In Conversation With Caroline Romano
Caroline Romano was first inspired to move to her current home of Nashville through a Taylor Swift documentary but since then, she’s made the city and her music all her own. Her new single “Panic Attack”, released from her forthcoming debut album Oddities and Prodigies, is a stunning confession and exploration of her anxiety and depression. Unpublished sat down with the artist to chat about her career beginnings at 13, releasing her first single at 15, and what she hopes listeners take away from her music.
We caught up over Zoom to chat about the new single, the process behind the writing, mixing, and recording process behind Oddities and Prodigies, and her biggest hopes for this album and progressing career.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You’re currently based in Nashville, Tennessee - did you also grow up there?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: No, I was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi but I started coming to Nashville when I was 13 to pursue music and I moved here full-time when I was 17.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What initially drew you to the music scene in Nashville?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I watched Taylor Swift’s documentary when she was playing at the Bluebird Cafe and I was like, “I guess this is where I need to go.” And then I just fell in love with it the second I came here.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How have you found that the city has influenced your music?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: It gave me a space to grow up normally because this is still a small town in a big city. You aren’t totally engrossed in the industry all the time. But also there’s so much culture here. You got all backgrounds of music, you can’t escape it, whether you want to or not.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What do you love about living there now?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I love that this is where I’ve decided to write my story. I love the people that I’ve met, I love seeing that I can drive by places where I played when I was 13 and say, “I did this, I did this, I did this,” and see the progress as it goes.
[UNPUBLISHED]: When was the moment you knew that you wanted to be a musician?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: It was the first time I ever came to Nashville and I got to play the Bluebird Cafe. I got off stage and I told my mom, “This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life. This is it.” It was one of the clearest moments of my life.
[UNPUBLISHED]: During your childhood, what aspect of music-making were you first drawn to?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I started singing from a very young age but I really started with songwriting more than I did an instrument. I started journaling after school everyday and I would write what happened, my drama life. Eventually, I picked up the guitar and started putting those words to music, and then I fell in love with the process of songwriting.
[UNPUBLISHED]: In terms of other artists, who inspires you, whether they influence your sound or fashion style or lyricism?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I’m all over the board but I’m always into Taylor Swift - I’m a Swiftie - Conan Gray, Noah Kahan, YUNGBLUD influences a lot of my style, and Jon Bellion as a songwriter.
[UNPUBLISHED]: As a Swiftie, which is your favorite Taylor Swift album?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: This is the hardest question of my entire life but it’s a 3-way tie between 1989, folklore, and evermore. But Speak Now is a criminally underrated album.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How have you found the experience of listening to her re-recordings?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I found it really interesting. I respect what she’s doing and also noticed that she tells a very different story singing those songs as a grown woman than she did when she was 15. It comes across more as a reflective album than her being in that moment then. So it’s almost two different projects, which is crazy that you can sing the same song but make it a completely different thing.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Back in 2017, you released your debut single “Masterpiece” with Jacob Whitesides when you were 15. How did that collaboration come about? What was the overall experience like?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I just happened to be a really big fan of Jacob and I tried to settle into the songwriting community in Nashville. So I’d written this song and I reached out to Jacob through an email like, “Would you be willing to be featured on the song with me?” And he actually said yes! As a 15-year-old, that’s crazy. And I remember I was in homeroom the day the song came out and I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want people to know. It was a weird day. Some people were mean about it, some were cool about it. But I was very happy about it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Is the song still something you resonate with and are proud of?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: Definitely, I’m very proud of the song. I know it’s a well-written song but it still speaks true to me today. It was me figuring out who I was and trying to be anything other than a 15-year-old girl when I wrote it. It’s about being your own self, which I still struggle with today so I think that I was onto something back then. I like it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How has your sound evolved since then?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I’ve been through a million genres since then because at 15, I had no idea what I wanted to be, I just knew I wanted to write music. I’ve tried out everything from pop to EDM, and now I’m in this alternative pop situation where I know I’m supposed to be and feel very comfortable. It’s a storytelling-based genre, which I appreciate. In that sense, it’s evolved sonically but it’s also evolved in vocabulary as I’ve grown in life. I’ve been able to see the world differently and write about it differently.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What does your usual writing process look like?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: It’s different every time. Most of the time, I start with words or an idea or an emotion and write a slew of words in my Notes app. And then I’ll go back home and start singing through it to see if there’s a melody that I hear. You know if it’s a song when you hear it as you’re writing it. I write based on what I’m going through but I’ll also collaborate with people in Nashville. They have an idea or a track built, and then you go in and write lyrics and a melody.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Speaking of which, let’s turn now to your brand-new single, “Panic Attack”! How was the experience of writing that song?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I wrote “Panic Attack” by myself in a car in five minutes because I was having a panic attack when I wrote it. It was one of the most intense moments that I’ve written a song and I could hear the melody as I wrote it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Given how vulnerable and honest you are in the lyrics, were you nervous at all to release this song about how you experience anxiety?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I definitely was because no one knew except my closest friends or family. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to own who I am and be myself because I write from a state of depression, anxiety, loneliness. That’s what drives my music. But I found myself putting out EDM tracks, trying to be this version of me that I could escape from. So it was scary, people were like, “I didn’t know this about you, you seem like such a happy person.” I’m proud that I did it but it was scary.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Do you see music as a therapeutic tool for yourself?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: 100%. I don’t think I’d be here today if it weren’t for music as an outlet to help me through things. It’s gotten me through my darkest moments and it’s where I go if I have to figure something out. I’ll write about it or listen to somebody else who’s already written about it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What message do you hope people take away from the song?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I struggle a lot with feeling like I’m crazy, like I’m alone in this and am the only one who feels these things. The biggest comfort to me is when I hear someone else say it in exactly the way I experience it. A lot of people write about anxiety and panic attacks but it’s our favorite artists who say it in the way we’ve uniquely experienced it. My hope is that if there’s 10 people out there who felt exactly the same way, then they hear it and feel some sort of comfort it. That’s all I can really hope for.
