody’s life” in the aftermath. The thing about cazimi is that it’s fleeting, accidental, even—a moment of exaltation that goes just as fast as it comes. It’s a phenomenon that Rose could relate to: “I was never prepared to take on everything that happened to me in my early twenties. Being all of a sudden thrust into spotlights that I had little business being under was rarely empowering, often more so debilitating, and being in the rush of it all, I never could quite catch up,” she explains. “I was living that ‘combust to the sun’ narrative and the burnout was inevitable”

Caitlin Rose brings her honey-dripping vocals, catchy pop hooks and witty lyrics exploring honest themes of self-destruction, self-care and romantic pursuits to Europe starting next week:

07/09: Paris, FR - No.Pi *
08/09: Hengelo, NL - Metropool *
09/09: Asten, NL - Misty Fields
11/09: Amsterdam, NL - Paradiso *
12/09: Nijmegen, NL - Merleyn *
13/09: Cologne, DE - Blue Shell *
14/09: Hamburg, DE - Nochtwache *
15/09: Berlin, DE - Privat Club *
17/09: Odense, DK - Nashville Nights *
18/09: Copenhagen, DK - Ideal Bar *
19/09: Malmö, SWE - Medley *
20/09: Oslo, NO - Belleville *
21/09: Stockholm, SWE - Bar Brooklyn *

* with Hollow Hand