Premiere: Kingsbury, ‘U Take It Back’

Kevin Bronson on July 23rd, 2019

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Twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter Caroline Kingsbury — it’s just Kingsbury when she releases music — says she writes tunes “your parents would have danced to at their senior prom.” And it’s true: If mom and dad are of “The Breakfast Club” generation, they probably negotiated the Sturm und Drang of teenage romance to sleek yet gritty electro-pop like Kingsbury’s.

Since she moved from Nashville to Los Angeles, Kingsbury has released a string of singles that speak to her generation in the musical language of the previous one. In June, it was “In My Brain,” a pulsing synth-rocker about the millennial anxiety that “our future is out of control,” as she said.

On Friday, she will release “U Take It Back,” a smoldering confessional in which the heartache of rejection rises like swirling smoke from still-warm embers. It’s the feeling you get when that batch of happy-times photographs show up, unwanted, as a Facebook memory.

Kingsbury calls the tune “an unstoppable freight train of loss, and you’re strapped to the tracks.” She adds: “‘You gave me something I never had / and then you take it back’ — the chorus repeats this extremely simple sentiment. It’s the feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. It’s uncomfortable and unbelievable. It’s heartbreak distilled to 13 words. Wars started, novels written, relationships eviscerated because of those 13 words. I wrote this to scream into the night as you ride home from work on your bike.”

The idea is that if you scream it loud enough, and enough times, the hurt will dissipate. It’s worked for generations.

||| Stream: “U Take It Back”