What the world needs is a modern day Taylor Swift, I mean the “Tears On My Guitar” Taylor, maybe as late as “You Belong To Me” but somewhere around that time for sure. For all of Taylor Swift’s myriad of powers, she can’t help growing up and 17 year old successor to the country Princess Caroline Kole is the answer. Like Taylor, Caroline acts her age.
On her debut EP, the six song Caroline Kole, she has the best metaphor in the business, the unrequited song of the year, the country symphony of your teen dream, a sister track to Meghan Trainor’s “Dear Future Husband”. Despite being signed to Reba McEntire’s label, her back up band are friends not Nashville cats and the entire sound was professional without being fussy.
There is a lot going on here, one sweet natured song after another and on top? “Money To Me” shares the “heeeeey” hook with “Blank Space” except Caroline wrote hers a year before Taylor. And Caroline has those kind of songs, songs you want to hear over and over again, songs that her peers can embrace, that younger girls can daydream and hope to. But even if they weren’t greats songs, the voice is terrific, here is what I had to say in a live review from last summer (here): “She can sing speak, she can shout, she can whisper, she can suggest intimacy with a guy and go down low and when she needs to she can belt it out.” To put it simply, this mild mannered young lady has next big thing written all over her.
