Caitlyn Smith used to have a go-to answer whenever she’d walk into a writing room and someone would ask how she’s doing. “I’m amazing,” she’d often reply, the phrase serving as a mask for the pain she was feeling inside.
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Smith is now taking off that mask as she thoughtfully explores the highs and lows of life on her new album, High & Low. Smith preceded the album with the High EP released in April 2022. She’s now completing the story with High & Low, which dropped on Friday (April 14).
“I realized there wasn’t ever one pure high and pure low because everything is mixed,” Smith explains to American Songwriter about the project. “Even the highs are mixed with a tinge of sadness sometimes and even the lows have colors of triumph for real, beautiful things. I realized that it needed to be all mixed together because that’s also how life is too.”
Since moving to Nashville in 2009 as a staff songwriter at Cornman Music, Smith has established herself as one of the city’s powerhouse songwriters, penning a variety of songs ranging from Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s final duet, “You Can’t Make Old Friends,” to “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” by Meghan Trainor and John Legend and “High” by Miley Cyrus, Smith recording her own version of the latter song for her new album. But Smith admits that in the past, she would cushion a sad or dark remark with a laugh to ease the tension and admits that she would “hide” behind her songs, a habit she’s broken with High & Low.
“I’m so guilty of putting on a face and I love to make my life look perfect and like I have it all together, but I realized that it was exhausting to keep the facade up,” she observes. “In making this record, it was a massive growth season. Going through a lot of therapy and digging through my own mental health in the last few years brought me to a place of trying to be more real.”
She honors this sense of vulnerability across the album that she self-produced. On “High,” she incorporates a gospel choir to help drive home the “spiritual” nature of the song. She cites the title track that closes the album as one she is “insanely proud of,” as it serves as “the summary of this season that I’m in” through such potent lyrics as, Nobody knows I’m crying in a bathroom stall / I’m living in a house of cards about to fall / But I make them believe that I’ve never been better / I am the great pretender.
Smith points to “Alaska” as another track she’s “proud” of and it’s perhaps the most vulnerable song on the record. Inspired by her parents’ relationship and that of her own with her husband of 13 years, Rollie Gaalswyk whom she shares two children, Smith offers an honest portrayal of marriage. She pulls no punches with the first verse that states, I’m terrified we’ll end up like my parents / Together but alone, singing to her own husband who’s in the next room sipping tequila on ice, yet they may as well be worlds apart. And if your walls were mountains / I would shake you like an earthquake / ‘Cause baby, your heart’s in another place / When you look at me, boy, you might as well be in Alaska, she sings in the aching ballad.
“Being in life with someone can be difficult, so just being real with that and saying it how it is has been really therapeutic,” she describes the song’s meaning, particularly the line I’m terrified we’ll end up like my parents / Together but alone. “That was the hardest one to write, but I think after I wrote it, I had chills down to my toes and then I felt afraid to put it in the song and I was like, ‘I think it needs to be in the song.’ I hope by me saying it how it is, people are able to connect with them.”
It’s that sense of connection Smith hopes fans feel as they listen to the album that she poured her heart and soul into, intentional about saying out loud the feelings she’s been holding in for so long. “I think this entire exercise of this record has been, ‘Let’s tap into that [pain],’ because I know I’m not alone in the feelings that I have,” she proclaims.
“It’s been a massive exercise as a human and a writer to tap into the pain, and I think being able to say it out loud and not deny it, you’re able to then find freedom in that. In me being able to be vulnerable with myself and putting it into my songs, that’s how I’m able to heal it. Music is a magical therapy and I feel like that’s what this record has been. So I hope people feel seen in this record.”
Smith continues on her headlining The Great Pretender Tour, which resumes on April 18 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at Cat’s Cradle and concludes on June 1 in Denver, Colorado, at Fox Theatre. She’s also nominated for New Female Artist of the Year at the 2023 ACM Awards, airing live from the Ford Center at The Star in Dallas, Texas on May 11 on Amazon Prime Video at 8 p.m. ET.
Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of Essential Broadcast Media
