Carol - More Than A Goodbye (2023)

More Than a Goodbye, the debut album from New York-based artist Carol, started the day that a lot of things ended. On March 13th, 2020, Carolyn Flaherty and her band at the time––Ruben Radlauer (drums), Emma Stacher (bass), and Jack Wetmore (guitar)––were driving from New York City to Boston for a show that proved to be their last before the entire world shut down.

“We had a really long, weird drive to Massachusetts. It was foggy and there were State of Emergency signs all over the highway,” Carol remembered. “We listened to music in the car the whole time and didn’t say anything. I had never felt that intense and ominous feeling before, but I also was like, ‘It’s gonna be okay. We are together, and that is how it probably was always meant to be.’”

In the summer of 2020, Carol and the band all met up again for the first time since saying goodbye in March to work in upstate New York. For two weeks, the four of them lived together as a single force. Waking up together, swimming in the lake together, rolling down hills, eating, spinning, laughing, the four found a pronounced focus on the true meaning of “play” and discovered the starting point to More Than a Goodbye. But this convergence, a blip only made possible by a world on pause, was as fleeting as it was magical. A sad truth, perhaps, but a beautiful one nonetheless.

On More Than A Goodbye, Carol is acutely aware of these everyday yet metamorphic contradictions––to love is to surrender; to trust is to bare your wounds––and explores the space between these equal and opposite forces. Every track displays Carol’s masterful ability to mine ordinary happenings for quiet, stirring breakthroughs. These moments––a woman crying from a next door window, the creek turning cold, feet hitting the ground at the end of the cartwheel––render the language between light and dark in her music, an emotional balancing act that never gives way to either end.

“The songs on this album are about the most simple dualities and the most simple ceremonies that we can see all the time,” Carol reflected. “I’m not only thinking about the languages that exist between people, but also the language between worlds, between us and nature, and how as much as language can help us communicate, it can also prohibit us from learning things in so many ways.”

Above all else, the album delicately but assuredly states the fact light and dark will always be constants in our lives. Friendships form, love blooms, bonds break, things die; all the time and all at once. That fact might be overwhelming or scary, but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of love and joy (or vice versa). It’s up to us to see these bonds and contradictions for what they are, and to be brave enough to embrace them all.