After releasing her second album, 2018's
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 (
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 I'm running, disappearing"); and she takes things to the record's 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,
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 weren't there. ~ Marcy Donelson