Premiere: Caroline Culver comes clean on debut single, ‘Honest’
The indie darling leaves an indelible mark with her first ever single.
A debut can do one of two things: fade into the background or rise to the surface. Caroline Culver‘s “Honest” (pre-save) firmly rests in the latter. Her dark rasp pokes through an electric static, eliciting such an intensity to drag you into her world of tearful brooding. As a first single goes, it shakes you to the core, wraps around your veins, and submerges you in swampy emotional waters. Culver sidewinds across the melody, and its bedeviling ways will hypnotize. “Tattoos on his skin / Stories I get lost inside of them / Wake me up at 3 am / Just to tell me that I’m something different,” her vocal cords puff in charred ribbons.
The Nashville singer-songwriter unravels a toxic relationship, and each thorn she removes from her skin leaves a gaping wound. “If I’m being honest, I don’t feel the way I should,” she howls at the pain on the hook. She brandishes her voice as a makeshift soothing agent, letting the pain flood from her bones, and it’s the kind of catharsis that’s painful and beautiful and totally arresting. “You don’t wanna leave, but I wish you would / If I’m being honest / I don’t say what I could,” she admits to her complacency. But she commands it all now in this moment, and she’s had enough. “You don’t wanna hear it / So I keep my mouth shut…”
On the song, Culver writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “It’s easy to lose sight of who you are when you’re with the wrong person. So I wrote this song about not being real with yourself and the relationship you are in. It’s also about finding my honest self expression as an artist,” she explains. “Whether those feelings stem from a toxic relationship or something else; I think no matter what, the most important thing to do in life is get real [and] confront these things. This song grows a new meaning in my life as I continue to sit with it. As a person, I strive to be honest with everything I do; I hope to be transparent with my songs.”
“Honest” (pre-save here) is a blistering performance and anchors a sequence of singles this year, culminating in an EP (slated for later this year or early 2021). To celebrate the release, Culver is performing a live stream show on Friday (March 27) at 9pm CST
Listen below:
Follow Culver on her socials: Facebook | Instagram | Website
