Colors of My Mind
The latest full-length from Carolina Story, Colors of My Mind took shape from a period of tremendous pain and metamorphosis for the Nashville-based husband-and-wife duo.
Not long after parting ways with their former label, Ben and Emily Roberts headed into the studio to record a few songs for the sake of sating their creative impulses, then quickly found themselves with an entire album’s worth of material. Rooted in the lush and moody brand of Americana they first honed by traveling across the country on DIY tours in the late 2000s, those songs contained essential truths about transformation, surrender, and the inevitability of impermanence—altogether forming a narrative of transcendence that soon had a life-altering impact on the band itself.
“For years I’d been struggling with alcohol and drugs, mostly in silence, but four days after we finished this record I went into rehab—which wasn’t planned at all,” says Ben. “At the time I hadn’t really understand where all these songs about change were coming from, but the catharsis of recording them wound up saving my life.” Emily adds: “Even though Ben was having a hard time admitting he needed help, he was definitely communicating that in the music. In a way the songs were almost prophetic, considering how much they changed our lives after the fact.”
The follow-up to Dandelion—a 2020 release acclaimed by the likes of American Songwriter, who noted that the album “furthers their journey into the hushed and hazy world of alt-folk musings”—Colors of My Mind finds Carolina Story teaming up again with producer Paul Moak (a five-time Grammy Award-nominated producer/songwriter/musician known for his work with John Paul White, Caitlyn Smith, and Madi Diaz). In bringing the album to life, Carolina Story joined forces with members of their longtime live band (guitarist/pedal-steel player Sam Wilson, bassist Randle Scruggs, drummer Nathan Sexton), with Moak also lending his talents on guitar and piano. Recorded at Moak’s Nashville studio Smoakstack, Colors of My Mind ultimately matches their nuanced musicality with a mercurial and often-dreamlike quality informed by their love of art-rock acts like Radiohead (and doubly enhanced by the duo’s decision to project The Wizard of Oz onto the studio wall throughout every session). “We went in unafraid to push our own boundaries,” says Ben. “If something felt right, we didn’t question ourselves or worry about what genre it might fit into. We were completely in the moment and just going with the flow.”
The first song recorded for Colors of My Mind, the album’s brooding opening track “Animal” immediately catalyzed Carolina Story’s exploration of their edgier sensibilities. “It’s a song about addiction, and the desperation of crying out for help but knowing that you’ve backed yourself into a corner,” Ben reveals. “It starts the record off with the main character at their lowest, in a very dark place with very little hope, and from that point they start to transform.” Several tracks later, on “Colors of My Mind,” Carolina Story begin to brighten the mood with a psychedelia-infused piece made infinitely mesmerizing by Ben and Emily’s warm yet haunting harmonies. “The idea behind that song is that we’re all human; we all want to love and be loved, and to have something to hope for,” says Ben. And on “Wake Up,” Colors of My Mind closes out with a bittersweet reverie lit up in luminous textures and etched with lovely poetry (from the first verse: “The ship is always made of glass/And the stars are all made of gold/One minute I’m a young man/And the next I’m much too old”). “The whole album exists in a sort of dream state, and ‘Wake Up’ is the moment of deciding to stop sleepwalking through life,” says Emily. “That’s where this character starts out, in ‘Animal’—sleepwalking through life, thinking they’re stuck and nothing’s ever going to get better,” Ben continues. “But by the end they realize, ‘No, there is hope. I want to live.’”
One of the most powerful moments on Colors of My Mind, “Don’t Look Down On Your Dreams” perfectly illustrates the strangely charmed nature of the album-making process. “We were getting ready to record that song, and Paul asked if I had a demo to share,” Ben recalls. “At the time I thought I’d left the song unfinished, but then I found a voice memo that started out with the sound of driving rain and realized I must’ve recorded it out on the porch in a thunderstorm. So I’m listening to the memo and the first verse comes, then the chorus, and it just keeps going. It turns out the whole song was done; I’d unknowingly written it in a blackout. In hindsight I can see it’s a letter from my future self speaking to who I was back then, telling me to stay in the fight instead of giving into certain thoughts I was having at the time.” Opening on the first 40 seconds of that devastatingly stark voice memo, “Don’t Look Down On Your Dreams” then unfolds into a spellbinding meditation on persevering through overwhelming self-doubt. “That song also applies to our experience as a band,” says Emily. “There’ve been so many times when we’ve felt like we’re rising but ended up falling again, and during the pandemic I felt myself becoming pretty skeptical about the whole thing. ‘Don’t Look Down On Your Dreams’ really slapped me in the face and told me to keep dreaming, because it’s not worth living if you don’t have anything you’re hoping for.”
With Ben hailing from Arkansas and Emily originally from South Dakota, the two musicians first crossed paths at college in Memphis and formed the band during a camping trip to North Carolina early on in their courtship. Over the next decade, Carolina Story built a passionate grassroots following by touring all over the country and performing stripped-down live sets that included using a hardshell suitcase as a kick drum, eventually making their Grand Ole Opry debut in 2014. “We have three kids now and at the time I was eight months pregnant with our son,” says Emily. “It was definitely one of the biggest highlights of our career to sing onstage at this place that’s so legendary and beautiful, with me about to give birth to our first child.” Along with earning recognition as a captivating live act, Carolina Story have turned out critically lauded albums like 2018’s Lay Your Head Down (praised by Pop Matters for “evok[ing] the chemistry of early alt-country darlings Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris”). But as both members point out, the creation of Colors of My Mind marked an undeniable breakthrough for the band. “In a lot of ways we shouldn’t have made this record—we didn’t have a label anymore, we had no idea how we were going to pay for it, we didn’t even really know why we were doing it,” says Ben. “It felt like there was some kind of force that was steering the whole thing, and we both knew we had to give ourselves over to it. Going forward, I think we’ll continue to create from that place of letting the music speak to us.”
Reflecting on the making of Colors of My Mind, Carolina Story note that the symbology of the butterfly served as a touchstone throughout the album’s writing and recording. “Before we’d even written any of the songs, we were talking with our manager about the process of changing from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, and the idea of transformation really stuck in our minds,” says Ben. “One thing I’ve learned from reading about butterflies over the past couple of years is that transformation is very painful for them, because their bodies have to literally melt down—and if you mess with the butterfly before it’s ready to come out of the cocoon, it dies. There has to be that time of self-realization or awakening, and then it can finally blossom into something else: a new creature that’s beautiful and free, but completely made from its former self.”