Name: Caroline Rose
Start: 2024-05-11T21:00:00-07:00
Location: 777 Valencia Street San Francisco CA 94110

$32 Advance and $36 Day of Show
$102 The Art of Forgetting VIP Screening includes:
- One premium reserved ticket in the first 15 rows -or- GA ticket (where applicable)
- Invitation to a pre-show screening of “The Art of Forgetting” short film
- Limited edition lyric booklet signed by Caroline
- $10 USD merchandise coupon* and shopping opportunity before doors open to the public
- Commemorative “The Art of Forgetting” movie ticket
- Priority entry into the venue*Note: Merchandise coupon is redeemable at this show only
Website [https://www.carolinerosemusic.com] | Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/artist/06W84OT2eFUNVwG85UsxJw?si=TZGiRQ78TtWsS-9IyWxOLw] | YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@carolineroseFM] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/carolinerosemuzak/?hl=en]
Dine with us at Curio [https://www.curiobarsf.com] and receive Expedited Entry into The Chapel! When you kick off your evening with dinner and drinks at Curio, you'll be checked into the show right at your table and avoid the line outside. Be sure to tell us you're coming to the show when you make your reservation HERE [https://www.opentable.com/restref/client/?corrid=869f5291-d743-45e7-86e1-a220169d0799&lang=en-US&ot_source=Restaurant%20website&restref=107224].

"Sometimes you've got to express yourself because if you don't you'll explode," says songwriter/producer Caroline Rose of their latest album, The Art of Forgetting. "...and I felt like I was going to explode.”
After a series of heartbreaking events, Rose had no desire to make a statement, let alone make a new album. It was a time of contemplation and transformation, a time to slow down. What transpired was what the artist considers a gradual union of reconnection and growth. “I was writing songs the way that I used to when I was a kid. It was more like therapy, just sitting down on my bed and writing about what I was feeling. It sounds so simple but I had really gotten away from that.” Dozens of songs followed and a narrative became clear. “It all happened very organically. I wasn’t ambitious. There weren’t any difficulties like most of my other records have had. This one just sort of appeared and seemed to know exactly what it needed to be.”
The Art of Forgetting is a pivotal release for Rose––an artist whose wit and satirical storytelling have made them a name in the indie music scene. It’s an album teeming with raw, intense emotion. Layers of vocal arrangements from Balkan-influenced yawps to Gregorian autotune choirs, acoustic instrumentation chopped and mangled like a glitching memory, and dreamlike synths push and pull to create a hugely dynamic soundscape. Lyrically, the album includes the type of confessional honesty we’ve only caught glimpses of in Rose’s previous work. “I’ve shied away from being very confessional in the past because I’ve always felt that other artists have already carved out that path and are very good at it. I’m a theater kid, I love the drama. My writing style really piggy-backs off the Southern gothics and Southern storytellers in my family, who have always used exaggeration to great effect.”
The albumbegins with a clenched fist, with a narrator who seems to know who they are only in regard to someone else, or not at all. “I am your love, I am your lover, I am your friend,” Rose says in the opening track “Love / Lover / Friend.” In “Rebirth” the narrator is lost––an orphan, a common man, an unknown in search of comfort. “If that was me then, then who am I now?” Rose questions in “The Doldrums,” an eerie track reminiscent of both Carnival des Animaux and Vespertine-era Bjork. Over the course of the album the author searches for something, anything, with which to ease their pain––a mother’s womb, the kiss of someone new, even death.
Amidst themes of regret and grief, loss and change, shame and the inevitability of pain, Rose’s impish humor pops up unexpectedly. “Stockholm Syndrome,” “Tell Me What You Want,” and “Love Song For Myself” showcase the kind of dark comedy with which we’ve become familiar in their catalog, fusing upbeat melodies with oft-hilariously deflating lyrics. “I’d like to think I’m self-aware enough to know that even when I’m close to rock bottom the view is a comic-tragedy. The biggest difference between this album and my others is I just didn’t have any sort of guard up this time. Everything I’ve said on this record is exactly what I would, and did, tell my therapist.”
