Negative Outlook

Tell Caitlin Rose that you're calling from Melbourne, and it's like you're on the line from her home away from home. The Nashville native spent a week hanging out in Fitzroy on her first Australian tour in 2011, played a show at a suburban RSL and journeyed out to country Victoria to play at Boogie festival in Tallarook and with The Felice Brothers. Wherever she went, Rose was surprised by the vocal nature of local audiences; even if, for the 26 year old, dealing with crowds hollering things at her is par for the show-playin' course.

“I definitely seem to encourage [crowd interaction], whether knowingly or unknowingly,” says Rose, on the phone from her actual home in Nashville. “Sometimes I enjoy it, but it can go either way. There's some people who are just trying to create a vibe, an atmosphere in the room, and I like that; it feels communal. In some ways, crowd interaction is why you start performing, because you want that response from other people, you want your music to take on a different life. But there are other people who think they can have this real one-to-one, personal moment with you despite the fact that there's several hundred other people in the room. That's when it gets weird, or uncomfortable, or just wrong.”

When stopping to consider why Rose – quietly spoken yet slyly humorous in conversation, but vocally blessed with an old-fashioned, heartbreaking country warble – might encourage crowd interaction, she's unsure. Could it be that listeners, tuning into records that have her name and face on the cover, feel like they already know her? “Yeah, but you can never really know someone all that much just through hearing their music, you can only know a certain part of them,” Rose considers. “You may know the part of them that creates, but there's always a lot more to people than that. People tap into different aspects of their personality when they write, it's never a whole personality kind of a thing. I don't think, just by listening to somebody's records, you can ever get to know them.”

Rose's records walk a line between straight country and gentle transgression; her wry, observationist character sketches told in a drawl over golden-toned guitars and lingering swipes of pedal-steel. Since her first record, 2008's Dead Flowers, they've grown both more luxuriant and more dark, the warm country hues of 2010's breakout Own Side Now giving way to the nocturnal, barfly tales of the more dramatic and far darker The Stand-In.

“There's a strong undercurrent of negativity going through my music, even at live shows,” Rose says, somewhat cryptically. Negativity? “Well, it's not exactly light-hearted, is it?” she responds. “I don't think the music that I create has a positive outlook to it, at all. It's pretty dark, at the core. Which goes back to what I say: it's only one aspect of who you are that comes out when you play. I'm not a particularly serious person, and I definitely try to have a sense of humour about my music, about the things that people say – the repetition of it. But none of that actually comes out on the records themselves.”

Rose didn't come at country as a traditionalist; instead, Her earliest musical explorations were far more of the punk rock variety. She dropped out of school at 16, and her love of old-school country came from first hearing Merle Haggard covered by The Mountain Goats. When her music first caught on in the UK – heard through the exotic lens of 'Americana' – Rose embarked on her first tour having never, before that, left the South. In the years since, she's seen the world, and Australian suburban RSLs, solely through the prism of touring.

“You're travelling the world, but you don't really see the world,” says Rose. “You see bars, hotels, vans. When you do go out it's usually late at night, after a show; you hang out until it's too late to go out anymore, go to bed, wake up, drive, end up in another bar. I remember one time we flew to Paris for six hours, we were going there just to do this radio thing. Then, on the way back to the airport, it was raining, and we all jumped out of the cab, took pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower. Then we got back into the cab, went to the airport, and flew home. That's kind of what touring feels like.”