Carolina Chauffe doesn’t like to stay in one place for very long. Some of the most dramatic turns on her life’s path have been unplanned—she’s driven by what she calls “Coincidence with a capital C.” She thrives in uncharted territory, lured by a stretch of road, a door held open six states away, or the pulsing possibility of new love. A year ago, one such coincidence led her to Chicago.
Chauffe, who makes music as Hemlock, has been writing songs for ten years—ever since she bought a guitar off Craigslist at age 13. Born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, and molded by church choirs and chamber choirs in her school days, she appreciates the power of a song sung among friends and loved ones.
In 2018, Chauffe bought a nylon-string guitar from her friend Dylan Babineaux, and its softer, more tender strings immediately transformed the way she played and wrote songs. Soon Babineaux offered to record a tape of Chauffe’s demos on his four-track, and her project Hemlock was born.
Chauffe hasn’t stopped writing songs since, with a pace and fluency that can only be described as prolific. She’s still never recorded in a formal studio, but since that four-track session, she’s released six more collections of demos and half-songs, all tracked on her phone—manifesting her belief that no detail is too small to be sung about, and challenging her own notions of what it means for a song to be “finished.” Last week she dropped her first full-length album, Talk Soon, recorded in the Oregon home studios of two musicians who appear alongside her in its songs.
The chain of events that brought Chauffe to Oregon—and then to Chicago—began at the end of 2019, when Chauffe accepted an internship that took her to Seattle and Los Angeles for 12 weeks. She fell in love with the Pacific Northwest, and after a brief return to Louisiana to graduate from college, she packed all her belongings into her red Toyota Camry and toured her way back west, intending to settle down in Seattle. But the pandemic derailed Chauffe’s plans, and she found herself in Astoria, Oregon, where what she thought would be a stay of a couple months turned into a year. During that year, she gardened, began and ended a relationship, and recorded the songs that would become Talk Soon. In 2020 and 2021, Chauffe visited Chicago occasionally, and when a friend of a friend told her of a room opening up in an apartment here, she once again packed up her car and moved someplace new.
Carolina Chauffe has already put out several collections of demos and phone recordings, but the new Talk Soon is the first release she’s presented as a full-length album.
Talk Soon, released independently on March 11, is a quiet, touching memento of the places Chauffe has lived in the past few years, the sounds she’s heard, and the people she holds close. She plays acoustic guitar with hypnotic intricacy and sings in a voice that propels and soothes with confidence and grace. The meticulous attention she pays to the things around her casts a kind of magic spell: Listening to Talk Soon, all of a sudden I want to brush my hand against my bedsheets and remember the last person who laid there with me. All of a sudden I notice a bird’s wings outside my window.
Across the album’s 15 songs, Chauffe weaves in voice mails from her mom, her friends, and her grandpa, the thoughtful and hilarious Pawpaw—he speaks with a charmingly drawn-out southern accent, and you can’t help but smile listening to his messages of care and encouragement. The voice mails add to the sense of travel and relocation implied throughout the record. We never seem to find Chauffe rooted in one place, but rather in constant transition, moving through all the places in between. There is heartache amid the goodbyes and the I miss yous, but there is freedom too, of always being on the edge of a new beginning.
The album’s layers of vocal harmonies, sung in a barely-there whisper, and the small treasures tucked into its tracks—a boiling kettle whistling, a page turning, a piano bench creaking—make Talk Soon feel intimate and familiar. It feels lived-in, like an old sweater that still smells like the lover who gave it to you—the feeling may have faded, but as you slip into it, the memory instantly ignites and softens. And at the end of the day, that’s all Chauffe wants: for a song to feel like a home, for a love to be kept close in someone’s heart, for a new adventure, in a new city, hundreds of miles away.
I met up with Chauffe on February 7 at her Hermosa apartment to talk about “memory hoarding,” her devotion to iPhone voice memos, and what songwriting means to her. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Options, Allegra Krieger, Hemlock
Wed 3/23, 9:30 PM, the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $12, 21+
Tasha Viets-VanLear: Most of your music that exists online at the moment are these song-a-day collections, where there’s a song demo every day for a month. Can you talk about how that started?
Carolina Chauffe: I went through a breakup in February of 2019, and it was really, really hard on me. I was like in love with this person. We lived in our hometown still, and it was very hard to move through the very insular music scene without seeing him all the time. So it felt like an uprooting from my hometown in an emotional way, where I was ready to run away from the feeling of being trapped by all of my past emotional grief.
But right before that, I’d gotten the idea from Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast. . . . I ran into her Bandcamp page, where there’s a project called June where she recorded a song idea every day, and I was like, “You know what, I’m grieving so much right now, and I feel like I have a lot to just get out of my body, and I think writing something every day is a way to harness that energy and try to reconnect to myself.”
And so in February of 2019 I recorded a song every day on my phone and put it out, largely unmixed, unmastered, all phone recordings. Some of them finished, some of them not. But with the idea of recording one of those song-a-day projects every year for the next 12 years until the whole calendar is blocked out.
Since 2019, Chauffe has been writing a song per day for one month out of each year. This Bandcamp release gathers together her tracks from August 2021, the first such project she undertook in Chicago.
Oh my gosh!
Yeah! So now there’s the February one from 2019, and that was largely a breakup saga in Lafayette, Louisiana. And then the December one, which was December of 2020 in quarantine in Astoria, Oregon. And then August was last year, here in Chicago. So we’ll see what happens in 2022.
