“Caroline Rose has traversed multiple styles since her 2014 debut album, from countryish roots-rock to gleaming electronic pop. None of them forecast the ghostly and then overwhelming 'Love/Lover/Friend.ʼ . . . As she announces 'I am your love,' a string orchestra surges in, and further avowals ...summon massed, Balkan-tinged vocals, as if that revelation is both ecstatic and humbling.” - New York Times
Caroline Rose announces The Art of Forgetting, their new album out March 24th on New West Records, and presents a new single/video, “Miami.” Rose is an artist known for their wit and satirical storytelling, but for the first time, with The Art of Forgetting, Roseʼs musicteems with raw, intense emotion. With no guard up this time, they present the type of confessional honesty weʼve only previously caught glimpses of in their work. Of course, Roseʼs impish humor does pop up unexpectedly amidst themes of regret and grief, loss and change, shame and the inevitability of pain.
Aer a series of heartbreaking events, Rose had no desire to make a statement, let alone make a new album. It was a time of contemplation and transformation. What transpired was what Rose considers a gradual union of reconnection and growth. Prompted by a difficult breakup, Rose began a deep-dive inward, unknowingly digging up long-buried childhood experiences. All the while, Rose was getting voicemails from their grandmother “who was clearly losing her mind.” These respective moments are pieced throughout the album, offering moments of lightness amidst an otherwise heart-rending story of a person who has forgotten, and is perhaps re-learning, how to love themselves. “It got me thinking about all the different ways memory shows up throughout our lives,” says Rose. “It can feel like a curse or be wielded as a tool.”
With this in mind, Rose produced the album using devices and media that embody the characteristics of fading or faulty memories. She gravitated towards instruments that naturally changed or decayed over time: wooden and string instruments, voices, tape, and granular synthesis. She began recording basic layers in her home studio, and “from there it was about a year of experimenting with those recordings both at home and in a couple other studios––chopping them up into loops and smears, creating modular percussion, and ultimately building any additional parts around them,” says Rose. Layers of vocal arrangements from Balkan-influenced yawps to Gregorian autotune choirs, acoustic instrumentation chopped and mangled like a glitching memory, and dreamlike synths push and pull to create a hugely dynamic soundscape.
Todayʼs “Miami” is an acoustic-centered track whose chorus of squealing guitars and bombastic drums seems to all but burst out of the speakers. Rose explains: “I'm not one to shy away from drama, and so this was a perfect opportunity to really bring out every ounce of desperation and anger and all those confusing emotions that happen aer a big heartbreak.” Rose sings:
Clean up all the memories Sweep the bad under the rug Put the good inside a coffer
I wish I knew anything
ʻCuz even at my best
I don't know why I even bother
This is the hard part
The part that they don't tell you about
There is the art of loving
This is the art of forgetting how
The “Miami” video, starring Rose playing a version of themself alongside Massima Bell, was directed by Sam Bennett, and shot at the Austin Motel, Sagebrush, and a sound stage in Austin, and continues Roseʼs run of theatrical, storyline driven videos. “For the ʻMiamiʼ video, I was mainly focused on what would be the most effective way to move people in regards to the two characters and how they interact,” says Rose. “Because this is a sort of loose recreation of some things in my life it was important to me to interpret the feeling of that time as accurately as we could within 4 minutesʼ time. Sam, who is a dear friend of mine and brilliant director, thought a great way to capture that fever-dream-like quality was to create a lot of movement with a continuous shot. He showed me different lenses and cameras to use and we ultimately went with an anamorphic, Old Hollywood-esque feel, which gives it that nostalgia thinking back on a time past.”
