Colbie Caillat: A Sustained Overnight Sensation (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

You mentioned MySpace. When MySpace launched, it was touted as the Next Big Thing for artists. But for most of them, it wasn’t. Yet it worked for you in 2005. Why?

Colbie Caillat: You know, it’s so interesting how so many things can line up to make something happen. I think it took so many different people and timing of things that aligned that way. But overall, what I’m most grateful for with MySpace is that fans got to choose the songs, and they chose my music. It wasn’t a label pushing a song out to radio. It was truly fans who heard it randomly from someone else’s page, and then added it to theirs; it was their choice. And they helped build my career. That feels so much more meaningful to me. I [still] meet those people at meet-and-greets, the first people who started listening.
But that’s how it happened.

Your first album went triple-Platinum; Coco was a success all around the world. That’s pretty amazing for a debut release. Did that success catch you off guard?

It all caught me off guard. It happened so fast, I really couldn’t keep up with any of it. There was MySpace, I became the number one unsigned artist, and then I got a record deal. And then months later, I went on tour with the Goo Goo Dolls, and then doing TV and then traveling the world for two years. Every moment was like, “I can’t even comprehend what’s going on!”

It was a lot to take in because it happened so fresh for me. I wasn’t one of those artists that had been doing it for years, trying to “make it.” It just literally happened, and I had no preparation. So I think it was a harder experience for me than, for other people. You have to just go with it: “I have this opportunity that people are dying for and waiting for; I have to go with it. It doesn’t matter how unprepared I am.” You say yes.

You wrote something like 40 songs for 2009’s Breakthrough and 60 for Gypsy Heart (2014). What happened to the ones that didn’t make the albums?

That’s a great question. Sometimes we’ll save them for other albums or other releases. Sometimes we’ll give them away to other artists. But most of them are just sitting in the computer. Every artist or writer has these same things; they have hundreds of unused songs.

There are a couple songs that my manager keeps sending to me: “Why don’t you release this? I always loved this one!” And I’m like, “It just doesn’t fit me anymore. I would love for someone to hear it at some point, but it’s not something I want to record and promote.”

And then sometimes I’m like, “You know what? This song, I liked the chorus, but let’s rewrite the verse.” Or maybe the verses were great, but the chorus fell a little flat. I’ve always loved to go back and kind of save a song, tweak it and make it better. I hate wasting them.

One of the adjectives that’s used to describe your music is relatable. Do your early songs still resonate with you? Do they mean the same thing to you now that they did when you wrote them?

No, they don’t. That’s something else that I’ve really been enjoying. Sometimes it hits me on stage; I’m singing “Realize,” and I’m like, “This is making me think about this person right now, someone I’m dating.” Or another song makes me think of something a family member is going through. It can either be really uplifting, or it can be emotional and heavy. And I’ve found that a lot of the songs have new meaning [connected] to whatever I’m currently experiencing.

Some songwriters write for themselves, and others write to connect with listeners. Where do you fall in that continuum?

I start for myself, and it’s really therapeutic. Sometimes you just play the guitar or sit at the piano and play a couple chords, and then melodies start falling out and some words fall out with it. And then you home in on what you’re wanting to write.

Or sometimes I just have an idea I really want to write about, and I’ll call up one of my writing friends: “Can you write this song with me? I want to get this sentiment out.”

I think that it always starts with the therapeutic aspect for me. If I’m writing the lyrics, I’ll maybe try to tweak it some way to where it can be more broad. But on the other hand, I’ve also found it [effective] for lyrics to be very specific.

Listening across your body of work, one hears little hints of reggae here, a little bit of hip hop flavor there. 2023’s Along the Way is a country album. Is that your new direction, or a one-time thing?

It’s been a natural progression. I’ve been in Nashville for nine years, but I didn’t grow up listening to country music; I was never a fan of it. But it was something that really grew on me once I was here, being in the lifestyle, and having a lot of friends that are in country music.

I love the dobro and the steel guitar; the steel guitar comes from Hawaii, and I grew up listening to Hawaiian music, so that always had a nostalgic feel. And at a certain point I was like, “I want to use these [sounds]. Am I not allowed? [Is it a case of] ‘You have to stay in your box’?” And once I allowed myself to do that, I felt like, “I write the same songs, but now I add steel guitar and dobro.”