No doubt, it gets personal. Rose’s actual therapist, Jill, has a song named after her in “Jill Says”—a sweeping arrangement of floral pianos and cinematic strings. In “Miami,” an acoustic-centered track whose chorus of squealing guitars and bombastic drums seems to all but explode out of the speakers, Rose pulls directly from an intimate conversation with their mother: “My mom always said never victimize yourself | You’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to protect yourself | Y’know, your father and I are in the last stage of our lives, so for god’s sake no more talk of how you imagine dying.” Multiple voicemails from Rose’s grandmother, Mee Maw, are given their own respective moments throughout the album, offering moments of lightness amidst an otherwise heart-rending story of a person who has forgotten, and is perhaps re-learning, how to love themselves.
Memory runs like a current throughout The Art of Forgetting. Prompted by a difficult breakup, Rose began a deep-dive inward, unknowingly digging up long-buried experiences from their childhood. “I was addressing all these painful memories from a recent relationship that meant so much to me, trying to learn from them, but then in the process some even more painful memories would bubble to the surface from when I was a kid. I realized my mind had voluntarily forgotten these traumatic experiences as a means of survival. All the while, I was getting these calls every day from my grandma, who was clearly losing her memory. It got me thinking about all the different ways memory shows up throughout our lives. It can feel like a curse or be wielded as a tool. ‘The art of forgetting’ can mean so many different things.”
With this in mind, Rose produced the album using devices and media that embody the characteristics of fading or faulty memories. “I gravitated toward anything that decays or changes with time––wooden and string instruments, voices, tape, granular synthesis that separates audio into tiny little fragments. I knew I wanted to have songs that would feel complete even if they were played stripped down, so I began by recording the basic layers in my home studio. From there it was about a year of experimenting with those recordings both at home and in a couple other studios––chopping them up into loops and smears, creating modular percussion, and ultimately building any additional parts around them. I thought it was important that any experimentation was done using the songs in their most basic form, so it would feel kind of like a game of telephone with those original recordings.”
Though the path back to self-love is clunky, by the final track, “Where Do I Go From Here?,” Rose is no longer grasping. “Pick yourself up, babe, you’re gonna be fine | take in a deep breath | quit wasting your time | ‘cause everything you love, it’s all gonna die | so pay all your respects and say your goodbyes | now go out and start living the rest of your life.” Albeit begrudgingly, Rose is giving in and letting go. "Every time I make an album I’ll come out of it learning a lot about myself. Now I look back and see the healing of a wound. I feel like a new version of myself. I think one for the better.”
"Sometimes you've got to express yourself because if you don't you'll explode," says songwriter/producer Caroline Rose of their latest album, The Art of Forgetting. "...and I felt like I was going to explode.”
After a series of heartbreaking events, Rose had no desire to make a statement, let alone make a new album. It was a time of contemplation and transformation, a time to slow down. What transpired was what the artist considers a gradual union of reconnection and growth. “I was writing songs the way that I used to when I was a kid. It was more like therapy, just sitting down on my bed and writing about what I was feeling. It sounds so simple but I had really gotten away from that.” Dozens of songs followed and a narrative became clear. “It all happened very organically. I wasn’t ambitious. There weren’t any difficulties like most of my other records have had. This one just sort of appeared and seemed to know exactly what it needed to be.”
The Art of Forgetting is a pivotal release for Rose––an artist whose wit and satirical storytelling have made them a name in the indie music scene. It’s an album teeming with raw, intense emotion. Layers of vocal arrangements from Balkan-influenced yawps to Gregorian autotune choirs, acoustic instrumentation chopped and mangled like a glitching memory, and dreamlike synths push and pull to create a hugely dynamic soundscape. Lyrically, the album includes the type of confessional honesty we’ve only caught glimpses of in Rose’s previous work. “I’ve shied away from being very confessional in the past because I’ve always felt that other artists have already carved out that path and are very good at it. I’m a theater kid, I love the drama. My writing style really piggy-backs off the Southern gothics and Southern storytellers in my family, who have always used exaggeration to great effect.”
