Today, Caroline Kingsbury shares her long-awaited Heaven's Just A Flight LP, out now on Fortune Tellers Records. FLAUNT premiered the LP alongside the music video for "Kissing Someone Else," praising the album as "an honest retelling of her life."
This Caroline Kingsbury record is so close to a massive pop album, the kind you hear out on Republic Records with hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk into it so that it blasts out your speakers absolutely perfectly, the kind of inescapable music you hear taking over the airwaves and internet. And yet, it's something else entirely. It's the story of a young artist begging, borrowing and stealing to just get her voice heard, and of all the desperation and hard days cutting through.
With each song you can actually hear a young kid who moved from Florida writing in her bedroom and starting out on her own in her cheap Hollywood apartment. You are right alongside her chasing those massive pop sounds, going to work day after day at the local grocery, and going on tour with a band for the first time. Feel her tenacity waver as she gets stuck in a sleazy contract, as her agent leaves her, and as her first serious relationship falls apart. The record lands in this strange place that is really like the sound of our own dreams. It takes you right there with her. It's not so shiny, not so escapist anymore. Sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes it's broken. Sometimes dreams don't come true but we keep trying.
Entitled Heaven's Just a Flight, it's the story of a queer artist from a religious family coming out to the world, meeting her girlfriend, finding her people and her place. It's the story of her older brother's battle with cancer, his sudden passing just as she arrives home from her first national tour, just as she's set to release her first single. The music is bursting at its seams. You feel her story, her experience. It's the sound of a really big voice in a small world.
Heaven's Just a Flight is the first release from Fortune Tellers, a label founded by Peter Matthew Bauer of the Walkmen with several more to come in the following months. Last year, Caroline self released a few of these songs, opened forChai, Aurora, Miya Folick and wenton a US tour with Alex Lahey. Her music was also featured on the Netflix show"The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina." Up until now, she'd always gone under the name "Kingsbury." She has elected to shift her artist name to the full "Caroline Kingsbury" for the new record, deciding that, in these times, it was important to show exactly who you are-every side of you - "not just a fantasy of who you might become."
