The first lyrical image on the debut album from Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says, is a name written on a window. In Sallee’s song, her lover left the mark months earlier, before she took a Greyhound around the West Coast—a trip that would inspire her to return to her family home in Alabama and create an album in her parents’ basement. But when we meet Sallee here, the name has faded away, as she attempts to wipe herself clean of this person’s impact through the passing of time.
There is a lot that is familiar on her new Caroline Says record, which is called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Hair is left on a pillow; the streetlights glow at night. And then there’s the project’s name and album title, lifted from the pop music lexicon, borrowing from a Lou Reed song and an unofficial Elvis Presley album respectively. Death and solitude and heartbreak are sung about with the same reverence, to the point that they become virtually interchangeable, all factors leading to a similar state of melancholy. The result is a road trip album that knows the catharsis of looking out the window as the scenery changes. It’s firm in its belief that running away and running towards aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s even resolute in its genre hopping, as if turning of the dial to hear whatever station is coming in clearly.
Getting a proper release after a tape-only run in 2014, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong returns as a precursor to a proper studio follow-up expected next year. But working on her own doesn’t hold her back. “Winter Is Cold” is fleshed out with hissing harmonies that mimic the wind rushing by a speeding vehicle. “Funeral Potatoes” replaces a twinkling piano line and Brian Wilson-sounding backing vocals with the static of the radio waves fading away over miles. And the record’s best and most Lou Reed-sounding song, “Lost Feeling,” winds down with an extended fade out until all that remains is an atmospheric whooshing. Homespun recording, for Caroline Says, is an asset that adds to the sensations of days passing and cities flickering by.
Clocking in at under 30 minutes, Sallee packs numerous songwriting and recording styles into the collection. The gentle bossa nova of “My Fiance’s Pets” passes by like a satellite, while “I Think I’m Alone Now” uses higher fidelity to support her most straightforward melody. “Gravy Dayz” drifts closer to C86 than anything else, and “Ghost Pokes” glistens as sunny California garage pop. There’s an ease to Sallee’s gear switching, even if it is the soothing folk music that binds the album together and winds up being its most memorable element. “I never know what I’m doing,” she claims on “My Fiance’s Pets”; the line doesn’t speak as well for her art as it does for her relationships.
But the heartbreak that Sallee reflects on and flees throughout 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong is never completely outpaced in the miles she travels. When the album closes, the name that faded away from her window on the album’s opening lines lingers. “Even when you weren’t there, I never cut you out,” she sings on “Lost Feeling,” her ghosts never quite disappearing from the rearview mirror. If the journey can’t put the past to rest, maybe an album can.
