Caroline Cotter: July 2023 Artist of the Month

 

Why is it that so much summertime music is dominated by rhinestone cowboys, geriatric rockers, and Jimmy Buffett? If you’d rather have something sweet and calm, get your Romneys (“mitts,” get it?) on the new Caroline Cotter release. By the time you read this, her third national release Gently As I Go should be available.

 

Cotter is a Rhode Island native now dwelling near Acadia National Park in Maine. She is an unabashed folk artist and a road warrior who has performed in 45 states and 14 countries. Cotter has shared stages with Heather Maloney, with whom she shares sensibilities and vocal qualities, though to my ear her soprano tones sound even more like Kate Rusby. Like those two artists, though, she prefers to strip music to its basics: a mellifluous voice and an acoustic guitar.

 

Gently As I Go is filled with Cotter’s observations on life, love, loss, and connections.

“Don’t Wait” is the first spinoff single and carpe diem is its core message. There are all manner of things–ranging from getting out of bed to embracing true love or making up your mind–that freeze us in place. It sounds simple, but her “don’t wait” message is disarmingly wise.

 

That song is the only one available to preview as the album doesn’t officially drop until August, but I can attest that the other ten songs are similarly serene.* They also prod her us in parallel ways, but usually with velvet gloves. “Coming Your Way” is at once a road song and an embrace of love wherever it’s found and for as long as it endures: And if this doesn’t last as all things shall pass/I’ll be coming your way. The title track also probes the potential pathos of learning to love without being loved back, but instead of plotting revenge or screaming to the heavens, she sings of closing doors and windows gently as I go. That same sense of grabbing the moment prevails in “The Year of the Wrecking Ball,” a tale of a woman seeking meaning and revelation. The last refrain shifts from “she” to “we” in a cautionary way: We sing hallelujah/sing to the holes in the walls/sing for the light through the broken windows/and the year of the wrecking ball.

 

The lyrics of the “The Call” are somewhat cryptic, but it was written for her grandfather who died at 104, so we can assume that he did more than his share of sucking the marrow from the bone of life. In “Morning Mantra,” the album’s concluding song, Cotter suggests we open each new day with gratitude and walk the path of the good and strong. Perhaps that’s easier said than done on some mornings, but it’s not a bad goal.

 

I won’t tell you that Gently As I Go is a perfect album. The only real change of pace is her giddy and delightfully silly “Do You Love Me?” with its litany of promises you know will be broken. She sometimes sings Dylan covers in concert, which we don’t need on an album of her songs, but I suspect she performs them for exactly such mood-changing moments. I’d also recommend that, as convenient as MP3s are, you get an LP or CD of Gently as the narrow sound band of MP3 recordings make her articulation difficult to decipher in spots. (At the very least, download a lyrics sheet.) But I will say this; Caroline Cotter will soothe you like a breeze rustling through a shade tree.

 

Rob Weir

 

 *There are also videos of past material on YouTube.