Caitlin Rose: Born At The Right Time

“Jordan and Skylar are like this funny little team,” says Rose. “It harkens back to the Hollywood thing to me. Have you seen Some Like It Hot? It’s like Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis. They’re constantly riffing off each other and they feed off each others’ creativity.”

Rose hadn’t see Lehning for a while when he approached her one night at a concert production of the musical Les Misérables at Nashville’s Mercy Lounge. “He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey I’ve got some songs for you’,” Rose remembers.

Earlier that day, Lehning had begun working on a new song called “Everywhere I Go.” “While I was writing it, I thought, ‘God, Caitlin would kill this song’,” says Lehning. “But we had not spoken in a very long time.”

On the finished version of “Everywhere I Go,” Rose sounds like a crystal coming through the speaker, singing, “I could sail across the ocean from the shoreline of Japan / Cut through every city and every foreign land / Run away from it all just as fast as I can / But no matter where I go there I am.”

She describes the song’s production as a “glass house” and “fragile-sounding,” and credits Lehning’s touch. “That’s what he’s done with me for a long time,” she says. “When we first started working together he took me out of that country place for a minute and said, ‘You don’t have to be a goofy country artist’.”

Wilson recalls the songwriting process with Lehning and Rose. “We wrote most of these in her living room. I would be lying on the floor, policing the songs, going ‘Where are we going? What is this person saying’,” he says.

The trio worked out each character’s psychodrama, building narratives and storylines and trying to figure out their motivations, creating composite sketches from each writer’s own experience.

“It was a very challenging but always comfortable process,” says Rose. “Writing the songs was my favorite part of making this record.”

The Stand-In’s crown jewel is “Golden Boy,” which Rose wrote by herself and brought to Lehning and Wilson in the studio. She says the “lush instrumental” sound of Richard Hawley’s Coles Corner helped inspire the production.

“It turned into a real dreamy song,” says Wilson. “It’s congruent with ‘Pink Champagne.’ We were all just like, ‘Wow, how’d you do that?’”

“Doomsday came and you were still around,” Rose sings. “Golden boy don’t go away / I won’t ask you what you’re here for if you stay,” she continues before the chill bump-inducing pedal steel interlude and “psycho-Sinatra” strings.

Rose says she felt freer rein in the studio to push “Golden Boy” in the direction she wanted. “I wanted to accomplish something that was very beautiful and shed the feeling of being on tour and rough-and-tumble. Sonically, it’s the closest to what I’ve been fascinated with for the last six months.”

If you thought Rose was a country revivalist in the vein of George Jones, you might be surprised by the songwriting and airy pop productions on The Stand-In, which draws more from standards and Tin Pan Alley than Nashville’s three chords and the truth.

“I wouldn’t say I’m not a country songwriter. That’s what I started doing, then I did with it what I wanted,” explains Rose.

“She never limited herself to country music,” adds Wilson. “She’s a whiz at songs and kind of a musicologist. She knows everything. She knows good songs whether it’s Fred Foster, or jazz or musicals, hillbilly country or blues.”

Just like her song choices – from Nashville to Hollywood – nothing is off limits for Rose on The Stand-In.