For emerging artist Caroline Jones, gone are the days of opera arias, cabaret standards and show tunes. But hers is a musical timeline that began with classical training she started receiving at age nine, tutelage under vast industry movers and shakers (including music demigod, Tommy Mottola) and a continuing education dedicated to honing her natural ability. Early this year, Jones again built upon her musical foundation with her release, Fallen Flower and with a nest of recorded songs under her wing, the fledgling artist is taking flight.As a child, Jones ranks listening to old R&B records as some of her first musical memories, but it was one iconic singer that solidified her interest in pursuing her own dream of making music. “My family loves music even though they aren’t musicians and my dad especially being from Memphis would play a lot of Temptations and Earth, Wind and Fire so I grew up listening to a lot of old R&B,” she said. “But I remember Mariah Carey being my absolute vocal idol and I would spend hours listening and learning her riffs. I still she think she has some of the most innovative riffs.”
Jones also said that she began writing at a young age, expressing herself through poetry. Then she began vocal lessons and learned to meld her two loves into one. “As soon as I learned to read and write I started writing poetry and after I learned how to sing, that was it for me. I completely fell in love with songwriting. Since I had always written poetry I learned to incorporate melody and from there the two just gelled.”
“Closest Thing To You” MP3:
It turned out the childhood lessons translated to her early years as an artist and paved the road that Jones treads on now. “I was trained classically in opera and that training is pretty rigorous and very technical. But it provided me the best foundation I could have ever asked for in terms of musical and vocal technique,” Jones said. “And that basis of knowledge has set me up to sing and write in any genre that I choose.”
In tandem with her second year at New York University, Jones set out in earnest to lay down a repertoire of tracks that she had ready to go. Mostly recorded at Avatar Studios in NY with a few tracks laid down on trips to Nashville, the collection of songs served as a bank from which she could draw.
“I took most of the year to record, I was in and out of the studio for eight months, but I really took my time,” Jones said of the sessions. “And during that time I recorded a bunch of other songs. I have about 45 songs recorded and Fallen Flower was the first compilation that I took from that group of songs.”
“It’s definitely an album of love songs,” she continued. “And they’re not all autobiographical, some are observations of people I know or people I’ve heard about and it’s not all boy/girl love… there’s friendship love and even familial love. It’s really about learning to trust yourself and be open to love.”
A big part of Jones “taking flight” as mentioned before is that in approaching the release, Jones went out into uncharted territory two-fold.
“This is was my first time producing by myself and that was a totally new experience for me,” Jones said. “I always play guitar live, but I’ve never played it on my records before and it’s kind of a different animal when you record it versus playing it live. That was one thing I really wanted to focus on. And the second thing is my favorite part of recording and that’s background vocals and harmonies. I love creating almost a symphonic pad for the lyrics to dance over, so I had a lot of fun with those.”
Fallen Flower is out and available and later this year, Jones will do a small tour of boarding schools and colleges. Also look for her to return to her bank of recorded songs. “I am putting out another record later this year and it will be the bookend to Fallen Flower. For more information go to www.carolinejones.com.
By Chris West – cwest@skopemagazine.com
Photo By: Adam Jason Photography
