Seventeen years in rural Mississippi, breathing in grazing country air, weren’t enough to convince Caroline Romano that the state could be her forever home. She said she never felt like she belonged among the Magnolia State’s country landscapes. Romano only needed one trip to find her true home, the place that makes her heart sing.
Instead of Mississippi, she sought refuge in Nashville, Tennessee, the country’s songwriting capital, where she could channel her burgeoning musical talents into fulfilling her wildest dreams. She first got a glimpse into life in Music City, USA, at 13 years old, when her family took a trip there and she played guitar-strapped gigs at venues such as the Bluebird Cafe.
Her brief escape to Tennessee confirmed what her heart had already been feeling: Nashville is where she needed to be.
“I first came to Nashville when I was 13, and I fell in love with it immediately. This is my place, for sure,” Romano said.
Four years later, 17-year-old Romano packed her things, left the Magnolia State behind and made her pilgrimage to the southern musical mecca, marking the official beginning of her professional music career. The transition, she said, presented plenty of hardships, including feeling isolated in a huge city as a teenager.
She also had to navigate a shifting music industry, one that now puts heavy emphasis on streaming and social media platforms. According to her, it’s both “it’s easier than ever [and] harder than ever to break through. In the past five years, it’s been a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what works.” These challenges, though, fueled her drive to succeed. She went out and made connections with fellow creatives and learned how to be independent while simultaneously existing within a bustling community. These essential, humanistic lessons have infused her musicality with a sense of openness and immense vulnerability.
Her determination paid big, early dividends in the industry, as after a year in Nashville, she scored a collab with the megastar producer R3HAB. He remixed her song “I Still Remember,” and the remix found success on the Billboard Dance Charts and is currently sitting at over 3 million Spotify streams. Overall, her relatively fledgling musical career has, so far, culminated in thousands of followers across Spotify, Instagram and TikTok, among many other social media platforms.
The singer-songwriter, now 22, said despite her early musical escapades in Nashville and her eventual relocation to the city, all as a teenager, she was nonetheless always a girl of few words, uncomfortable steering through social situations. She embodies this in her music, as she’s the self-proclaimed “loudest sort of introvert,” the patron saint of Gen. Z pop punk, mixing booming, bombastic choruses with meditative verses drenched with emotional resonance and brutal honesty.
“I don’t think people necessarily gleam that I’m an introvert from the music I write, but the whole reason I do it is because that’s where I’m loud, that’s the only time I’m extraverted and feel like the truest version of myself,” Romano said.
While her songs center around a part-pop, part-punk, part-alternative rock sound, listeners shouldn’t make the mistake of placing Romano in simple, restrictive categories.
Take “St. George,” the fifth track from her latest EP, “A Brief Epic,” for example, where quiet, reflective lyrics crescendo into a headbanging dance beat, enticing listeners to dance and sway to crushing, forlorn love while they cling to hope that their lover will “come down, for sure.”
Romano’s latest single, “Tell Her I Said Hi,” which she released on Friday, Dec. 8, leans heavily into the alternative-rock aspect of her persona. The song straddles an odd, yet relatable dichotomy, evoking feelings of resentment and indignation, amplified by booming guitars, yet also acceptance and subtle resignation. Though this past relationship has left her “bruised by half-truths,” and she hasn’t fully healed, Romano is willing to express her feelings one final time, let her ex’s new partner keep her jewelry and begin to move on.
Romano said, “I think they’re going to get a lot of what they’re expecting from it, and it's definitely one that’s been really requested from my fans. They should prepare to be emotional, sad and a little bit heartbroken still, but also ready to get past it and angry.”
On the opening, self-titled track of her debut album, “Oddities and Prodigies,” Romano embarks on a musical rollercoaster, riding an addictive bassline on a steady incline before plunging into autotuned vocals, a rebellious punk chorus and a hint of trap production, which all comes to a satisfying close with smooth background harmonies. Following that odyssey of soundscapes, the album immediately transitions into a slow, melancholic but hopeful ballad on mental health, titled “Panic Attack.”
In summation, leave all expectations and preconceived notions behind when Romano’s at the helm.
Her single, “girl in a china shop,” which was released on Nov. 17, is an in-your-face analysis of who Romano is, flaws and all. Lyrics such as “I carry a baseball bat and a broom, but I’m the most breakable thing in the room,” alongside a declarative, blaring chorus laced throughout the song, ultimately speak to Romano’s psyche at 22: “I’m scared that my worst is the best that I’ve got.”
“I wrote ‘girl in a china shop’ about five days after I turned 22 in September. I was at this point where I felt like I was getting older, but becoming way more immature, and making way more mistakes than I did when I was a teenager…I juxtaposed basically the best and worst parts of myself, my sins and flaws, in the verses,” she said.
Romano recommends “girl in a china shop” and “St. George” to new listeners wanting to get a sense of her artistic direction.
“You get a little taste of the really introspective, soft side of my writing, but also more of the anger that’s come out lately in my choruses,” she said.
Romano’s found plenty of success in just five years of pounding Nashville’s pavement. She’s aiming for higher goals – she wants to tour, travel the world, sell out stadiums and amass thousands of fans listening to her music, to be exact. Lofty goals, to say the least, but if anyone has the talent and tenacity to reach them, it’s Romano.
“I always say, [I want to go] as far and wide as I can possibly go,” she said.
Her intergenre sound, rich in honesty and punchy pop-punk choruses, has the potential and the accessibility to reach huge audiences and populate thousands of heartbreak playlists. At just 22, she has time to become the stadium-packing artist of her dreams. Give Romano’s music a listen, and buy in now while she’s still on her ascent, because before any of us know it, she’ll firmly take hold atop the musical summit.
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