With the boundaries to music making lower than ever and overnight sensations truly feeling overnight at times, the benefit of experience can sometimes be underrated. Caroline Romano has been active in the singer-songwriter lane since fifteen, now eight years deep into a career we’ve been lucky enough to track the whole way through. With her debut album Oddities and Prodigies out of the way, we find Caroline Romano on the heels of Unsteady having turned her attention to tighter and more focused EPs — that song evidently meaning we’re in the midst of building another.
Leaving it to the woman herself to describe the influences behind this latest effort:
i’ve been waiting what feels like all of my life to write a project like this one, and i can’t believe this collection of songs exists and is about to be out in the world. i spent most of last year quietly piecing together this story together as i lived it in real time, trying to find a concise way to tell the most expansive feeling i’ve ever known. in looking back one last time, just to realize you’re finally looking forward, this is what i know about the feeling. what is meant for you will find you. sometimes it just takes falling.
“Unsteady” Earnestly Starts The It Took Me Falling Era For Caroline Romano
Though tacitly teased with “Up the Stairs,” the singer promising that “more was on the way on its heels,” her single “Unsteady” is the actual starting gun. On social, she let loose that she views the track as her first bona fide love song, and with how comprehensive the feeling is, it’s hard to argue. On a lyrical level, the beating heart of the song is imagery pinning she and the object of her fascination in poetic detail: “I’m the shipwreck / You’re the moon,” “I’m the summer / You’re the shady,” or the real crux in the chorus, “I’m unsteady, but I’m steady with you.”
Aesthetically, the focus really is on that verse-writing ability, leaving much of the song’s construction to a combination of raw guitar and vocal layers. There’s a particularly pretty moment in the first verse where a set of harmonies build underneath the lead rapidly and disappear just as quickly. In that aforementioned hook sections, an additional set of strings joins the set, making good on that motif of “steadiness” Caroline Romano sets up throughout.
Though no doubt a quieter cut, the overall conceptual concentration that Caroline Romano delves into with “Unsteady” already makes it a fitting choice. It Took Me Falling is due out on March 13th. For now, you can catch “Unsteady” and pre-save “It Took Me Falling” wherever you steam your music.
