Producer's Diary: Caroline Cronin - Softening
If you hang around Nashville long enough, you’ll start to recognize a few bumper stickers. A popular one is, “Too dumb for New York, too ugly for LA.” Which raises the question: Where would Caroline, Jackson, and me live if we were to start a band?
Caroline’s a mountain weirdo, Jackson’s a west-coast hippie, and I’m a desensitized 12-year-old.
Musically, we’ve become somewhat of a unit. Over the course of the last few releases, we’ve collaborated to wholesome success. If you’ve read my other entries, you know all about Jackson. But you probably don’t know too much about Caroline.
Caroline has eyes like Linda Rondstadt. Her pupils are wide-open and precise. Like a pair of sniper scopes. You get the sense they lead to an interior world so distinct, it might require translation.
If she were born 60 years ago, she’d probably be called an indigo child. She speaks fluent Spanish and has a license to practice Reiki. Her vocal floats, and so does she.
We first connected on Instagram, where her debut album caught my ear. It turned out she was a Nashville native—went to a magnet school right on Broadway, two blocks from Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row. Her demos from that era are about as far away from steel-string country as Paris, but she and Dierks do share that mountain sensibility.
She came over to my apartment after a run-in at Brown’s Diner. We talked music. She said my Super Brava collaborations reminded her a bit of The Blow. Totally. I’ve been a longtime fan of that band, and it must have come out in that project. No one gets a rush-hour DJ slot on WXNA without an extensive repertoire, and Caroline knows her stuff.
A few days before our second get-together, I sketched her a simple idea: C Major, synthy, 120 beats per minute.
Before I sent it, my apartment got a gas leak.
The culprit was a lemon sativa Delta-8 pen, which made everything sound too slow and turned the pontification pathways in my brain into Autobahns.
The Tempo of the 2010s: 128 HttpBeats-/per-Minute, I thought.
Still too sloeeee, ow.ie.
But, add a BPM for each year in a decade…
What’s the sum?
138 BPM.
I sped it up and fired it off.
At the time, Caroline didn’t have a driver’s license, so she rode over on her red Vespa. When the mic got hot, she ran through the song three times, start to finish.
Normally, in-the-moment vocal feedback comes easily to me, but Caroline’s style was so foreign, her performance needed extra time to sink in. So, we let it marinate. On our third get-together, she punched in with two bars of changes. The rest is the first take.
We also recorded her flute.
After she left, the gas leak subsided, and the edit began.
Fortunately, stellar musicians don’t require much editing, and Caroline has professional-level chops.
The final challenge was to differentiate the back half of the song. When I’m out of ideas, I usually turn to Jackson. He writes melodies like Brian Wilson if he’d grown up a fan of ultra-lights and Alors En Danse. He also has a pen for acoustic love songs.
He sent me a folder of ideas and, a week later, took his first listen to the mixed arrangement. From a thousand miles north—Montreal—he hit me with those magic words: “It’s done.” Tragically, he’s heard me tinker plenty of songs into the grave, so I’ve learned to trust him when he says stop.
Caroline agreed. It was finished.
Mac Demarco says Americans shouldn’t move to Montreal to live out their Euro fantasies. But something tells me the three of us might be the exact right mix of wacky for that place. Plus, there are built-in activities: Caroline would kill it on the DJ circuit, Jackson could find a wife, and for me, etiquette lessons are half-price.