Caroline Rose finds fertile ground in heartache

Apr. 26—Caroline Rose knows it sounds improbable, but when she posed for the cover art for her latest album, The Art of Forgetting, she had no knowledge of the popular meme it evokes.

There she sits, blindfolded and wearing fur, in a burning room. She's holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She may as well be saying, "This is fine," much like the hat-wearing dog sitting in a burning house popularized by cartoonist KC Green.

"I had never seen that meme," says Rose, who performs on Sunday, April 28, at Meow Wolf. "Someone sent it to me after the album came out, and I was like, 'How have I never seen this? This is so funny.' So I contacted the artist and said, 'I'm somehow the last person on earth to see your cartoon.'"

The connection is much more explicit as an image on her sold-out tour T-shirt. Green took his concept and Rose's album cover and mashed them together: Rose is stylized like Green's cartoon dog, blindfolded and wearing fur in a burning room. In the second panel, a close-up of her face, Rose utters the Green punchline.

"This album, I was going through a really difficult time, but even in the worst place I was in, I was still kind of laughing at my desperate situation," she says. "It's a bunch of opposing things; clearly something is very wrong, but the figure is either choosing to disregard it completely or maybe to be above it. It's open to interpretation."

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Caroline Rose

* 7 p.m. Sunday, April 28

* Meow Wolf

* 1352 Rufina Circle

* $25

* 866-636-9969; meowwolf.com

Rose, who grew up on Long Island, New York, has been a musician for most of her life. She says that her hometown — Center Moriches on the south shore of Suffolk County — is "a tiny little town before you get to the nice places. It's like where you fill up the gas tank on the way to the Hamptons."

Growing up, Rose says, she lived in a musical household and her parents — who are both artists — often had creative friends visiting. She started writing her own songs as a teenager, although she was never in a band in high school. She's been a solo artist for as long as she's been writing songs.

"I've always been a huge loner," Rose says, referencing the title of her third album, Loner. "Music has always been a way to channel my weird little thoughts. It hasn't really been a social activity for me; it's been more internal. But now I think I'd love to be in a band. I think I'm much more social now in making music than I was when I was a kid."

During the making of her latest album, The Art of Forgetting, Rose was navigating a difficult breakup. When she plays those songs, she's transported back to the time when she wrote them.

When she was performing live for Seattle radio station KEXP in April 2023, Rose seems on the edge of losing her cool. She tells KEXP's Cheryl Waters that she's just not sure how long she'll continue making music.

Rose wound up pausing her tour and moving a lot of dates to the spring, and now, as she nears the tour's final month, she's thankful for the break.

"I think performing these songs every night was kind of slowly destroying me," she says. "There are a lot of things I want to do besides music, but I think more than anything, what I would like to change is the cycle of put out an album, tour an album until you want to drop dead, and rinse and repeat. I think those days are numbered for me. I just want to have a different lifestyle. I want to have healthier relationships and grow a garden."

Rose studied architecture during her undergraduate days at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and says she keeps her hands busy by working on an old car and an old motorcycle when she's not working on her music. She loves the precise nature of being a mechanic and knowing that if she completes specific steps in order, the machine will work.

Songwriting has a different process in that there are endless ways to be creative, and you never really know when you're done.

Rose plays guitar, bass, and keyboard but also noodles on several other instruments in the studio when she feels it's easier to make her own sound rather than explain what she wants to collaborators.

"It's actually faster if I play a lot of the stuff if I have something in mind," she says. "If I don't have something in mind, I like hearing what other people come up with. I find it such a fun part of the studio process, writing melodies and bass lines. It's not just the piano, guitar, and vocal song on its own; I think the whole thing is fun, the whole orchestration. Oftentimes in my mind when I'm driving around or walking to the grocery store, I'm not just thinking of a song that's one voice and a piano."

Rose says she reached a career epiphany between the release of her 2020 album Superstar and The Art of Forgetting, and that was that she never wants to let business decisions interfere in the creative process again. She didn't let her record label or her publisher hear her latest album until she thought it was finished. She had both the time to work on her craft but also to use the studio to flesh out ideas and complete the songs.

"The way that I had written the songs was very natural; I was just kind of sitting on my bed, and one by one, they just arrived," she says. "I was going to write the songs that could be played solo because it was important to me that they were strong enough on their own. And then I wanted to experiment.

"What I was feeling inside my brain and heart was a lot of disassociation and confusion and these kind of complex feelings that weren't completely translating with just playing the guitar alone. There was so much more inside."