Mint Condition closes out with its breathtaking title track, a song with an enchanted history. Just be exactly how you are.’” With its graceful piano melodies, “Sit Here and Love Me” gently unfolds in flashes of wisdom and insight (“Please recognize my shadow/This is the same place from where I love you deeply”). “That song is my way of saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s okay-you don’t have to try and fix anything for me. “I’m dating someone with an incredibly sunny disposition, and as a person who deals with depression and anxiety, I’ve had to explain all that to him while knowing he might never fully understand it,” says Spence. “In a way I think that can be said for the entire record.”Īn especially personal song, “Sit Here and Love Me” elegantly uncovers the nuances of a very specific emotional experience. “It’s not necessarily my story, but it’s not not my story,” Spence points out. With several lyrics mined from church signs and freeway warnings from a solo trip to Joshua Tree, the slow-building story-song puts its own spin on the classic runaway narrative (“It’s like a line in someone else’s love song/Her life, like some cowboy’s cliché”). On “Angels or Los Angeles,” meanwhile, Spence offers up a cinematic piece of storytelling. “I think it’s because that’s the thing I don’t understand, the thing that makes me pick up the guitar every time: trying to figure out my place in the world with other people.” “Anytime I see a song with a city or a state in the title I’m so drawn to it-I wish I could write a song about some great old town, but I always end up writing about relationships,” she says. The sole co-written track on Mint Condition, “Song About a City,” written with Nashville artist Ashley Ray, illuminates the troubles brought on by a romantic temperament. “That song is equal parts pep talk and confession, where I’m so determined to keep going with this way of life but I’m also recognizing how insane that is,” Spence notes. One of the most anthemic tracks on the record, the sharp-edged yet swinging “Long Haul” delineates the many demands of the musician’s life, including the self-sabotage often required in sustaining passion (“I keep breaking everything I’m fixing, so I can be fixing to do it tomorrow night”). The kinetic energy of that collaboration infuses all of Mint Condition, an album centered on Spence’s crystalline vocals and finespun melodies that soar and drift and sometimes gallop. “They have this unspoken understanding of my instincts, so it made the whole process really comfortable and collaborative.” “It’s wonderful to step into a room full of people who already know me,” says Spence. Her debut for Rounder Records, Mint Condition follows Spades and Roses-a 2017 release praised by American Songwriter as “an album of stunning beauty and lasting impact.” In bringing Mint Condition to life, Spence worked with producer Dan Knobler (Lake Street Dive, Erin Rae) and recorded at his Nashville studio Goosehead Palace, landing a guest appearance from Emmylou Harris and enlisting musicians from Spence’s previous projects and live band. Having won numerous songwriting awards from industry mainstays like the Kerrville Folk Festival, Spence has long been regarded as a best-kept secret in her scene, earning admiration from esteemed artists like Miranda Lambert and from her own fellow writers in the Nashville underground. “There’s a sense of things not going my way and feeling rattled by that, but knowing deep down that it’s all part of getting to where you need to be.” “A lot of these songs come from a very tired-and-worn place,” says Spence, lifting a phrase from the title track. “For me songs are a way to ask questions, and sometimes you end up figuring out the answers.” Despite some moments of self-doubt, Spence telegraphs a quiet self-assurance, a faith that she’ll someday embody the essence of the album’s title phrase-something weathered and delicate yet miraculously intact. “People tell you to write about what you know, but a lot of the time I write about what I don’t know,” she says. With her poetic clarity and precision of detail, the Nashville-based singer/songwriter reveals the risk in setting out on an unconventional path, and subtly makes the case for living your own truth without compromise or fear.įor Spence, the making of Mint Condition was an act of both self-reckoning and discovery. The third full-length from Caroline Spence, Mint Condition is an album narrated by people in various states of searching: alone on faraway highways, restless on rooftops in glamorous cities, stubbornly chasing their deepest dreams against all better judgment.
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