For the Sake of the Song: Caroline Spence “Softball”

Around 7 years ago two new female singer-songwriters appeared. on my radar at least, who both had the songwriting chops and the voices to match that might presage long and successful careers. One was Emily Scott Robinson, who I posted for this Feature recently with her song ‘The Dress’. The second is Caroline Spence, who had just released a brilliant album called “Spades and Roses”, which I thought was the best album of 2017, with song after beautiful song full of personal insights  (about loneliness on the road (‘Hotel Amarillo‘)  seeking love (‘Heart of Somebody’), concerns for a friend (‘You don’t look so good (Cocaine)’ etc), all sung in Spence’s sweet, sometimes tremulous voice, with a slight ache in it. For me the highlight was the song that appears here, more of which a bit later.

Spence was born in Virginia but gravitated to Nashville where she was drawn to the writing and musical styling of Guy Clark – “discovering his songwriting was incredibly eye-opening for me. The simplicity of his writing, and how you could be in the song, kind of following along pretty easily with what he’s saying and there would be two lines, you know, that would come out of nowhere. That are said so simply, but cut and hit so hard. That’s power in writing”  After winning American Songwriter’s Lyric Contest Spence released her debut album “Somehow” in 2015, a lovely acoustic affair, which I did not hear until after “Spades and Roses” came out – the latter was a big step forward with a number of the traits that she saw in Clark’s writing, as in:

‘Softball; a lovely tune with apparently simple lyrics about a girl playing sports, but in reality a hard-hitting polemic about the inequality of women in a man’s workplace:  “One day Coach will put me in / I’ve been working hard / I can catch any pop fly / And hit one out of the yard / And if there’s one thing that I’m sure of  / It’s I could win ’em all / And when I make it to the majors / They ain’t gonna call it ‘softball’ “

And to go with, the video produced to accompany the song is quite superb, although I personally enjoyed her solo interpretation at the Rough Trade East emporium when she was touring to promote the album. Enjoy.