Caroline Cotter

“Find me somewhere out on the road / Take me into your heart and into your home,” Caroline Cotter sings in the first song on her third album, Gently as I Go. The new music takes listeners around the world and deep into human emotions, reminding them that home can be anywhere, if you’ve found someone who shares your heart.

“Don’t Wait,” the first single from Gently as I Go, encourages listeners to seize the day — “a reminder that we have in our power the ability to take action and create our present and future,” Cotter says. Ironically, though, the singer-songwriter ended up waiting three years to release her new album. She had just finished recording the 11 songs in March of 2020, and with the world reeling, she simply couldn’t find a reason or the motivation to share them. “To me, at the time, it felt unimportant,” Cotter admits.

Fortunately, the past three years have only strengthened Cotter’s belief in these songs while further defining her own essence. Gently as I Go explores travel and connection, essential to who Caroline is, as well as things many of us experience such as procrastination, love, life and death, nostalgia and growing up, loss and gratitude. Often, even the most disparate of those ideas coexist: for example, in “The Year of the Wrecking Ball.” Written by Cotter in early 2020, during Escape to Create’s month-long artist residency in Seaside, Florida, the song wrestles with the dissolution of a traditional family and the loss of a safe, comforting place from childhood, but finds gratitude for the beautiful, albeit different, relationships formed in the wake.

Songs dealing with difficult transitions that we face continue to pop up throughout the album, including “The Call,” which Cotter wrote for her 104-year-old grandfather’s funeral, and the title track, about saying goodbye to a partner in love, life, and music. Throughout, Cotter’s “smooth, tremulous soprano” (WickedLocal.com) and calming delivery are reminiscent of the female folk singers who came before her: Mary Chapin Carpenter or Natalie Merchant, for example.

Often, the peace Cotter’s songs bring is as much for her as it is for her audience. She started “Don’t Wait” to offer words of encouragement to a friend but recalls that it quickly became clear its message was something she also needed to hear, and now it’s “a song for all of us who put off creating our lives to the fullest,” Cotter says. “We really do already have all that we need. And yet, without confidence, our fullest life can appear murky or completely out of reach.”