"there are lines in my head / i know they've never been read / but i know that i don't want them said / cuz you'd know..."
The beginning brittle sadness and growing survivorship of "Unread" by Barbie Barker, the new project of Candy Ambulance guitarist and lead singer Caitlin Barker, digs deep in a barebones emotionally rustic way, open and revealing. For me, it feels like porch rock bloodletting as a personal cathartic experience that we are, as listeners, eavesdropping in on. Sonically, I feel tinges of 90's indie, hints of Pavement or Cracker or Shawn Colvin or maybe an amalgam of all three into something else. Like any song that punches you squarely in the gut, makes you feel something, makes you wonder about what circumstances existed between the sung lines, "Unread" gets exquisitely personal.
LINER NOTES and "Unread" (bracketed):
[Barbie wrote this song in a really desperate place. Candy Ambulance is her first band, and she put so much of her self-worth based on her role there. It was her salvation, the reason she goes to therapy, and works really hard to be a good person. She wrote about some really intense traumas she was working through and toured the record where she bore her soul. It was fulfilling, but intense - and she started to drinking heavily. It affected her relationship with her band mates to the point of them needing to set boundaries and almost ultimatums. She was ashamed and really afraid to lose her identity and two best friends. It sounds like a love song, and of course it is, but it's for the people who dragged her up from her lowest. "I don't wanna fail them like that again." - Barbie Barker]
Loving the somber sway, the artful guitar shapes / sounds and, of course, Barker's evocative emotional vocal countenance that draws you in like bittersweet honey. "Unread" is a song you can play on repeat over and over again but not get tired of until it lulls you into an inquisitive head space where you see an expanding story like a great indie film that is emotionally cinematic.
Loving the somber sway, the artful guitar shapes / sounds and, of course, Barker's evocative emotional vocal countenance that draws you in like bittersweet honey. "Unread" is a song you can play on repeat over and over again but not get tired of until it lulls you into an inquisitive head space where you see an expanding story like a great indie film that is emotionally cinematic.
-Robb Donker Curtius
https://www.instagram.com/barbie_barker_/
Adopting her middle name as a tribute to her Grandmother, Barbie Barker is a new project for Candy Ambulance guitarist and lead singer Caitlin Barker. Barbie's song work is vulnerable, willing, and hopeful for what's to come. A once farm girl of the outdoors who loved playing in the woods and rivers of Upstate NY, now debuts her first ever solo project under Tummy Rub Records in the hopes to breakthrough her unfamiliarity for the internet.
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.instagram.com/barbie_barker_/
Adopting her middle name as a tribute to her Grandmother, Barbie Barker is a new project for Candy Ambulance guitarist and lead singer Caitlin Barker. Barbie's song work is vulnerable, willing, and hopeful for what's to come. A once farm girl of the outdoors who loved playing in the woods and rivers of Upstate NY, now debuts her first ever solo project under Tummy Rub Records in the hopes to breakthrough her unfamiliarity for the internet.
Barbie Barker , indie rock, busker punk, folk, porch rock, alt rock, new project of Candy Ambulance guitarist / lead singer Caitlan barker, singer songwriter, melancholia, moving, personal, "Unread",
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