The albumbegins with a clenched fist, with a narrator who seems to know who they are only in regard to someone else, or not at all. “I am your love, I am your lover, I am your friend,” Rose says in the opening track “Love / Lover / Friend.” In “Rebirth” the narrator is lost––an orphan, a common man, an unknown in search of comfort. “If that was me then, then who am I now?” Rose questions in “The Doldrums,” an eerie track reminiscent of both Carnival des Animaux and Vespertine-era Bjork. Over the course of the album the author searches for something, anything, with which to ease their pain––a mother’s womb, the kiss of someone new, even death.
Amidst themes of regret and grief, loss and change, shame and the inevitability of pain, Rose’s impish humor pops up unexpectedly. “Stockholm Syndrome,” “Tell Me What You Want,” and “Love Song For Myself” showcase the kind of dark comedy with which we’ve become familiar in their catalog, fusing upbeat melodies with oft-hilariously deflating lyrics. “I’d like to think I’m self-aware enough to know that even when I’m close to rock bottom the view is a comic-tragedy. The biggest difference between this album and my others is I just didn’t have any sort of guard up this time. Everything I’ve said on this record is exactly what I would, and did, tell my therapist.”
No doubt, it gets personal. Rose’s actual therapist, Jill, has a song named after her in “Jill Says”—a sweeping arrangement of floral pianos and cinematic strings. In “Miami,” an acoustic-centered track whose chorus of squealing guitars and bombastic drums seems to all but explode out of the speakers, Rose pulls directly from an intimate conversation with their mother: “My mom always said never victimize yourself | You’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to protect yourself | Y’know, your father and I are in the last stage of our lives, so for god’s sake no more talk of how you imagine dying.” Multiple voicemails from Rose’s grandmother, Mee Maw, are given their own respective moments throughout the album, offering moments of lightness amidst an otherwise heart-rending story of a person who has forgotten, and is perhaps re-learning, how to love themselves.
Memory runs like a current throughout The Art of Forgetting. Prompted by a difficult breakup, Rose began a deep-dive inward, unknowingly digging up long-buried experiences from their childhood. “I was addressing all these painful memories from a recent relationship that meant so much to me, trying to learn from them, but then in the process some even more painful memories would bubble to the surface from when I was a kid. I realized my mind had voluntarily forgotten these traumatic experiences as a means of survival. All the while, I was getting these calls every day from my grandma, who was clearly losing her memory. It got me thinking about all the different ways memory shows up throughout our lives. It can feel like a curse or be wielded as a tool. ‘The art of forgetting’ can mean so many different things.”
With this in mind, Rose produced the album using devices and media that embody the characteristics of fading or faulty memories. “I gravitated toward anything that decays or changes with time––wooden and string instruments, voices, tape, granular synthesis that separates audio into tiny little fragments. I knew I wanted to have songs that would feel complete even if they were played stripped down, so I began by recording the basic layers in my home studio. From there it was about a year of experimenting with those recordings both at home and in a couple other studios––chopping them up into loops and smears, creating modular percussion, and ultimately building any additional parts around them. I thought it was important that any experimentation was done using the songs in their most basic form, so it would feel kind of like a game of telephone with those original recordings.”
Though the path back to self-love is clunky, by the final track, “Where Do I Go From Here?,” Rose is no longer grasping. “Pick yourself up, babe, you’re gonna be fine | take in a deep breath | quit wasting your time | ‘cause everything you love, it’s all gonna die | so pay all your respects and say your goodbyes | now go out and start living the rest of your life.” Albeit begrudgingly, Rose is giving in and letting go. "Every time I make an album I’ll come out of it learning a lot about myself. Now I look back and see the healing of a wound. I feel like a new version of myself. I think one for the better.”
Ian Sweet
SUCKER, Jillian Medford's fourth album as IAN SWEET, is a massive leap forward for the songwriter and pop auteur. Perfectly merging her recently showcased pop sensibilities with the widescreen indie rock that she first made her name on, SUCKER is both sumptuous and fully realized, as Medford digs her hands into tough questions about looking ahead and personal growth. Her musical voice has only become more unique amidst an ever-growing field, and SUCKER is proof positive that even with a considerable discography in her arsenal, Medford is just getting started.
