When Caylee Hammack started readying her sophomore project, one album wasn’t expansive enough to reflect the depth of her thought and creativity.
Buoyed by co-producers Dann Huff and John Osborne of Brothers Osborne, Hammack released her 13-song album Bed of Roses on March 7. Its accompanying romance novel, also called Bed of Roses, is also available digitally. Hammack wrote the book with Carolyn Brown; hard copies will be available in June.
“It gave me this new creative facet that I was able to explore and define the parameters and the scenery of this album in more complex ways,” Hammack said of the book. “Just instead of three minutes at a time. I have 262 pages. I can really tell you everything now.”
Fans who listen to the album top-to-bottom will hear Hammack’s sonic story. If they listen to Bed of Roses from bottom to top, it’s her book’s plot.
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Caylee Hammack’s ‘Bed of Roses’ Tells More Than Her Story
“I made the album so that when you listen from top to bottom, that’s the evolution of me,” she said. “I swapped the track listing in reverse and then wrote the book around the track listing. If you listen to the album in reverse, that goes through chapter by chapter of the book and tells Sam’s story.”
Hammack underlines beautiful words, looks up definitions, and asked for dictionaries for Christmas in her younger years. The opportunity to explore words through storytelling in her novel was a gift.
“I just love creating,” Hammack said. “I’m obsessed with words. I love melody. Melody has been something, though, that to me came later in my life. Since I was eight years old, I’ve been obsessed with words.”
The singer looks at the phrase “bed of roses” as a metaphor for life is a bed you make.
“You get to decide every single day if you’re going to make it Heaven or Hell,” she said. “You allow it to be Heaven or Hell for yourself.”
Heaven or Hell, It’s Your Choice
Hammack spent years waiting for a boy to bring her flowers. Then, she stopped waiting and decided to grow her own. The concept of Bed of Roses grew from there.
“I think that there are some songs here that talk about just the heartbreak of letting go,” she said. “There’s some songs on here that talk about love and the passion and the fever that comes with it and those feelings.”
Her project is a collection of those experiences. Now that she’s happy in love “for once in my life,” she has a fresh perspective.
“I found a man that gives me the love that I never really had found outside of romance novels,” she said. “That kindness and that care really put into perspective the past 10 years. A lot of this album is about trying to find it; it’s the pursuit of it and all of the different detours and dead ends that you have to navigate as you figure out your way around the highway of life.”
Hammack hopes listeners home in on “No I Ain’t,” which she calls the “broken heart on the record.” She believes words have a lot of power – especially words you say to yourself, especially after heartbreak or while navigating heartbreak.
Caylee Hammack Wants You to Love Yourself Enough to Choose Yourself
“It heals you a little bit more, or it hurts you just a little bit more,” she said. “You can rip a scar open easier than you can heal it. I think that if we can learn how to speak kinder to ourselves, life is just overall better and kinder to us. I am the meanest person to ever be cruel to myself. The brain knows how to hurt the heart the most.”
“No I Ain’t,” she said, is about choosing yourself over the person who isn’t choosing you.
“You love yourself more than you love someone who doesn’t want to give you the love that you deserve,” she said. “I wanted something that a girl can sing over and over and over to themselves until they finally pick themselves, for once.”
(Photo by Keith Griner/Getty Images)
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