ODDITIES AND PRODIGIES GO HAND IN HAND: an interview with alternative pop star, CAROLINE ROMANO

Where are you from and how has your upbringing influenced who you are today? 

“I am from Mississippi originally, but I live in Nashville. I started coming up to Nashville when I was thirteen to write music… I had asked my parents to take me up there for my thirteenth birthday and fell in love with it. Nashville has been very influential for my music and it feels like everyone I’ve ever met is from there including both my band and close friends.” 

Who would you say influences most of your songwriting? 

“I would say I’m a big Taylor Swift, Holly Humberstone, and Lorde fan. I like different elements of their songwriting– like how it’s very storytelling but also not always the most sensical or structured. I really appreciate their work.” 

How do you want to impact listeners with the music you release? 

“I can only ever hope that it provides some sort of feeling of being understood. Particularly with artists like Noah Kahan or Taylor Swift, they’ll say things sometimes that I didn’t even know I felt or that other people felt the same way. They do this in a way that no one else has ever said before, and it makes me feel very at peace and understood. That is ultimately what I can hope for in my music and how it impacts other people.”

How has your experience on your first tour been so far? 

“It’s been incredible, the best parts have been like the best parts of my life. It’s been tiring and stressful in some moments, but has overall been great. I think the highest point of the tour so far would be playing an almost sold out show in San Francisco, and while I was standing in the back a man told me how he came here just to hear this one song that I have, it was unreal to me. He came here just to listen to ‘girl in a china shop’.” 

Do you have a specific process in your songwriting and production? 

“It happens a little bit differently every time, depending on who I’m writing with or producer wise. Sometimes I’ll write completely on my own in my house and I’ll bring a song to a friend that I trust and tell them this is what I want it to sound like. Other times someone will start up a track and I’ll just start writing to that with lyrics about a certain vibe or what is currently going on in my life. So, it depends, it’s different every time, but that’s what is fun about it.” 

What is your favorite song that you have written so far? 

“That’s hard, I have a song that no one really knows, but I put out an album two years ago, and it’s called ‘Leaving Wednesday’. I wrote it after listening to Noah Kahan, had actually sent it to him, and he responded. He was like, ‘Keep going, you’re doing great,’ and he gave me a follow, it was great! That song is very special to me because it was about me fully moving away to Nashville by myself and feeling like, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen but that’s kind of the great part about it.’”

Is there anything that you would like to share to new listeners and audience members of your music? 

“I always like to leave people with my life motto which is I think oddities and prodigies go hand in hand. It was the name of my first album and it’s something that I try to remember because the parts of me that I have disliked most about myself and the weirdest parts I guess of me have been the parts that have gotten me the farthest in life. They have ended up being the things that have taken me to the coolest places. Kind of cliche, but embrace your weirdness is I guess what I’m trying to say.”