Caroline Rose was on fire last year with their album The Art of Forgetting — quite almost literally. Their fourth studio full-length, released in March via New West, was Grammy-nominated for its cover art, which features Rose coolly lounging as the room they’re in is on fire. Now, Rose and band are on tour for their final lap for The Art of Forgetting, including a stop this Sunday (April 7) at Royale in Boston.
Earlier this week, Rose — whose ties to the area go back to their college years at Wellesley — took some time after the first night of tour in Portland, Maine, to talk to Vanyaland about touring, film, and just what went into that now-famous album cover.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Vanyaland: So you just kicked off the last tour of this album cycle, right?
Caroline Rose: Yeah, we just started. We’ve only played one show.
How was the first show?
It actually went really well. Usually the first show is mostly pain and suffering, and there was hardly any of that. I mean, you’re still kind of dialing things in, like we have new production, so there’s usually something that goes wrong. We had our fair share of things going wrong, but everybody handled it really well and I feel like we’re all in good spirits. We’re all just kind of happy to be here, and everyone seems grateful that we’re out.
How is this tour different for you, as an artist?
Touring is notoriously difficult. I feel like there’s still this facade, as though we’re all the Rolling Stones getting blood transfusions out here, and there’s just groupies everywhere, and it’s awesome. It’s so hard. It’s extremely expensive. And I’m constantly getting sick. We’re all under-slept and underfed. And it’s a good day if you have time in the morning to, like, go for a run and have a cup of coffee.
So it’s really it’s really difficult and we’re trying to find ways to just make it less difficult. Mostly that means trying to find ways to get more sleep and just make our time more enjoyable. So for instance, instead of just running from city to city, [we’re doing] multiple nights in one city. It’s more expensive, and it tends to mean that you’re in a smaller venue rather than moving in to a larger venue, or just playing one night in each city.
So the tour’s a lot longer, but the drives aren’t as intense, and we’re doing multiple nights in five or six different cities. So we have a need to go explore and meet people and have fun and actually see stuff. Because another common misconception is that we get to see all these amazing sights. And we pretty much never leave the venue. If we have 40 minutes before doors to get dinner outside of the venue, that’s pretty much all we see. So it’s like a three block radius around the venue. I think we want to enjoy this time. It’s such it’s such a big part of our lives, and the tour last year was really difficult. So I think we’re all just trying to find ways to just make it more fun.
Switching gears for a minute, there’s a lot of multi-modal art that you’ve been doing. You announced a short film viewing that you’re doing before shows. What’s your experience with multimedia and how do you approach it as an artist?
I’ve always been so inspired by film. I feel like it’s such a big part of my music. I think part of that is a testament to storytelling. Movies are just kind of this amazing method of telling a compelling story. I try and translate that into music. So when I’m doing the visuals, I always get really into it, from making the album covers, [to] designing the stage. And it’s usually something it depends on budget. I’ve been known to sink a lot of my own money into making the visual stuff, like the short film. It’s so expensive to make the visual stuff, and often the returns aren’t really there. So it’s mostly my own satisfaction as an artist and as a person. I think they go hand in hand to me. So you have the music and the visuals to it are just another way of enhancing the story.
I wanted to ask about the album cover as well. I know that was kind of a big labor of love for you and your team. And then the album cover got nominated for a Grammy. I would love to hear more about that process and what the result was for you.
I always get really into the covers. I mean, both my parents worked in publishing forever, especially my dad. He’s been doing it for many decades now, and he was art director at a publishing house. So that was how he made money, was making book covers. Growing up, I would always hear, ‘you should totally judge a book by its cover.’
And I do think it’s so incredibly important. Sometimes I’ll just kind of be flipping through things, like Spotify or going to a record shop, and if I see a compelling cover, it immediately draws me in. And I want to know who it is and what music sounds like. So yeah, I think, you know, [with] Loner and Superstar and The Art of Forgetting, all the covers are really cool. I wish we could’ve submitted for Grammys for all of them, because I think they’re all cool. And they all have their own story, and were very much a labor of of love. And they usually required a team of people to make.
This one had a bunch of people involved, and they’re mostly my genius friends who helped me kind of do everything. We recreated, built a whole set in this warehouse in my backyard in Texas. We were going to light the thing on fire. I ended up not lighting it on fire — not because it was incredibly expensive and difficult, no, that would make way too much sense. It was mostly because you can’t control the lighting [with] the fire. So we ended up kind of recreating this set of my my living room, and then in creating all of the effects of what the fire would do to a room if it was burned, and then we kind of pieced it all together, visually in post. I can talk more about that.
You’re more than welcome to!
There’s just a lot to talk about there. I will mention some of the people that helped me make it. It was based off of this film photo that my friend Monica Murray took. This is this was during the time [of the pandemic] when everybody was on a road trip to find themselves, and she came to visit me. She just had this really cool, old, specialty Polaroid type film with this really beautiful color. It had really intense color. It was a type of Polaroid that you pull and peel. But it was very old, it was on an odd format camera.
She had 10 of these [film shots], and I remember it was like the ninth or 10th photo, towards the end of the thing, she just got this incredible photo of me in my house. We were just messing around, you know, I’m like such a thespian and I’m always dressing up and kind of finding some funny way of stylizing photos. So it was just a sort of funny photo of me in this ridiculous outfit, like my underwear and this fur coat.
I always thought it was just such a great picture. And I sat on it for like a year and a half and [thought] ‘wouldn’t it be so cool if it was the same photo, but just the living room was on fire?’ And it just so happens my next door neighbor, Andy Flores, is another brilliant artist, who helped me design the set. Our friend Tori Reynolds built the set. And then my friend Sam Bennett, he kind of helped edit the whole thing, and he was also the director of the short film. So all my friends are kind of involved in this album cycle, which ended up being really personal, and really cool to, you know, to hang out with my friends and make art.
What can folks expect from your show coming up in Boston?
Well, it’ll be different from the last time. Last time we were at Royale, we were playing the album in its entirety, and this whole tour is just going to be different. I don’t feel as heavy. And I also don’t feel like I need to adhere to the album anymore — we already did that. And so it’ll be kind of a combination of the last three albums and I just really want it to be fun and light.
We have a new stage production, and it’s the last tour that we’re doing with this configuration of this band and the last tour of the album cycle. So, I think there’s just going to be an element of levity that I personally need. And, you know, I think we’re all just grateful to be here. We’re all just grateful to be on tour. This tour almost didn’t happen at all. I was going to cancel the whole thing because it was such a difficult album to tour, mstly emotionally, but also it’s, you know, it’s really taxing being out here. We do a lot. Everyone’s wearing multiple hats on tour. So it really, just takes a lot of energy and time and money to make it happen. And, y’know, I’m glad that we’re doing it. I think it’ll be really beautiful.
CAROLINE ROSE + LA FORCE :: Sunday, April 7 at Royale, 279 Tremont St. in Boston, MA :: 7 p.m., all-ages, $29.50 :: Event page :: Advance tickets