It’s so impressive!
Thank you! I love evolving with this project.
And it’s such a disciplined commitment. I can have such a combative relationship with practicing or trying to write. I won’t do it for so long, and there’s all of the guilt that comes up. Or when I do, there’s so much pressure to make good things. Now that you’ve done so many of these, how has this influenced the way you approach song making, or just influenced your creative process in general?
I love it. It’s definitely a challenge timewise. But it’s also allowed for this very cathartic immediacy where I’m not dwelling on what I’m writing about or how I’m writing it. It’s often just sitting down, whatever comes out first.
And it’s playful! It’s allowed me to play in a way that I have fully taken the pressure off of myself, which has opened up so many windows and allows for this kind of imaginative creativity. It gets less autobiographical sometimes, which is fun, like writing as different characters. Or the opposite happens, where it’s hyper-autobiographical and I’m just doing a recount of what happened that day. But there doesn’t have to be a through line either way. Which opened up such possibilities.
That’s funny you should say that about being playful. Do you know the poet Ross Gay? I was reading an interview with him the other day, and he was talking about letting go of this idea of approaching your work through a lens of accomplishment, and leaning into being playful and imaginative, and attempting rather than achieving. I feel like that really lines up with your ethos around this endeavor.
Absolutely! It’s not striving for imperfection, it’s just allowing it to the point where something can feel unfinished—but it is finished. Just leaving something where it’s at on the day that you make it, and just staying so in touch with that emotional immediacy every day.
I think a main goal now with that project too is to gatekeep my idea of music way less, because it’s not doing myself any favors by trying to frame things around the idea of success or accomplishment or cleanness . . . that’s stifling for me. I feel like an archivist. I want everything that is ever made to be out in the world. Even if something’s unfinished, I just want it to have ears if the fates allow.
Let’s talk about the iPhone voice memo! It seems very integral to your work.
It is! That is a through line. Even on Talk Soon, which was recorded in friends’ homes and is more of a “studio album” in the sense that it wasn’t all recorded on my phone, I wanted to make sure that there were still elements from my phone. The voice mails obviously take us through this journey, and those are phone sourced. And then there’s also field recordings that I just take all the time.
I think as the child of a hoarder, I’m a memory hoarder now. Like instead of trying to hoard physical things, I just have so much data . . . so many documents, photos, videos, recordings on my phone. And I don’t want them to just be sitting in the virtual world withering away. I want to feel like they’re still being useful somehow, and so incorporating them into my work too makes me feel like it’s not a fruitless effort.
I want to hear more about the story of the album. Because even though the songs were written over a long period of time, from 2018 to 2020, they still feel like a cohesive collection.
The songs were largely written . . . well, two of them were written at home in Lafayette, but the rest of them were written in California, Seattle, one in New Mexico, one in Texas. It’s like an interstate saga, this journey I was going through trying to find time to write while I was on tour. I feel like a hermit crab. I feel most with myself and most at home when I am in the process of transition or moving around, like with touring.
That was one of my questions, actually. It seems like the in-motion, the moving from one to another, feels comfortable for you.
Yeah. I think it allows for reinvention of self and a challenging of previous ideas of yourself in a way that I welcome, because I want to constantly be growing and evolving with my environment. I think that’s a feeling that ties all these songs together as well. They’re written across all of these different places, but there’s this feeling of home that I hope comes through in each of them in different ways. Whether that’s a negative feeling of home where you feel trapped, or a positive feeling of home where you feel fully comfortable, or the kind of being at home that being in love imparts you with.
I really love the voice mails on the album, especially Pawpaw’s. All of these voices feel so familiar to me now. There is a comfort you get just by listening to it. It’s really sweet and touching.
I think it’s really interesting and fun, the idea of imparting your memories upon someone else that’s not just lyrical. These voice mails are like me giving memories of people in my life to whoever is listening, and there’s an intimacy, a deep intimacy from that. People have told me that the voice mails have been what’s made them cry or made them laugh out loud. Even with things that are so specific and unique to everyone’s interpersonal relationships, there’s still this overarching resonance of how we connect to each other as people.
How do place and season affect your songwriting? For me as a listener, there seems to be a direct correlation to the seasonal and physical place that you’re in, and the songs that come out of it—is there much intention behind that?
I think it’s a deeply subconscious intentionality at this point, where even if I sit down trying to write about something specific, looking back on it retrospectively it’s always so deeply influenced by my environment. And I think that that probably stems from a fear of forgetting and wanting to hold on to these feelings and memories.
Thinking about these songs, I can remember where I wrote each of them in a way that I can’t remember conversations that I’ve had. So maybe it’s the way the light is shining through the rain outside of my apartment window in Lafayette, and that just happens to be what I’m looking at when I have my guitar in my hand, and it’s mind-blowing, and it finds its way into the song. Now I can remember that one time it rained in my hometown, in a way that I can’t with other things.
What does the album dwindle down to, for you, after listening through?
A huge influence in my life is an English teacher of mine in high school who was the first person who told me, “You can write. You have something to say and it should be heard.” And it’s stayed with me so much. We had these altered books that she worked on with us in high school, and when she retired from teaching, she left a found poem in every one of our altered books that was personally addressed to us. And the words on the page that she left for her found poem in my book were: “Everything that counts is for love. Keep in touch.”