[UNPUBLISHED]: You’ll also be releasing your first ever full-length album, Oddities and Prodigies later this month! Can you walk us through the experience of writing and recording this album?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I started this album in the summer of 2021, about June or July. Some of the songs I’d already written earlier that year, most of the love songs because I’d just gotten out of a relationship. I sat down and was like, “I’m gonna write this many songs and I’ll write this many songs with other people.” I set up with a few of my favorite people in Nashville, like, “Let’s just hit the tracks we know we want to write together.” We hit the grou nd running. And it was one process writing the songs but then you gotta go through demos and narrow 30, 40 songs down to 16. It took until December to finish it so it was six months of trying to get this thing together.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How does collaborating with other people compare to making music on your own?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: It was important for me to work with other people on this because they bring me out of my sadness. They’re like, “Let’s write something not depressing!” And also, they knew a way to harness the things I was trying to say and turn it into a bigger song, whether it was a hard-hitting melody or upbeat track. I wrote 7 of the songs by myself and the rest of the 16 with Michael and Chucky Aiello, they’re brothers here in Nashville. They really got what I was trying to do from the get-go. We’d schedule one or two rights a week and hang out and make music, knowing that it would end up on the album if we finished a song that day. It was like therapy but I was working at the same time. And then my producer Will Macbeth would take all these songs and turn them into something I couldn’t even imagine. It was a more fulfilling feeling working with other people.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was your favorite part of the process?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: There’s moments with certain songs on this album when I was recording it with Will. We would just look at each other or I would sing a line or cry and he would be like, “That hits, this is really cool.” Those moments when you can slip into the audience’s perception of it, when you finally hear the full thing coming out of the speakers for the first time, it’s crazy.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How did you decide to name the album Oddities and Prodigies?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: “Oddities and Prodigies” was the first song we wrote on the album together. And when I tried to put it all together, I wanted the theme to be my life up until now and what I’m trying to do, chapter one of the career of my life. And I’ve always said that oddities and prodigies go hand in hand, which was so summarizing of my life and the current generation but I didn’t realize it until I heard it in the song. It’s the name because it’s who the album is looking for, people who are different.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your favorite track on the album and why?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: People will be surprised when they hear that my favorite song is “Leaving Wednesday” and it’s a really simple acoustic guitar song. I wrote it in January 2021 in my childhood bedroom. One of the lines is, “I hope there’s more to what I am than just my plans.” It’s the hardest-hitting lyric for me because it’s all I’ve been thinking about lately. So much of my life, I’ve been working for this goal and I’m going to work for this until I die. But sometimes you stop and wonder, “Is there more to me than just these dreams I’m chasing or this person I’m after?” I find myself isolated and lonely because of the career that I’ve chosen, because of the things I’m doing and have to miss out on. And sometimes I’m just like, “Who am I outside of music? Have I made this my entire life?”
[UNPUBLISHED]: How did you decide to approach the design for the cover art?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: The cover art for the album and “Panic Attack” are kind of the same picture. It all stems from the line, “I’m a fucking narcissist” but I call myself a narcissist who hates herself, and that’s the theme of the album. We’re all self-consumed people but I don’t think any of us want to be. So there’s all these pictures of myself behind me x’ed out. I got to do all that, rip up pictures of me, and there’s lyrics and words embedded in there. It’s a very self-reflective album.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Following the release of the album, what are you looking forward to next?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: My biggest goal on this album is to start touring on it. I’d love to open for somebody so we’re actively looking for people and trying to make that happen. Obviously, tours are still so up in the air, they can cancel at any minute so we haven’t pulled the trigger on anything yet. But I’m hoping that 2022 is the year I finally get to tour the album.
[UNPUBLISHED]: If you went on tour, what places would you love to visit?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I’d love to go anywhere. I’ve never left the United States so I’d love to go overseas, even Canada, and just try it.
[UNPUBLISHED]: As you move forward in your career, what are the goals or milestones you’re excited to accomplish?
[CAROLINE ROMANO]: I want to go as far and big with this as I possibly can. The most people who can hear my music, that’s my goal. I’m gonna keep writing and putting out albums until I feel there’s a moment when I’ll know that I’ve made it, that’s where I wanna get to.