SUCKER follows Medford’s 2021 breakthrough and Polyvinyl debut Show Me How You Disappear, which chronicled her time spent in an intensive outpatient program that included six hours of group therapy a day. “Show Me How You Disappear was written during a really difficult period of my life after reckoning with a mental health crisis,” she explains. “I survived that very moment in my life through writing that record, and the extreme urgency to heal is reflected in the songwriting. With SUCKER, I felt more capable to take my time and experiment without being totally afraid of the outcome. It wasn't life or death—it was just life, and I was lucky to be living it.”
Work on the new album started in the fall of 2022; feeling newly untethered in the wake of a "COVID relationship" that had recently come to pass, Medford took a cross-country road trip from her L.A. home to an artist residency at The Outlier Inn – a New York Catskills based recording studio where she took up residence to demo and produce SUCKER in full. “I was feeling very stuck in L.A. and was trying to get comfortable with spending more time alone again,” she recalls about her hermetic confines, which included 24-hour studio access to create in an unfettered fashion. “I went there not knowing exactly what I wanted to do or make, but I knew I wanted to explore and get out of my comfort zone. I forced myself to make things on the spot, in the moment and not overthink it too much.”
Feeling inspired, Medford brought her demos to life with co-producers Alex Craig (Binki, Claud) and Strange Ranger's Isaac Eiger along with mixing engineer Al Carlson (St. Vincent, Jessica Pratt), all of whom helped shape SUCKER into its current form—a record that reconciles Medford’s beginnings with where she’s landed at this current moment. “I revisited the reasons why I started playing music to begin with,” she explains. “I wanted to get more personal and showcase a more confident side musically and lyrically. I’ve always been very doubtful about my own work and don’t often share it with a lot of people. But there was something about this record where I felt very secure with what I was writing about and wanted everyone to hear.”
The result: ten songs that count as the strongest Medford’s ever put to tape, bringing to mind the guitar heroics of indie rock legends Broken Social Scene, the searing hooks of ‘90s alternative rock, Leslie Feist’s dusky songwriting, and shoegaze’s warmth. The quietly explosive title track is practically a miniature epic, with oceanic guitars rippling behind Medford’s tactile vocals, while first single “Your Spit” swerves and sways with a distinctly pop gait that packs a punch.
“Sometimes I get imposter syndrome when I write poppier music, because of who people assume I actually am as a musician, and where they’d like me to fit in in the ‘indie’ space.” she says while talking about the song’s sound as well as navigating the expectations that come with being boxed in genre-wise. “I think the indie rock world really feeds off trauma. If you’re not going through something terrible, people are like, ‘What’s the story?’ That’s fucked me up a bit, but it’s a really beautiful thing when you’re feeling healthy and it shows in your music, too — and I don’t want to be forced into any narrative.”
Indeed, SUCKER showcases Medford’s ability to push herself into previously unexplored territory: The arpeggiated and dusky beauty of “Emergency Contact” belies the songs’ biting sarcasm, as Medford reflects on codependency and a recent breakup that forced her to recognize destructive patterns she willingly—and sometimes, purposefully—falls into in spite of her best interests. “There’s some sneering energy to it, as I’m trying to convince myself that I didn’t really want what I had lost anyway,” she says. Then there’s the surging and anthemic “Smoking Again,” which Medford describes with a laugh as “pretty dramatic” before breaking down the song’s all-too-relatable themes: “I often put myself in situations that I know won’t be beneficial to me, just to get a rise out of myself. Almost like setting up obstacles just to see if I could overcome them.”
The disorienting sensation of falling in love and staying in love appears throughout SUCKER, but this isn’t a break up album so much as it is a reclamation album. “I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself over the years, and with this record I think the intention was to let go and put more trust in myself,” Medford states while discussing how this splendid album represents where she’s at as an artist—and SUCKER feels like the culmination of her personal and professional accomplishments so far, as well as the first step in a bold and exciting new future for IAN SWEET as a whole.