Americana Burns Bright on Caitlin Rose’s CAZIMI
The Nashville genre-bender returns after nearly a decade with a shimmery new sound

“Cazimi” is a term derived from Arabic literally meaning “in the heart of the sun.” In other words, when a planet is in cazimi, it’s so close to the sun that it’s in the “heart” of it. Total combustion might be just ahead, but the rays are blinding.
Country singer Caitlin Rose’s take on the astrological phenomenon takes shape on her third album CAZIMI, which frequently finds the singer/songwriter, or one of her many characters, facing what happens just before they’re engulfed in flames. Rose herself, who found modest music stardom in her early 20s around the release of her buzzy full-length debut, Own Side Now, knows a thing or two about the space between exaltation and burnout. After the release of her 2013 second album The Stand-In, Rose took seven years off from music, a period that was defined by its own sets of fits and starts, ups and downs. When she was ready to return to music in early 2020, Rose decided to reinvent the idea of cazimi to better fit her motives for making a fresh album. Rather than be swarmed by flames, she found power in the light.
Of course, Rose never could’ve predicted what was waiting for her in March 2020 when she and collaborator and producer Jordan Lehning were getting ready to make CAZIMI. Their plans were thwarted by the pandemic and the destructive tornado that swept through Nashville. But maybe the songs needed that extra time to steep, because the eventual album is brewed to Americana perfection.
Single “Modern Dancing” is full of little bites of wisdom, but thanks to the light and bright melody, it never strays into world-weariness. “I’ve had enough of these cosmic divorces,” Rose sings. “You know in the end that we only end up on our own.” Rose’s narrator may fear another “false start,” but in the end she admits to “a romance with ruin” and keeps grooving.
Rose teams up with another Americana force in Courtney Marie Andrews (who also released her own lovely new album, Loose Future, last month) on fellow single “Getting It Right,” and they sound like they were born to sing together. They wrote the song together and harmonize throughout, fiercely examining self-doubt, particularly around vulnerability, in lines like, “Talk too much or not enough / Everything tender always comes out rough.”