The eight-piece musical collective caroline released their self-titled debut in 2022 and quickly found themselves topping critics’ polls and end-of-year lists all over the world. Touring with long-awaited follow-up caroline 2, trumpet player and vocalist Freddie Wordsworth talked to SNACK about what’s changed in the last three years.
Your songs feel very alive. They always feel very kind of organic. I was really interested in your songwriting process – how does that work?
I’d say it depends, song to song. Primarily though, we have Jasper [Llewellyn], Mike [O’Malley] and Casper [Hughes] who are I guess the equivalent of our lead singer, and for the first record they’d go and workshop ideas to a pretty significant extent. And then we’d come and learn parts and add little bits, but generally songs were kind of formed before we got there.
For this record it was much more collaborative. We were all more involved in our own part of writing but also just a general composition of the songs. We were all really present for it. We went away for a week to a friend’s barn out in Essex. We were there for seven really long days, proper 12, 13, 14- hour days in this room from dawn to dusk. And we left with generally what the album is now. I mean, it’s changed quite a lot since that week but we had the bones of it there.
Is there a bit more of an intentionality to the second album?
The concept was a lot to do with duality and different spaces being combined in individual pieces of music. ‘Coldplay cover’ – which is obviously hilarious named – is probably the most overt expression of that, where it’s literally two songs happening at once. This idea of travelling between spaces was ever present in the record, I’d say.
Something I’ve always liked about your music is as much as it’s very experimental and very organic, it is quite hooky.
We like pop music! I think strong songwriting is at the core of it. Like little earworms, I guess. We like that stuff in different ways, but I think it’s got to have its place and it’s got to be really intentional, and it’s got to have the focus behind it.
Caroline Polachek is on the single ‘Tell me I never knew that’ – how did that come about?
So, curse the internet, but she followed us on Instagram 4 years ago and we were all like, fuck, this is insane. She would like the odd post of ours here and there and we were like, oh my gosh. We had this one song, which we preliminarily named ‘Backstreet Boys’ because we just felt it kind of had that vibe. Anyway, when we recorded the record, it felt like it needed something different.
We weren’t 100 percent happy with the last takes of it. We were a little bit like: we could make this better. And I think there was always this idea to maybe ask. I think we just felt we didn’t want it to be gimmicky, you know, asking a big pop star to sing your songs. But it actually turned out like the melody was made for her, basically. It felt right and like we should just flipping ask. And we did, and she replied within 10 minutes, like, sure, let me have a listen. She was really game.
We sent her the song and the whole album and then within a couple of days she sent back a really polished demo of her singing. Very similar to how it is now, to be honest. And yeah, it was epic working with her. Amazing, lovely person but super focused, super gritty and hard-working and obviously fiercely talented. But the impressiveness for us was the conviction and the work ethic. She stayed until two in the morning in the studio – there was no rush or hurriedness; she was very invested.
Your music always feels very intimate. How does that translate live? You’re about to go into some pretty decent-sized venues in this tour.
Yeah. it’s gonna be new to us for sure, because we’re used to playing random rooms. Like we played in this abandoned shopping mall in Cardiff once and it was amazing. It was so good. We used to play in the round and people stood around us – I think we’d love to keep doing that if we can, but for some venues it’s just not going to be appropriate. So it’s still quite intimate and we’re all still communicating, which is really important because we have to keep visually communicating with each other. It’s a crucial part of when we play. Even though the songs are much more formed now, in the way that they maybe weren’t on the first record, we still have to talk and look and be kind of one organism. I hope that that comes across when you watch it live.
Your music is hard to pigeonhole, and I’ve come across some very silly genre descriptions: ‘Appalachian midwest emo’ and ‘Sad boy triumphalism’.
That was Jasper. Those are both self-proclaimed – they’re both Jasper for sure.
Have you got any favourites?
What I say to people is you have to just listen to it. It sounds like a lot of stuff and nothing at all.
caroline 2 is out now via Rough Trade. Available on vinyl here.
caroline play St Luke’s, Glasgow, on 7th June. Tickets here.
Main Photo credit Henry Redcliffe.
