Listen Now:

Caitlin Rose at Swan Dive in Austin, Texas, during SXSW. Photo by Jack Martin.

Nashville singer-songwriter Caitlin Rose has something in common with British chart-topper Adele and hip-hop moguls Kanye West and Jay-Z. On December 7, they all made TIME Magazine’s top ten albums of the year. Rose’s debut Own Side Now is the closest thing to country on the list—closer even than an album by the acoustic duo the Civil Wars, which landed two spots behind hers. But it’s Rose’s sharp twist on country tradition that’s grabbing ears.

Having It Both Ways

Caitlin Rose’s music is a captivating bundle of contradictions. A couple of months back, a blogger for the mother of all rock magazines—Rolling Stone—described her pop tune “Shanghai Cigarettes” as “twangy”. That descriptor has shown up in lots of blog and print reviews of her album—and not as a criticism.

It’s perfectly clear that neither that nor any other track on Own Side Now is aimed at the Billboard Country Songs Chart. The scruffy, fuzz tone of the song’s signature guitar lick—which makes no concessions whatsoever to radio-friendly production—is one dead giveaway.

Twenty-four year old Rose has shown she’s not only a sure-handed songwriter, but one who’s unfazed by stylistic contrasts, and that’s drawing attention from critics and show-goers who prefer their music a little left-of-center.

In hers, you can hear the classic, contoured forms of the countrypolitan era, plus ‘60s and ‘70s pop. But they’re filtered through a contemporary indie rock lens—from lean, live-sounding arrangements to skepticism toward happily-ever-after endings.

Early stages

Sure, critics have showered Rose with Patsy Cline comparisons, but Patsy probably wouldn’t have gotten away with singing biting words of self-reclamation like these from Rose’s song “For the Rabbits”: “Looking back at myself/It’s wrong how much I change for you/I sit back and watch my channels/Change just how you want them to.”

Rose has a knack for nailing the wounded heart’s prickliest emotions in her songwriting.

“There’s very little romanticism in relationships, I think. Maybe for some people. …I feel like it’s kind of stretching the truth. But as far as misery goes, you can stretch that as much as you want, because I feel like everybody can wallow pretty hard. The romantic stuff has always been really funny to me. I don’t really know how to write that,” she says.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit

On paper, Rose seemed destined to wind up in mainstream country territory. Her family moved to Nashville when she was seven so that her dad, Johnny Rose, could take a job with a country record label. When her parents divorced, her mom, Liz Rose, got into songwriting and collaborated with a young Taylor Swift, a partnership that yielded “Teardrops on My Guitar” and a host of other ultra-successful songs.

All that was more or less background noise to Caitlin—until she heard Merle Haggard’s honky-tonk number “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” performed as a sort of barroom scream-along by John Darnielle, the lead singer of the lo-fi indie rock band The Mountain Goats.

“I heard him do that song,” remembers Rose, “and didn’t know it was a cover. Once I finally went out and bought the Merle Haggard Greatest Hits, it was kind of just like an instant thing.”

Not that her high school friends necessarily got her sudden urge to tune in to WSM-AM and repeatedly spin Linda Ronstadt LPs.

Says Rose, “I remember one time a guy I was dating said, ‘So you’re really into this stuff, right? Like, you’re not being ironic?’ I was kind of disappointed, because I didn’t really think of it that way.”

Charting her own path

By this time, Rose was quietly writing songs. But instead of turning to her well-connected parents to try and get a leg up in the music business, she snuck off and played all-ages clubs and house shows in Nashville’s underground punk scene.

“I don’t think my dad or mom went to one of my shows until I was 19 or something,” she says. “It was very separate. So I didn’t grow up with that sort of them being really excited about what I was doing and kind of like bragging about me. I grew up with me trying to keep it away.”

The Indie Route

Rose’s hit-writing mom had no idea what to expect the first time her teenaged daughter let her come to a show. Back then Caitlin was performing her songs at breakneck punk speed, but Liz Rose was immediately struck by something else.

“What I heard,” says the elder Rose, “was the lyric and how brilliant, you know, how good the lyric was. …I never interfered. I never said, ‘You should be doing it this was or that way.’ I just kind of sat back and said ‘She’s got something.’ And I just let her do her thing.”

And, yes, in case you’re wondering, mutually respecting mother and daughter keep their songwriting separate even now. Liz Rose relates, “You know, people say, ‘Why don’t y’all write together?’ Well, when you look at her songs and the lyrics, it’s like, she can’t sit down with her mother and write that!”

With her parents’ hands-off support, but without a specific career plan, Caitlin continued grinding it out in local clubs. She found a home at the tiny Nashville imprint Theory 8 and—while still in her fast-tempo phase—made an album that’s never seen the light of day. “It’s almost more like a punk record than a country record,” she says.

After that, Rose recorded her Dead Flowers EP, followed by Own Side Now, which got buzz overseas last year and was finally released in the U.S. in March by Theory 8. It was re-released, to greater response, on the sizable indie label ATO in October.

Rose has found a good fit touring with acts like Justin Townes Earle and Deer Tick, who, like her, grew up with an irreverent take on roots music.

Caitlin and her dad, Johnny Rose.

“I think that’s the funniest part, is that we all kind of spent a lot of time pretending that we didn’t like country music,” she says. “And then it came out in our music, and then we were this weird thing in a rock scene.”

Weird no more—now Rose’s blended sensibilities are precisely the appeal. And Rose is the striking songwriter she is at least in part because of the self-guided, freewheeling musical journey that got her here.