Premiere: Caroline Kingsbury, ‘Hero’

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Caroline Kingsbury (Photo by Lissyelle Laricchia)

Four years ago, when Caroline Kingsbury made the moves that put her on the path leading to the release of her debut album, she was thinking big. She put folk music in her rear-view mirror. She dropped out of college in Nashville and moved to L.A. And along the way, she came to terms with her identity.

That album, “Heaven’s Just a Flight,” is out April 16 as the first full-length on Fortune Tellers, the new label launched by Peter Matthew Bauer of The Walkmen. It’s a clinic in all things ’80s — new wave, dream-pop, dance music, power-pop — and at 16 all-killer, no-filler tracks, it’s as massive as the emotions that fueled it. Two years ago, when the Florida native started rolling out the songs, it was described as music “your parents would have danced to at their senior prom.” If your folks came of age around the time of “The Breakfast Club,” that’s true.

Dreams, love, death, generational angst, identity and personal resolve are all topics on “Heaven’s” table — the latter subject taking on a special poignancy on the album’s penultimate track, “Hero.” A stone-cold ballad reminiscent of the Motels, it features contributions from Kingsbury’s girlfriend, singer-songwriter and ace guitarist Liv Slingerland, and was the final song Kingsbury wrote for the album.

“Written dead smack in the middle of COVID quarantine 2020 and [Black Lives Matter] protests,” Kingsbury says. “I was already grieving the loss of my brother, who passed away October 2019, but now I was grieving the loss of normal life.

“I was also examining my own biases. Trying to figure out a way to contribute to the BLM movement. I was living a street away from the protests. The whole neighborhood was surrounded by smoke and helicopters. I realized for me it was all about personal responsibility. Work on your own problems to be able to help contribute. It was the quiet voice inside of me that helped pick me up off the bathroom floor when it all felt too much. The voice helped me wipe away the mascara stains and try to look forward to the future. You are your own hero at the end of the day in order to be able to be a ‘hero’ for someone else.

“My mom wouldn’t stop asking for a ballad and it took a pandemic for me to give in.”

||| Stream: “Hero”

||| Also: Watch the video for “Fall in Love”

||| Also: Stream “Massive Escape” and “Lose”

||| Previously: “Alone Again” / “Emeralds,” “U Take It Back”