CAROL ADES’ LATE START: A TESTAMENT TO THE COMPLEXITIES OF GROWTH
Growing up is complicated, and singer songwriter Carol Ades knows it all too well. Despite the title of her debut album, Ades’ career began in 2013 at age 17, parallel to her appearance on season 5 of The Voice USA. Her initial releases exist under her birth name, Caroline Pennell. The name switch came from a nickname her friends gave her, combined with her middle name, creating a new identity she feels is her “wiser voice”. Having departed from her original artistic self, her debut single “I Can’t Wait to be British” released in 2021.
Since then, Ades put out many more singles and two EPs. “Late Start”, her debut LP, encompasses her growth as an artist, containing songs she wrote over many years to make her own coming-of-age soundtrack. Over the course of the 13-track album, she dives into the feeling of falling behind, exploring her lingering youth and how her mental tendency to rush affects growing up. By the end of the record, her audience arrives at peace with meeting themselves wherever they are, the same peace she made with herself writing and releasing this album.
With an opening track like “I’m Having Fun”, the lyrics are instrumentally reflected in what finding positivity amidst paid might sound like, with uplifting acoustic guitars and bright, boxy, driving snares. She sets the stage for growth and her fast-paced disposition with the first line: “Went to bed a little girl, and woke up a grown ass woman.” This song holds confessions and pieces of mundanity like wiping tears on sweatshirts and takeaways from therapy sessions.
Fragments of this record are musically experimental, with modal changes in “Dreams” and “Better Than You Found Me”, both of which were released as singles. These changes in chords shift the way a listener receives the message; in the case of “Dreams” the musical switch-up makes the song sound ethereal, playing into the title. In “Better Than You Found Me”, these shifts exist under the title question in the chorus, almost posing a threat, as if to insinuate she should be left better than she was found.
Transitionally, the album is ingeniously organized. As “Mom Song” leads into the first verse of “Better Than You Found Me”, Ades steps out of the conversation between herself and her mother, and acknowledges “I am a lonely girl, I’m never satisfied, it’s just me and my mommy issues til the day I die.” This record is full of connections, even between “Dreams” and “Dreams (Reprise)” where sonically her imagination blossoms. Her vocals echo and reverberate to a different plane, reminiscent of the foundational track, but a continuation of the same story.
Ades’ listeners can also expect to find humor in this record. Though the song is tender, “Hope Is a Scary Thing” contains irony in the title, where even though hope may be the antithesis of fear, that is what makes it so terrifying. In “Late Start”, she relates to the hatred for the beginning of the week, “Monday’s a bitch”. She taps every emotion possible and dances between them from track to track.
The biggest effervescent connection contained in this record is Ades’ journey through different kinds of sadness and finding love in unexpected places. In “Furniture”, she dissects the process of rearranging a room for a sense of control. In “Crying Is My Superpower”, she embraces sadness and calls herself a hero for braving the storm of sadness. In “Never Fucking Fall In Love Again”, even if dramatic, hold space for an enormous heartbreak, a sadness so intense, it can be all encompassing, reflected both lyrically and instrumentally.
Throughout this record, a theme of accepting oneself emerges. In an Instagram post she says, “...this next chapter of sharing the record with you begins and the chapter in which I lived it ends… writing has always been a means of telling myself the truth & I’m so grateful to have this bookmark of truths from the last 5 years to show for it”. Music contains many truths, giving space for subjectivity, interpretation, and most importantly connection. For a “Late Start”, Carol Ades is right on time, having produced a record that resonates with listeners trying to cope with becoming new versions of themselves.